Introduction
In November 2009 I finished and published my first book Running Shoes Are a Girl’s Best Friend. It felt like it had been a long and challenging haul since I started working on it in January 2008, shortly after my partner Tim and I moved from Australia to Canada.
Tim is Canadian. I am Dutch. We had lived and worked in Sydney, Australia, for seven years. Quitting our jobs—we both worked as sub-editors at The Australian Financial Review newspaper in Sydney—we arrived in Vancouver, Canada, in October 2007. I entered Canada as a visitor and needed to apply for a permanent residency visa before I could work—or stay for that matter.
I have been a journalist since 1996, starting my career at the financial newswire Bloomberg Business News, as it was then still called, in Brussels, Belgium, where I had moved from my native the Netherlands in 1995.
Headquartered in New York, NY, Bloomberg has offices around the world. In 1998 the company owned by Michael Bloomberg offered me a transfer to its office in Toronto, Canada. I jumped at that chance, as I did at the opportunity to move to its stunning Sydney office in June 2000. I left Bloomberg News in 2004 because I was ready for a change. The following year I took a Book Editing and Publishing course at Macleay College in Sydney before The Australian Financial Review newspaper hired me as a sub-editor in 2006. I also began writing freelance articles for a running magazine, Run For Your Life.
The first two months after our arrival in Canada, just in time for the 2007 winter, were taken up by starting our lives from scratch here. Tim got a job and we moved into a rental apartment in Port Moody, near Vancouver. (The two-bedroom unit was sparse until our belongings arrived from Australia in January 2008.)
We had also gathered, prepared and submitted the documents for my Canadian permanent residency application. Approval, if given, would take at least six months and without it I could not seek employment in Canada. I decided to use that time to do something I had thought about for years: write a book.
My project started off well. Having decided to focus on female runners and the reasons for their commitment to this active lifestyle, I interviewed 53 women and two top running coaches. I have been a runner as long as I have been a professional writer: this is not a mere coincidence. My experiences as a distance runner have empowered me in every aspect of my life and are an ongoing source of inspiration and motivation. This is what I wanted to convey in my book by merging stories of other female runners with my own.
I had a wealth of material and started planning the structure of the book. This is where my struggle began. After trying different ways of structuring it, I just couldn’t seem to find one that worked and kept getting stuck. After a flying start my progress on the book slowed down before coming to a grinding halt. The more I struggled the more I doubted. The more I doubted the less I enjoyed working on my project, before beginning to wonder if all this meant I just wasn’t cut out to write books altogether.
Running, as always, cleared my mind. I trained for and raced in two marathons in 2008. As everyone who has attempted to run the distance of 42 kilometres and 195 metres, doubts about one’s ability to finish it are never far away. The only way to get rid of the disbelief is to keep going, step by step, and the finish line will be yours. Eventually. So that’s the approach I used with my first book too: I refused to give up and kept writing and rewriting, word by word.
In April 2009, I set myself a writing challenge that became the first draft of the book you are reading now. A Work in Progress: Exercises in Writing started as a 10-day project, i.e. my plan was to write the manuscript in 10 consecutive days, as an exercise to regain confidence that I could write a book. Seven months later I finished that first manuscript about female runners and published it as Running Shoes Are a Girl’s Best Friend.
I wrote most of A Work in Progress: Exercises in Writing during the time my doubts about my ability to become a book author nearly got the better of me. Many times I felt so lost I almost relinquished the will to keep pursuing it. I felt I lacked time, clarity, ability and, most of all, simple faith.
Yet I persisted and hope this book, my third, will help you do the same.
Copyright © by Margreet Dietz
