It takes nine months to create a human being. That’s somewhere in the neighbourhood of 100 trillion cells, 300-350 bones (some of which will fuse together as the child grows), 3,000 taste buds, 230 joints, 100 000 hair follicles, 23 pairs of chromosomes, and one tiny beating heart that powers the whole machine. That little human will grow, and learn, and change, and will sooner or later sit down to write a story. Maybe even a best selling novel.

A thrice-published bestselling author once told me that I should expect to spend the next two to three years with my novel if I was going to see it through to publication. From the drafting, to the revising, to the pitching, to the pre-launch promoting, the novel will consume an average writer’s life for a solid two years.

To put that in perspective, a friend of mine recently created two human beings in that amount of time. The computer you use to type the first words of your project will be on the verge of obsolescence by the time you see publication. Everyone will be driving hovercars and living on Mars. [That may be going a bit too far, but you get the point.]

It’s important to love your story. You don’t always have to be ecstatic about sitting down and typing, and there is every chance you may hate your characters and the whole idea by the time you’re giving your first reading with a hard bound first edition in hand, but there needs to be something driving you to chisel away at the work day after day. Non-writers will of course have the opinion that it’s an idyllic life of typing a few thousand words each morning before strolling to the café to converse with other artist types. It’s easy, right? Just string a few pretty sentences together, and after a few months you have a book.

Those of us who’ve looked ahead know that there is significantly more involved in the process. After the drafting comes the revisions. How many revisions? Maybe only three (we hope), more likely eight or nine on that first novel. We’re done after the revisions though, right? After we write out a dozen different versions of our query letter, send it to a few agents, deal with the rejection, revise our query letters and sample pages, send to a few more agents, land an agent (we hope), suffer through the publisher rejection process, get an acceptance (we hope), negotiate a contract, handle our own publicity by doing blog tours and interviews in the online and independent media because the publishing industry only has media budgets for it’s biggest new stars, and eventually get drunk and pass out at our book launch party. Then instead of writing we have to convince all our local bookstores to let us do a little reading and signing, where we’ll sit and try to snare the attention of the one or two book browsers who are trying their best not to wander to close to our aura of discomfort and embarrassment at standing alone in front of several empty chairs and a pile of books waiting to be signed.

Is it starting to sound fun yet? This is all part of our labour though, and to survive the frustrations, anxieties, and sense of tedium that are all likely to crop up, we need to be working on projects that we are passionate about. We need to write the stories that only we can tell, and we need to find the motivation in our work that keeps us coming back to it time and time again. When you write those first few lines of novel length project, you’re at the beginning of a new relationship. If you’re not feeling the excitement churning in your stomach in the first few days of dating, how can you expect to get through through the long term?

Do yourself a favour, and find a project that gets you going. Be ambitious, be bold, and be brave in your creativity. If you’re not a little bit afraid that you won’t pull it off, maybe it’s not worth writing about?

I’ll write more about what tactics I use to harness that excitement in a future post.