Even while recognizing that in no area is achieving more success totally within our control and that chance and outside factors play a role in all areas, a look at our matrix clearly tells where our bets are most likely to pay off. Our "chips" consist of our time, effort, and emotional energy. If we stack those chips only on the squares of commercial success, what are the odds of a payoff? What happens to those odds if we spread our markers across the board of the types of success? How about if we stack them higher in the personal success column, not quite as high in the critical success box, and then the few remaining covering commercial success? How do our prospects look then?

In our quest for more success, we are all betting men and women. As smart gamblers, we’ll cover all the bases, but we’ll also put our greatest efforts into those areas where we have the best chances of winning and of reaping valuable rewards.

When Are You Successful?

When can you call yourself successful? Success is a good thing, and we naturally want more of it and want it sooner, rather than later. A careful look at our matrix tells us that depending on our definition, we can have more success sooner or we can wait months, perhaps years, to have a sense of achievement.

The generally accepted rule of thumb is that it takes about a year to eighteen months for a writer to complete a book-length work of fiction. Some full-time genre writers crank out two or three works in that time, while other writers spend several years planning, preparing, and writing the work of their dreams. An author can spend another year to eighteen months (or more, in many cases), marketing a work to agents or acquisition editors. Once a publishing house does contract for the book, publishing schedules may dictate that anywhere from six to twenty four months will elapse before the work is available to the public.

With the exceptions of showing your work to a critique partner or group, writing a book length work of fiction is a solitary, private process. There are no opportunities for commercial success during this time because there is nothing to sell. There are also no opportunities for public critical success, because reviewers don’t review drafts (thank Heaven!). 

The private critical successes a writer achieves will most likely come during revision, the time when you take a good draft and make it better. Many writers feel a great sense of accomplishment, and justifiably so, in taking their rough first cut at a chapter, paragraph, or scene, and reviewing, revising, and rewriting it into something more powerful and more entertaining. However, the testing of your work as a whole—with critics, readers, and reviewers, will come only when the entire work is finished and made available in a public form.

The extended nature of the process of writing, marketing, and publishing a novel means that writers who focus on or pursue only commercial and critical success may spend up to three years at their project before they can even have the opportunity to be successful.

On the other hand, writers who truly leverage the concept of personal success have daily opportunities to achieve. Setting daily goals and working hard to meet those goals offers the potential for positive reinforcement every day, and this positive reinforcement provides the energy to go on to pursue the next day’s goals. Cast in other terms, the choice is clear. Which sounds more appealing: to struggle for two to three years in chasing uncertain rewards that are outside your control, or instead see—and feel—yourself progressing steadily day by day, moving from one achievement to the next?

An approach that plans and celebrates daily personal writing successes does not have to be Pollyannaish, and indeed it should not be. Our own life experience tells us that on any journey there are setbacks, speed bumps, detours, rough roads, dead ends, and some wondering around lost. Situations and circumstances change, and so too will our plans as we adjust them to new situations, realities, and priorities. Yet, even these changes offer us new opportunities to be successful in meeting the challenges they present.

In a thousand forms, the world around us catalogs and recites mankind’s failures. From inside our minds, negativity and self-doubt work hard to snuff out the candlelight of joy. The long and arduous process of writing a novel is filled with opportunities for rejection, disappointment, criticism, and even despair. Yet, this same process is also a treasure trove, stuffed with opportunities. The writer who sees and seizes these opportunities is already successful.