Did you know I went to boarding school for 10th–12th grades? It helped shaped who I am, prepared me for college, and allowed me, a 5’1″ shorty girl, to be a starter on the basketball team. (That’s me in the header image, being very serious in art class.)

(There were only 25 girls in the school, and of those, only ten wanted to play. Of those, five of us knew how. Voila! Starter, haha. I’m also convinced that’s how I ended up as valedictorian — there were only 25 kids in my senior class.)

But that’s not what this post is about. At fifteen, the school motto — Nihil Sine Labore (nothing without labor) — was just one more thing that terrified me about moving away from home and into a dorm. By the time I was eighteen, I understood that the phrase meant you had to work to succeed, but it still struck me as something added to the school crest to make them seem fancy.

Thirty years later, I have a better understanding of what the founders of my school were trying to teach us. We live in an era of immediacy, where people want fast results with as little effort as possible. (This isn’t a judgment — I’m totally guilty of this as well.) Information that once took days or weeks to discover is foisted upon us by simply asking Hey Siri/Alexa/Google. Or if you were like me and had a walking encyclopedia for a mother, you just asked her your burning question.

[Side note: one of my favorite examples of her helpfulness was in the summer of 2001. I was meeting a group of friends to play volleyball at North Avenue Beach in Chicago and was told they had an Australian flag marking their court. I wasn’t sure what that looked like but figured I’d find them — until I arrived. If you’ve never seen these volleyball courts, there a dozens and dozens, most with flags, and it’s a sea of people. So I did what any self-respecting 26-year old would do: I called my mom. She whipped out an atlas, described the blue background with white stars and the Union Jack in the corner, and sent me on my way!]

It can be easy to slip into the habit of expecting quick results. Heck, even self-publishing makes it “easy” for instant gratification. Step 1: write a book! Step 2: upload to Amazon! (Please don’t skip the 1500 steps between those two.) No one wants to hear about the hours and hours that go into reading and editing and rewriting a draft, they want a book to read, preferably on sale for 99¢ please and thank you.

To do anything well takes work.

When I do school visits, I tell the students that to be good at anything, you have to practice. As much as we may want immediate gratification and to excel right away, we have to put in the work to get there. And that work isn’t always fun.

That’s the point I’ve reached with my current work in progress. When I decided to take a sabbatical from marketing earlier this year, I didn’t intend to stop writing as well, but that’s what happened. Stepping back for the summer was really good for me. It gave my mind time to rest, which led to me figuring out what wasn’t working.

Now I’m feeling the itch to write again, but I need to overhaul what I’ve already written. I stopped just shy of 30K words, which should be almost half of my book, but it needs tightening, and at least one side story is getting cut.

Note to self: you don’t need to put math in saucy summer suspense book.

Even though I know what I need to do and when I explain the changes, they seem simple* enough, part of me is afraid of the work. I’d much prefer to snap my fingers, open my laptop, and find that my manuscript has magically transformed into the masterpiece in my head.

But it won’t happen without work.

If you have tricks on how to slog through the hard parts, I’d love to hear them in the comments. <3

*ha