Writing requires stamina. Writing requires endurance. Often used interchangeably, these two words have slightly different meanings. And it is in these two different meanings that we can gain a new perspective on how we approach our creative work. 

So what’s the difference? 

To call on your stamina, you’ll need to be working at max exertion or towards muscle/mental failure for as long as possible. Endurance, however, is more about how long you can perform a certain activity, regardless of its intensity.

Participating in NaNoWriMo requires stamina. Writing a series requires endurance.

When talking about stamina, it often means you’re working within a time limit, and to hit the deadline you are working as hard as you can. If the project needs to be sent or submitted at some point, then you must call on your mental stamina to get it done. 

Mental stamina is our capacity to maintain focus, concentration, and mental clarity during demanding tasks or activities that require sustained mental effort. This can include studying, problem-solving, or engaging in complex projects like writing a short story or novel.

When you enter yourself in a writing contest or NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month, where the goal is to write 50,000 words in a month—you need the stamina so that you can meet that time. If you don’t submit your work by the deadline or hit the word count by the end of the month, then you’re not yet in the right condition to tackle high-pressure projects, and some more training is required.

The more you build up your stamina the better you’ll be at getting a project to the finish line. Stamina is essential. 

But what about endurance? 

Endurance refers to the length of time in which a person can perform a certain activity, regardless of the intensity because it’s measuring the prolonged effort over an extended period. You can keep working on it without getting overly fatigued. Well-paced endurance could last a lifetime. 

If you are building a career as a writer, you need to have endurance. You need to be able to go from one story to another and write one series after another. Endurance doesn’t happen fast. It requires you to build a base and establish a habit over many months and years. The more regularly you write, the more endurance you’ll acquire. 

You need stamina to run one marathon. You need endurance to be a marathon runner for life. And that’s how we should think of writing as well. You need stamina to polish a short story and submit it before a deadline. You need endurance to build a collection that keeps readers coming back. 

Stamina gives you the speed and urgency to finish a piece of work, that way you don’t spend the rest of your life with a mountain of unfinished projects. However, you don’t want to burn out or bury yourself either, so you need to build your endurance too. Endurance allows you to establish a proper rhythm so that you can continue working after each milestone that way rest and recovery don’t mean quitting forever. 

With all that said, you’ll need two different types of projects. You need your shorter projects whether they be writing contests or creative writing courses, where you can do sprints and develop your stamina. These will allow you to determine how long certain projects will take you. Think of it like a race or a game.  Participate in competitions, and events, or find a job that requires you to finish something on time. These are opportunities to get your work polished and in front of people. After all, learning to get readers is something you need to practice. 

Then you should have bigger, more ambitious projects. These are life works. These are magnus opus. These will define you as a creative. Whatever it is: make it big. A big novel. A series. An epic. Keep working on it until it’s fully polished. Don’t rush it. Allow yourself to escape to it. Allow it to grow at its own pace. Endure the times when it gets hard. There will be many. Work on it a little every day, if not every day, every other day. If not every other day, as often as possible. But to truly build endurance, I recommend you try not to skip more than two days. Commit to it. Endure. It will all pay off. 

Writing requires stamina. Without it, you won’t be able to push yourself to finish. Writing requires endurance. Without it, you will always feel desperate to finish. No matter what you are working on, having stamina and endurance gives you the mental and physical strength to enjoy the process. It will be hard. It will be pain. But in many ways, that’s all there is. So you must have the stamina and endurance to get through it. Good luck! 

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