The importance of having patience as a writer.

Over the years I've learned that one of the most important qualities of being a writer is that you need to have a lot of patience. Whenever you're writing, you can't give up too easily, even though things might not immediately go your way. 

In order to show you why patience is so important, let's look at these examples about the writing process. Whenever you're trying to come up with good stuff, you should consider these important things that are required.

1) You need patience to come up with an idea that is good enough.

It's always a pretty good feeling when you have been lucky enough to come up with a decent idea as a writer. Solid ideas and premises have the most amount of potential to turn into quality scripts, storylines or articles. 

At the same time, there are moments when you don't feel comfortable enough with your idea. Your intuition, gut or whatever tells you that you should think of something else to go with, even though you might be about to start writing. 

In these cases, most of the time it's probably a good idea to step back and think a bit. Even though you might feel impatient and think that coming up with another idea won't be easy, you should likely put your thinking cap on again.  

2) You need patience to spend enough time to get the story right.

Now that you came up with an idea that you think is good enough, you need to get your basics right. This means that you delve into the structure of your story and try to make sure that you are going to write something worthwhile.

This is likely the hardest part of the process and you'll usually spend hours after hours trying to come up with solid ideas. It's crucial that you'll come up with good ideas that make sense and that you know what you're writing about.

At least in my case, I will almost certainly get super frustrated because most of the time I don't get things to work right away. I have to struggle a lot before it feels like I have solved most of the problems with my story / task.

3) You need patience to rewrite over and over again.

Once you have gotten your structure right, you have likely solved at least 80% of your problems. This is the moment that usually gives you the first real sense of having accomplished something and that you're going to make it.

Nevertheless, just because you're not staring at a blank screen anymore, you still need to rewrite and in many cases create new content. This leads to you to adding and removing stuff in the hopes that your script would finally make enough sense as a whole. 

This takes time and effort and you might still notice some fairly obvious problems that need to be fixed. These are problems that you know you can fix as long as you're willing to work hard enough and won't give up.

4) You need patience to not publish what you've written too soon. 

Having now fixed 95% to 99% of the stuff, it's time to take a break from your thoughts. You should always let your brain relax a bit and wait at least a day before you publish or let others see what you've written.

Taking this break will almost certainly help you find certain - likely relatively small - mistakes that need to be fixed and that you hadn't noticed before. These are the last things that you need to take care of before your task is finished.

No matter how difficult taking a break might seem to you, you need to get your thoughts off from writing and do something else for a while. It will almost certainly be the right decision and will make you a better writer in the long run.
  
5) You also need patience when you're not rewarded immediately.

Finally, once you have managed to complete your precious task, you should be happy that you managed to get the job done. It wasn't easy and you spent so much time trying to give your best and making your story as good as possible.

However, don't get too upset if people don't immediately pat you on the back for your efforts. No matter how smart, talented or insightful you are as a writer, in most cases the world still doesn't revolve around you.

Instead, appreciate the fact that you had the chance to go through the process and that you managed to reach the finish line. At least in my opinion, that's what really counts and what should make us happy as writers.