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Lately it’s been brought home to me how many opportunities the writing life offers me for growth in virtue.

First along the path comes humility. Each of us has that moment when we come out of the closet with the writing we’ve slaved so hard over and which, despite many misgivings, we really believe at some level is brilliant. Then someone reads it—someone, that is, who cares more for integrity in the work than for our feelings—and we find out how very far from brilliant it actually is. There may be some spark there, but it’s been all but buried in adverbs, clichés, and purple prose. (I never dreamed how many clichés existed in the English language until I began trying to write without them.) As we work to improve, the humbling comes at higher levels—instead of critique partners, we get agents and editors telling us our stuff stinks. Those who have attained the holy grail of publication have the privilege of being humiliated by critics and Amazon reviewers and bookstore customers who shun their signing table as if it were an IRS auditor’s desk. But it’s still the same thing: You’re never as brilliant as you think you are.

After the early lessons in humility comes the really big lesson: patience. It takes months, often years, to finish a novel. Then you have to wait for people to make time in their own full lives to read it and give you feedback, and then you go back and work on it some more. Lather, rinse, repeat until your hair falls out. Finally, you think the book is ready to see the light, and you start sending it to agents. These days, a month seems to be the minimum response time; two to three months is not uncommon, and many agents never respond at all. Even with a book that is absolutely ready for the big-time, finding an agent can easily take a year or more. Then the agent has to find you a publisher—and if agents are tortoises, publishers are giant sloths. If and when the book is finally sold, you may have to wait up to two years before it is published. And let’s not even talk about how long you wait to get paid.

Somewhere along this journey, you may easily stumble over that big rock in the road called “the market.” Maybe your book is the best thing since prepared mustard, but nobody is buying your genre right now. Or your vision seems just a little bit ahead of its time, and no one wants to take a risk on it. Sooner or later, someone—probably an agent or editor—is bound to suggest that you write something a little more salable. This seemingly innocent suggestion is really the Demon of People-Pleasing in disguise. This is where you have to renew the commitment I hope you started out with: You are going to write with integrity, to serve your art, not to please people. If you’re writing to please people, you may as well chuck it all in right now, because people are fickle; what they love today they may hate tomorrow. Some of the greatest artists of all time were not valued in their day. Imagine if Jane Austen had said, “Well, shucks, nobody likes these books I’m writing; maybe I should write Gothic thrillers instead.” She’d be no better known today than Ann Radcliffe, who was all the rage as a writer of Gothic thrillers back then.

And that leads to the last and biggest lesson I’m going to talk about today: letting go. Humility, patience, and integrity are all part of it: Ultimately, you have to let go of the reins of your own writing career and abandon yourself to the will of God, or the universe, or however you regard those forces larger than yourself that make things happen. You can write brilliantly and market your little heart out, but ultimately, success will come when it is meant to come and not one moment sooner.

I mentioned in my earlier post, “Riding the Wild Word,” that writers need each other. We need each other for support, encouragement, reassurance that even though we are in fact crazy, it’s somehow okay. And specifically, we need each other for honest, intelligent criticism of our work, generally referred to as “critique.”

Some people say that a writer is one who writes—as opposed to just talking about it at cocktail parties (or, these days, on the internet). I say that a writer is one who has subjected him/herself to critique and has profited by it. Until you’ve done that, you’re just messing around.

Getting critiqued is, of course, a two-edged sword—in more ways than one. (Does that make it a four-edged sword? Sorry, it’s too late at night for geometry.) First, while a good critiquer will always find something to praise, he or she will also find something to—well, criticize. You will discover that your work is not perfect. If you have any sense, you suspected as much to begin with, but perhaps you cherished a tiny fantasy that your critiquer would finish your book and cry, “This is the most fantastic thing I ever read! Don’t change a word! And by the way, let me introduce you to my agent.”

Enjoy that fantasy and let it go. Ain’t gonna happen.

When you get that criticism, first you say “thank you,” very politely and with gracious self-control. Then you go home, lock yourself in your bedroom, and cry your eyes out. After that, you drink some wine or eat some chocolate or pet the cat, and get down to the work of revising, which will one day make you a real writer.

The second way in which critique is two-edged is that there is good critique and bad critique. I don’t mean flattering vs. unflattering; we already covered that. I mean intelligent vs. clueless. Some people will read your work, understand what you were trying to do, and give you suggestions for how you can do it better. Other people will read into your work their own agenda and make suggestions that are completely off the wall.

