“The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast and you miss all you are traveling for.” Louis L’Amour

As the writer of classic Westerns, our boy Louis knew a thing or two about trails. And his words of wisdom are a good reminder that wherever we’re traveling to isn’t really the point. In the end, it’ the journey that counts. As writers, it’s good to remember this now and again. Sometimes we can get so entranced with word counts or page counts or hitting our daily targets that we forget the desire that underlies it all—the real goal—becoming better writers.

So let’s think about the trail we’re on and enjoying the journey:

We’re enjoying the journey when we feel rested and eager to write—when we have ideas spilling out of us that we long to capture and share with the world.

We’re enjoying the journey when we have others walking beside us—when we take time to encourage our fellow scribes who may need our words of inspiration and a shot of our Adrenalin.

We’re enjoying the journey when we take time to savor its many pleasures. Sometimes this means exploring a byway that seems promising but make take us off our main road for a bit. It’s these little side trips that often lead to surprises that delight our readers.

We’re enjoying the journey when we don’t let bumps in the road knock us flat. When we don’t worry too much about a pass from a journal or an agent, but continue to believe in our work and its value.

We’re enjoying the journey when we realize that there’s nothing more fulfilling than grappling with something difficult that we really care about. And when we keep wrestling with it, until it really works.

So let’s keep our goals in mind—the end of the trail—what we’re aiming for. But let’s also enjoy the trail—let’s enjoy being on the road to improving our craft and creating better, truer, deeper stories. Write on!

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