Motivation
Why Gratitude Keeps Us Humble
Thanksgiving is the one day out of the year where we survey our lives to uncover what we ought to be grateful for. Some of us have a generic list. Others might like to come up with unique reasons to count their blessings. But if we’re all honest with ourselves, some days it’s hard to see the silver lining, and that’s okay. So as long as we rise from struggle and understand how gratitude can make us better.
Gratitude, in many cases, has become overly used. It truly has become the go-to phrase whenever anyone is upset. There’s nothing worse than clichéd responses to personal challenges, trauma, and real difficulties we face. It’s easy for someone else sitting where you’d like to be in life and is not in your shoes to tell you to “just get over it” and to “be grateful for what you have.” If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard someone say that, I’d be a billionaire.
Read the rest of this entry »You’re Never Too Experienced To Learn What You Don’t Know
The best gift you can give yourself this season isn’t the latest gadget on a Black Friday sale but the gift to be open to learning new things. I absolutely love to learn, and in all honesty, if college was free, I’d be a perpetual student enrolled forever. However, there are ways to improve your skill set that doesn’t cost a lot of money.
Why is it important to keep learning? Being open to learning not only helps you in your professional life but also improves your skills as a writer and helps you become a more self-aware individual. On the other hand, having a know-it-all attitude stunts our growth and can potentially tarnish our relationships. Let’s face it, no one wants to be around someone who thinks they have the answer to everything. While we can be experts in a particular field, things are constantly evolving. There’s new software, innovative strategies to market products, advancements in technology, and a butt-load of skills that we’ve yet to learn.
Read the rest of this entry »#WritingCommunity #WritersLift: Why You Should Be Your Own Inspiration
November is the perfect opportunity to consider giving back and not just to others but to ourselves. It’s the month for turkey dinner, Black Friday sales, Cyber Monday blowouts, and, for many writers, National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. If you’re trying to crank out 50k words by the end of the month, it could help bust your tendency to procrastinate.
However, you should also consider working on consistency as a writer no matter what month it is. Some writers need a muse, and NaNoWriMo could offer that to them. It’s a cool and fun challenge to get us all trying to write every day. Other writers wait for inspiration to hit. Many of us often have work, kids, and lives full of distractions. There will always be a reason not to start. Excuses are very easy to make because they’re the quickest way to allow procrastination to get in the way of accomplishing not just our daily word count but any goal, for that matter.
Read the rest of this entry »#WritingCommunity #QuestionOfTheDay: To Plot Or Not To Plot?
There’s a huge debate in the writing community whether or not having a very detailed plot outline is invaluable or a waste of time. Does it really make a book better? There’s a new story idea I’ve been toying around with and so I’d considered plotting out my next manuscript.
With my last one, I sort of had to do a super light outline because I had multiple POVs and a dual timeline. But it was the second book in a duology, and so I already knew the characters. It’s a lot different if you’re writing out a series and you already know the characters, the storyline, and kind of know what he/she would do next. It’s a lot harder to start from scratch when you are simply going off of a brand new idea that you haven’t quite fleshed out.
Read the rest of this entry »Creative Empowerment: Build A Life You Don’t Have To Escape From
I admit it as a creative soul, as a writer I’m quite the escape artist and there are many forms of avoidance. A glass of red wine or two. A mind-numbing videogame on my cell phone. Even a good book. Read the rest of this entry »
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Writing With Hope 