It’s your job to tell the difference.

In the beginning, when you’re insecure and desperate for approval, you want to accept every suggestion and try to implement it. If you do that, your work either ends up looking like a crazy quilt, or it loses every spark of life because you’re trying to follow all the “rules.” Remember the old story about the old man, the boy, and the donkey going to market? You’ll end up carrying the donkey.

This approach usually palls the day you get two critiquers saying precisely opposite things. Then you’re stuck—you’ve got to trust your gut whether you want to or not. So you do, and in the process you learn that your gut is fairly trustworthy. Gradually you gain confidence, until you reach the point that you know almost immediately whether a given suggestion is garbage or gold.

And when you get to that point, a good critique becomes a real joy. You read it, and a suggestion nestles into your mind and you think, “Yes, of course! Why didn’t I see that before?” And then you start revising, and the new words slide so effortlessly into place that you know they were meant to be there all along, only for some reason you were too blind to see it. And then you kiss your critiquer’s feet and offer praise to God that your eyes have been opened.

Sometimes a good critique is the only thing that can pull a manuscript out of a stalemate in which you couldn’t bear to look at it for months on end. Sometimes, a good critique can save your writing life.

So when you find those few people who “get” your work, cherish them! Stand by them, buy them coffee, critique their work intelligently in return. We can’t pull ourselves up by our bootstraps in this business; but we can pull each other up.

Words are like horses: They know if you are their master. If they sense you are not in control, they’ll throw you, or bolt and take you where you do not wish to go. But if they sense your mastery, they will do your bidding, and you can choose anything from a quiet amble through the countryside to a wild gallop up hill and down dale.

Observers can sense the mastery too. Watching a skilled rider, we are caught up in her rhythm and grace; we can almost feel the play of the horse’s muscles beneath our own legs. But watching an amateur, we feel the awkwardness of every jolting step, the agony of the inevitable tumble, the humiliation and the fear.

Some people seem to be naturals with horses: They sit easily in the saddle and know instinctively how to relate to a horse. Others have to learn through hard work and practice, with many falls and remountings and saddle sores along the way. But the only thing that can stop you from learning is your own fear, laziness, or failure to persist. Natural talent is great, but it isn’t the only way.

How do you gain mastery over a horse? Some people do it through fear and violence, but this is likely to backfire; the best way is with gentleness and love. You spend time with the horse, feeding it, caring for it, talking to it, before you ever try to mount it. You gain its trust, you learn its idiosyncrasies, you adapt yourself to its gait. You become, in effect, its servant, and only then can you become its master.

When you are ready to ride, you start small, with just a lap around the paddock, building as you gain skills; you don’t try to take a six-foot fence your first time out. Nor do you enter a show or a competition until you’re sure of yourself and the horse–until the two of you can work and breathe as one.

Okay, so enough with the high-flown talk about something I really know very little about (if you do know about horses, please forgive me). What does this mean with respect to writing?

You have to be gentle with words, too. You have to get to know them well by reading, reading, reading. You have to pay attention to how the real masters use them–not the hacks, but the greats, whose mastery you can sense from the first paragraph. You have to learn the rules and internalize them before you can begin to break them to good purpose. You have to start small and build your skills. And you must, at all costs, learn patience and restrain yourself from sending your early unpolished efforts out into the world.

There’s one unfortunate but significant difference between riding and writing, though: You can’t be an incompetent horseback rider and not know it. If your technique is faulty or the horse doesn’t trust you, you will have the aches, bruises, and broken bones to prove it. Not so with writing. Amateur writing may cause pain, but most often that pain belongs to the reader on whom the amateur has foisted his stuff before it was ready. Here’s where the role of the trainer comes in.

If you want to get to the top of the equestrian tree (now there’s an image for you), you need a trainer–someone who can spot the subtler mistakes in your riding and help you to fix them. If you want to be a great writer–or even a passably good one–you need someone to perform that service for you, too. True writing mentors, unfortunately, are rare and tend to be expensive; most of us have to rely on books, the occasional workshop, and a critique group of our peers. But it is essential to get that training one way or another. A few great geniuses can do without it, but who’s to say that even Tolstoy might not have profited from a teacher, if there had been anyone better than he around to teach him?

One last parallel: As in every endeavor of life, no matter how much natural talent you have, you will fall, and fall, and fall. But you have not failed as long as you keep getting back up.