Michael T. Hare

Have you ever wanted to quit your book? Maybe it’s not shaping up, or you feel it’s not working? Well, I have some essential advice for getting rid of all that… MAKE PIZZA! Today, my family and I made a big batch of pizza calzones—basically folded pizzas—and I got thinking about writing. Getting the dough to a perfect twelve-inch circle takes time, and sometimes, we consider giving up and starting over. Nonetheless, if we keep rolling it, and rolling it, and rolling it, it will eventually take shape so long as we don’t give up. It’s the same process for us authors; only the rolling pin is a bunch of keys beneath our fingers.

My point is that we can neither judge a project by how it looks now nor how it looked before. Just keep working. We can’t give up simply because our story isn’t shaping up in the blink of an eye—should that even happen, our readers would feel completely underwhelmed, and we’d get some pretty poor results. Like pizza, a good story is made through patience, persistence, and, the most important ingredient, time. So, if you’re ever feeling low about your writing, try making pizza!