Dear O'Abby - How Much Grit Do I Need?

Dear OAbby,

I read about this: https://angeladuckworth.com/grit-scale/ somewhere and was wondering, how much grit does a first time writer need?

Signed,

# AmIGoodEnough

Dear AmIGoodEnough,

I'm not entirely familiar with the scale as presented in your link, but in my opinion, all writers need a fair amount of grit, or perseverance if you prefer.

Writing is hard.  It requires you to be on your own for periods of time, mining words and stories and emotions from your brain.  And often your brain is not as cooperative as you would like it to be, tossing up shiny new ideas and characters when you know you need to finish the project you're already in the middle of.

Then when the writing is done, you have to go out there and share the stuff your brain dumped on the page with other people who will tell you everything that's wrong with it.  And you have to go back and try to fix all these things.

It's not for the faint-hearted or for those who give up on things easily.  It's easy to write something, hear that it's flawed and then move on to writing something new without ever addressing the problems in that first piece. Or to give up writing all together.  Other hobbies don't require the same level of perseverance.

The writers that will succeed are the ones who can find the grit to keep going for draft after draft, constantly moving and changing and cutting and rewriting until they have a story that shines.  But also the ones who have the grit to understand that nothing is ever going to be perfect and know when to stop.

How much grit do you have?  I got a 3.50.  Not sure I'm gritty enough for this writing thing after all...