It was George Bernard Shaw who said that.

This is such a good post, and so true. You don’t see sports people that go “oh, I wanted to run the marathon, but I tried once and didn’t get past a mile.” o.O You practice!
Also about the shortening a long novel…. it reminds me of, I forget, maybe Emerson? Who once wrote a letter that started with “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” It takes a lot more work in my opinion figuring out how to cut out the boring and keep all the information in a shorter text than to just write a long book. And it’s what makes the difference between good idea and good novel. (well, not that some long ones aren’t good, but they’ve had the same kind of work done on them–they’re long instead of super-long!)

That’s what Jane Austen did. Her first novel, “First Impressions” never sold. Years later she rewrote it and it sold under a new name: “Pride and Prejudice.”

strugglingwriter: You’re welome. I struggled for almost twenty years before I was published: “Never give up, never surrender!”