Every career has its tough stuff -- tasks and requirements that are unpleasant or difficult. Writing has more than its fair share of these challenges: working alone, setting your own schedule and sticking to it, submitting despite the rejections and lack of encouragement, even the rewriting and revising can get tedious. But doing these things are part of a particular line that divides the serious writer from the hobbyist: perseverance. The road to any success as a writer is a long, slow battle uphill, and very few become stars. And for most of us, every sale is a testament to our determination. A friend once told me that every story has a home, and he's right. The hard part is finding it.

Perseverance goes beyond the market hunt. We can't give up on our stories at any phase of development. They may require more revisions than we thought we'd ever need to do, or a complete rethinking or rewrite. We may have to set them aside, sometimes for years, but we can't give up on them. Perseverance means working through the challenges, whether those challenges are finding a new market after a stinging rejection or picking up a novel we abandoned after 4 attempts to write through to an ending. It means doing what we need to do despite how we're feeling, despite lack of support, despite the obstacles, set backs, and discouragement.

It doesn't come easy, this determination. Like almost everything else about writing, it's something that happens one step at a time. A story gets returned, the comments aren't so great, and you decide to hunt up a new market anyway. Choosing to write a little more on the next chapter after a long day at the "real" job and frustration with progress on that novel. Only the serious writer does these things and all that other "tough stuff" that makes writing what it is. They don't give up on their stories, their dreams, or themselves.