"VERTICAL LIMIT"

                                                                 Aim Higher

 

            Have you ever seen the movie Vertical Limit? It debuted in 2000 and, in my opinion, was thrilling. If you haven’t, I recommend you do.

The vertical limit is the highest altitude at which humans can survive.

What do mountains have to do with writing, you might ask?

Everything.

Mountain climbers climb because they have something to prove to themselves. They climb because it’s a goal and a badge of honor to accomplish something no one has ever done.

It’s more than recreational or a sport for that climber, life-changing.

This philosophy applies to writers as well.

We write with the hope of completing a journey.

You climb until, after a while, you feel like you can’t go any further. In the writing world, that is the vertical limit.

But the goal is to aim high. Keep going until you surpass your writing peak. You’ve published your first manuscript and feel accomplished.

On a mountain climbers scale of lowest to highest mountains, Mount Wycheproof is the lowest at 138 ft. That’s the equivalent of publishing one book.

That’s a great start because we have to crawl before we walk. But remember that you’ve just joined millions of other authors with a published novel. However, there’s still work to do.

The goal is not to stop at one but to start on the next project until you’ve climbed the highest mountain, Everest.

It sounds insurmountable but in the writing world, achievable. I firmly believe we can do anything we set our minds to do.  It’s only impossible if you never try.

In the movie Vertical Limit, we watched people die when they reached that death zone. But it doesn’t have to end that way for authors.

We are capable of achieving more and aiming higher without limits.