Grit - passion and persistence conquer all

This week I've been reading a non fiction book, Grit, by Angela Duckworth.  Angela asks why some people who are talented succeed, and why others, equally talented, don't.  She concludes that the people who succeed have what she calls 'grit'.

Angela is an ex-teacher who trained  as a psychologist when she started trying to figure out why some kids succeeded in life and some didn't.  In her book she talks about highly successful people having a kind of 'ferocious determination' to succeed'.  After years of research on the subject, she concludes that a combination of passion and persistence makes high achievers special.

Angela studied West Point cadets, and found no relationship between the assessment scores of the cadets' abilities and the likelihood of them surviving the gruelling training.  That was when she began to wonder when something else was in play.  She came to believe that, as Woody Allen put it, 'eighty per cent of success is showing up'.

So what does that mean for a writer chasing mainstream publication?  First, we can be reassured that we don't have to be the most original writer on the planet.  In fact, as I discovered from John Berlyne's talk recently, if we're too original we'll make publishers nervous.

What we can all be is persistent, in learning and honing our craft, and in sending out submission after submission.  As Angela says, "Grit is about working on something you care about so much that you're  willing to stay loyal to it."  And boy do we need to stay loyal to writing if we want to have any hope of being mainstream published.

I like collecting these stories.  They show me that I'm not alone in racking up hundreds of rejections, or in persevering through them.  There are writers all over the world doing exactly the same, and keeping the faith.  If they can do it, I can too. 

When I really need a dose of encouragement I turn to the litrejections website.  There I see that 300, 400, even 500 rejections before selling a single thing is not uncommon.  I can't be far off achieving that upper figure now.  All I need is grit to persevere.