Wins are punctuation, periodt. Before and after the win is the work. The work and the discipline are the bass line anchoring the melody of our lives.
An actress gets an invite to the Oscars because she’s nominated — and immediately goes thousands into debt for clothing, hair, makeup, and the privilege of pretending she floats instead of walks. She spends hours practicing the red‑carpet glide and rehearsing her sixty‑second thank‑you to the Academy. Before that moment? Decades of auditions, rejections, survival jobs, and acting classes held in rooms that smelled like wet carpet. After the moment? A few days of parties, interviews, and pretending the shoes don’t hurt. Then a week later she’s home, staring at laundry that’s staging a coup, a robot vacuum that died mid‑mission, and a cat box that qualifies as a misdemeanor.
Writers get the same joke without the couture.
Most of us work for free until we manage to sell a completed manuscript — if we ever do. Most never publish. Their pages become attic‑bound diaries, forgotten until the grandchildren use them as fire starter. Words swallowed by the noise of memory.
Once in a while, one writer makes it through the gauntlet: rewrites, editors, rejections, fraudulent agents, and the classic “come over for dinner and we can talk about it.” There is a whole tragicomic novel in that invite. Go write it. Then the marketing machine kicks in and it’s a whirlwind of book tours, radio hits, TV spots, maybe an award or two. So FUN!. 🙃✨
But the truth is the same for all of them: The win is the periodt. The grind is the emdash — the long breath that keeps the sentence going.
—💪🧱
On each side of a win is discipline. It takes work — often unpaid, unseen, and unacknowledged — to build the thing that eventually earns applause. Oscar‑winning actors don’t just collect trophies; they grind through publicity tours, podcasts, talk shows, radio hits, and the endless choreography of being “on.” Writers get book tours, sometimes, if the stars align and the marketing budget hasn’t been eaten by someone else’s memoir.
Every polished appearance — every interview, every panel, every “effortless” moment — is built on hours of prep, repetition, rewrites, logistics, and the discipline to keep showing up long after the dopamine of the win has evaporated. The spotlight is a flashbulb. The work is the generator humming in the dark behind it..
Every Monday my desk waits for me. After prayer and breakfast I open a WordPress session. For a decade now, and over 400 posts later, I haven’t sold anything. One person in a decade paid for a subscription. A friend, listening to me talk about this space, asked, “are you going to write a book?”
The Only Real Writers are Novelists
The only real writers are novelists said no one ever. Social media has turned all of us into writers. Speech recognition is killing the keyboard warrior. Our phones are how we communicate. 🧠📱💬🌐
👴💭“ok…”😏
Fair. I won’t know if I could be anything more than a weird old boomer who touch types content into WordPress just drinking coffee and watching my cats play. That’s the job. Writing means putting words to paper, often with no hope of them ever being read.
Writing is a hermetic and monastic pursuit. It happens alone in a room. The work is surrendering to what the abyss has to say and then writing that down. The abyss doesn’t care about audience metrics. The discipline doesn’t care about whether the words will be read. The work is the work.
Nothing Begat Something
AI is still a parrot. A smart parrot coded to keep us engaging with it. My best work happens when I shut up and listen to the words bubbling up within me. Words arise out of nothing and I write them down. The science of that? I’m a storyteller, not a scientist. And I believe science can’t explain everything. Some truths require faith.
Am I going to write a book? I’m almost done with the embedded novel, “Inger’s Finger.” I had an idea in mind when I started it. The original plan was a police procedural. Inger would be a woman who thought maybe a law enforcement career would be good. There was trauma in her past that put her at risk of difficult behavior. Accusing a coworker of rape, spending a night in a park in Palo Alto, CA, joining the protest in Charlottesville, VA “Unite the Right” protest.
Since then it’s become a story of obsessive love by an unrequited suitor. Damian declared that she was his person and the universe owed him her devotion. That’s not gone well. In a recent post he walked two kilometers away from the meadow where he was dropped off and got lost. Only the clothes on his back, already hypothermic, hungry and dehydrated, he walked into the forest and disappeared.
Keep Coming Back
My favorite definition of a writer is one who builds a discipline of writing consistently. I had to write enough to feel good about charging for subscriptions. I met my goal of at least 365 posts on 2024-11-19. In the spring of 2024 a friend asked me, “are you going to write a novel?” I can say today, “I have. (almost)”
The success I respect is earned through discipline. We have to put in the work. In three domains there is no substitute, exercise, career, and faith. Also, breaking news! Failure is an option. It may be that I die an eccentric old man who spent his latter years consuming the health of his hands in pursuit of nothing useful. Maybe so. Nothing beats a failure but a try.
And nothing tried is nothing gained. 4:30 am, when the alarm goes off, the bed is inviting, warm, and seductive. We can, and many do, turn off the alarm and go back to sleep. To sit up, collect ourselves, and head for the shower sucks. There is no shame in muting the alarm and skipping the gym. But . . . to write that novel or achieve that goal, get your ass out of bed. NOW!
Moody Blues
I know. That one. The one who seems to breeze through the office perfectly coifed, wearing an expensive designer watch, always the latest iPhone, never does any tangible work, and emits an aura of untouchable. Meanwhile, your quota of data entry increased by half-again, you have a sick kid at home, and the boss is whining about declining sales. Woo. Discipline isn’t for the good times. It’s for these times when life gives you a sick kid, a crappy job, and a car that threatens to puke fluids all over your parking spot.
No, not going to write soothing words. Sometimes life sucks. It is what it is. I can offer this—my rhythm is that things get ugly for me, feel like they’ll get uglier, and then over time, the way forward reveals itself. The key is to stay salty.
You can take this away: the satisfaction of daily small wins. 7:30am, gym done, dressed for work, driving there, it feels good. At the end of the work day it feels good to know you made enough of a dent in the quota. Also this prediction for creatives: the award ceremony only happens after an investment of time and effort. And book tours are work.
Desert Fathers
The Desert Fathers were early Christian monks of 3rd–5th century Egypt who sought solitude, prayer, and disciplined labor in the wilderness, shaping Christian monasticism through radical simplicity and spiritual rigor. Why? Why bother? Because they discovered that the work itself changes the worker, even when the work produces nothing measurable, profitable, or admired.
I’m in a good place. 365 posts was a marathon. It wasn’t assured that I’d make that happen. I did, though, and whether those half-million words surface or not I know I did it. The novel Inger’s Finger has enough content to make the shift to editing it as a novel. This is the reward for me whether anyone acknowledges the win or not.
The work is the reward. This is true whether it’s creative work like this, a more normative career, or discipleship. I enjoy looking at the “all posts” view of WordPress and seeing 23 pages of posts. My oldset published post is Define Poor. I still reread it once in a while.
Do Bother
Will I, will you, get that limelight moment? Probably not. There was a desert father who made baskets. When he finished one he would immediately take it apart. Notoriety was not the point for him. The work itself was the point.
Next, some of us are just built for it. It is our gift. We don’t do well stuffed into a cubicle with a laptop and a ServiceNow queue. A lot of us put only the effort to click on a video of a marathon. We’ll never complete a 26 mile run. We have other wins we can celebrate. As I write this I can point to the over 400 posts I’ve written. The actress that got the Academy Award ceremony now has that accomplishment, whether she wins anything or not.
And this little milestone as I write this, word count met for this week. I hope I’ve fulfilled Horace’s aim for poets, “Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae.” Have a great week and do one small, healthy thing that you should do and resist doing. Once done you can enjoy the accomplishment.