All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty (Proverbs 14:23).

My friend Chris moonlights as a novelist.  During the day, he works as an executive for an international communications company -- which certainly seems to be respectable enough and profitable enough to maintain him and his family at a relatively comfortable level -- but his real passion is writing.  In particular, he's been working on a historical fiction project, based on a love story set in the middle of the Second World War.  I've been reading it in installments, since I'm in a writers' group together with him, and I think the story really has a lot of potential... But in the world of book publishing, it's really hard to predict what will sell well.  The book may go on to sell millions of copies; or it may be passed over by publishers for years and years before (or if ever) being picked up by someone.  This is one of the great challenges for aspiring authors.  A writer can put in hours and hours, and months and months, and years and years of work on a particular project -- only for it to be a complete bust.  You just never know.

However, from everything that I've observed of Chris's writing process -- and from the keen wisdom of Proverbs 14:23 -- I think it's safe to say that Chris's writing project is absolutely bound to bring a certain profit.

Seriously, one of the things that I most admire about my friend is his diligence and dedication to the writing project.  Because of the fact that his day job demands a lot of time and attention, Chris has decided that he has to develop a personal discipline to wake up at the crack of dawn, before his wife and son are awake, and spend an hour to an hour-and-a-half per day, writing his novel.  Sometimes, he'll even take vacation days -- getting away from his desk-bound, behind-a-computer job -- in order to sit at a desk, behind a computer, to work on his novel.  His dedication is admirable.  A lot of writers talk about the project(s) they've been working on -- sometimes for years at a time, or even whole decades (there's a pretty strong self-indictment in there, by the way!).  But Chris actually gets down and dirty -- and he does the work.  He works hard, putting out chapter after chapter until his novel is finished.  And as Solomon once said, "All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty."  Clearly, Chris is on the right track to profitability.

And I think that Chris is bound for profitability, even if his book never sees print -- even if no one ever reads it outside of our writers' group and a few close personal friends and relatives.  Because even if he doesn't ever see economic results from the hours and hours of hard work that he's invested into the project, he's still bound to see profit when it comes to his own development as a writer and as a person.  Chris may or may not ever become a household name -- but he will be able to rest assured that he really did give it his best shot, that he put himself out there, and that he did what many "writers" never actually do:  complete an entire novel, single-handedly.  There's something in that which generates a kind of profit that can never be had any other way.  So I absolutely believe that all of my friend's hard work will bring a profit.  And if he makes some money on top of it all, so much the better.