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To be a successful writer, you need to write.

Carry a notepad around with you to catch those voices in your head: those sparking connections and ideas to crystallize; those twists of phrases, snatches of conversation, synchronicities.

Write in a journal every day. The content matters not at all next to the practice, because good content will be forthcoming, and then it’s just a matter of hoeing the weeds away, and working with the healthy plants that remain.

What matters is the mindset and focus, giving space and permission for vision to clarify, and for the unconscious to work out creative intentions—as well as scheduling time to work on persistent action and its eventual, unstoppable results.

1. Doing It: The Real Work

It doesn’t really matter whether you’re recording and composing on scratch pad or desktop computer, handheld device or voice file. The key is to get it down. To write. To get down to it. John Steinbeck rightly called it “the real work.” And not just in a garret, dutiful only. But to want to do it, and be willing to do it, as a fact of one’s chosen profession, anytime, anywhere.

Need a job description? Be a “Journalist of Life” as you experience it. Or: sit down three hours a day and really do it fully, completely, lost in it, absorbed, inventing, editing, envisioning.

Living the world in words: it’s what we all do anyway, isn’t it? So your job is to record the words you paint your world with, set them in pleasing order, and get them out to the world, for any who have ears to hear.

The feedback you get will merge with your own non-academic degrees of innate motivation, dedication, discipline, focus, patience and self-esteem, to determine just how far you get with number 2.

But first, a word about that bugaboo, “Talent.” Talents are so unique as to become almost purely subjective in their evaluation. Technical mastery is another matter, but that’s achievable more readily by putting in the time. The talent is telling but the feedback will gauge it in the end. Talent only matters if you want recognition and appreciation from others. It may be harder or easier to satisfy oneself, but fame is reserved for those whom fate and fashion, and often friendship, choose.

2. Keep on Walking, Don’t Look Back

One of my favorite oracles, the I Ching, has three key words that come up again and again. (I don’t think it’s just me.) They are Persistence, Patience, and Perseverance. Related beyond their pushy first letter, they prescribe a routine of steady actions, daily practices, continual motion. The attitude, as the reggae song has it, is to keep on walking, don’t look back. This forward-looking mantra may be unfamiliar to some: the backbiters, second-guessers, armchair quarterbacks among us all. Any pro writer will tell you they’re not thinking about the manuscripts that got rejected, but the ones they’re rewriting and resubmitting.

Six Key Qualities

Let’s look closer at what it takes to keep going while the feedback trickles in.

1. Motivation
2. Dedication
3. Discipline
4. Focus
5. Patience
6. Self-Esteem

We all know what these mean, but what do they mean for the writer?

1. Motivation. You need to be interested enough in succeeding at this to make a serious effort and commitment of your personal resources: time, energy, money, space, emotional investment. If you’ve read this far, your motivation is on the right track.
2. Dedication. Your dedication is critical in determining if your motivation actually has room to breathe, in the crowded chessboard of your life. Otherwise, the forces of opposing and distracting action will wipe the board clean, and you’ll be alone at the end, in checkmate.
3. Discipline. This is a further step toward ensuring in concrete terms that the doing will get done. Scheduling will be necessary for half of us: the same time slot or amount every day, the same page count. Or, for the remaining happy lot, whatever more indirect ritual (gardening, a long walk, a bath by candlelight) serves to gather the energies toward the desired result.
4. Focus. This is the trickiest for me, because I see a writer’s inner job depending on balance in life and lifestyle. I acknowledge a bias because I value the success of being wholly human as more important than success in any one field—even writing. I think of Shakespeare and Tolstoy, and realize the importance of being in touch with all facets of life, all varieties of the human condition. Still, the work must be done, and there’s only one way to do it: by not doing everything else.
5. Patience. Patience is the virtue that life itself teaches. A writer’s life, like any life, is mean and troublesome without it. If items number one through four are in good working order, patience will lose relevance and be rewarded in due course. This may be a matter of faith in the beginning, and it may be severely tested in the absence of positive feedback. Sooner or later, however, everyone comes to the point of decision: you know it’s time to try something else; or you know there’s no turning back.
6. Self-Esteem. Once a little-known offshoot of psychological theory, “self-esteem” has become a household word. Maybe our patience as a generation or race of dysfunctional families is coming to an end, and we’ve finally realized it’s time to stop blaming and shaming. Whatever the timetable of this utopian state, we can open enough to this love energy to get a taste of it now. Emotional clearing in pairs and groups is an effective way to get back self-esteem if its been crushed or abandoned in the survival of one’s early years. Once we realize (again) that we deserved to be heard and loved in this world (and not just the next one, if we’re good and live up to certain conditions), we are free to express what we feel to the people we care about. As our preoccupation with our own needs is lessened by satisfying that one most core need to feel loved and accepted, we can care about more and more of the life around us. As we care we are led to share our visions of how it is and might be: and as writers we happen to have the tools to share deeply and widely. Now it’s left to us to do the only thing left to do:

Write.