The Essential Why?

People ask; What does it take to get published? It takes a number of things. One is certainly, luck. It is almost certainly the smallest factor, but present. Finishing a novel is another, and by finishing I don’t mean simply writing until you toss in “the end”, but polishing the delivery, making vocabularies internally consistent and appropriately varied, making sure that rooms, cars and hair don’t change colors, brands or sizes from one chapter to the next and of course that you’ve spelled your each characters name the same way throughout the novel. There is of course the minor step of circulating a novel, of which any number of writers and agents have talked about before. But before each of those, and more importantly than any is why.