Writing: The Importance of Showing Up

Woody Allen is given credit for the statement: “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” The truth of this observation resonates with many people, pursuing many different pathways to hoped-for success, and writing is one endeavor in which it seems most apt.

When you make your living as a writer (or want to) and then you don’t regularly show up at your keyboard, or your writing tablet, or however you do it, the words don’t go down on the page. That seems pretty obvious. Something that is running around in your head isn’t being put down in words that others can read.

But there is something more to it that is even more important. If you don’t show up, you aren’t there for the inspiration to strike you, you aren’t there for the Holy Spirit to write through you, you aren’t there to create the message or the story or the essay or the poem or the book that you didn’t even know was in you waiting to be written, and those creations are always more stunning, more magnificent than the ones you formulated all by yourself. And part of the tragedy is that no one will miss it, because no one else knew it was in you either.

Whenever your time of day or night is that you write – that time when above all else, you are a writer – make sure you show up!