Happy Tuesday! I hope you all had a lovely weekend. Hopefully, you took some time to rest and do something enjoyable. For me, that meant eating a bag of Twin Snakes, and a jar of Talenti Coffee Cookie Crumble while watching a mix of Gilmore Girls, Victorious, and Suite Life on Deck. Overall, it was a very wonderful weekend.
As I was thinking over what to post for this week, I was reminded of the fact that it is highly possible that none of you actually know who I am or what I look like.
But isn’t there an about section on the website?
There is! But my picture on this website has a very distracting (yet delicious) crepe and a cup of coffee from a super cute coffee shop in Boston. I think I look cute too, but that pastry – a sweet crepe with some sugar and lemon – while super yummy, is slightly distracting. But it was the only good photo of myself that I could find at the time of the creation of the website. I suggested using a picture of me smiling next to a giant sign that had different cheeses written on it but I was outvoted.
My author bio on this website is wonderful. I love it, and I love my friend who wrote it for me. But it can’t go too in-depth with it because when publishers want an author bio, they don’t want your life story. I won’t be sharing my entire life story today, but hopefully, you’ll learn a little bit more about me!
First things first – I like coffee. I really like coffee. Perhaps you didn’t get that from the author photo or my shout-out to baristas in Saturday’s post, but I love a good cup of coffee. I’m not enough of a coffee lover, though, to go black. I tried it, and it was too bitter for my taste buds that seem to gravitate towards sweet things (hence the Twin Snakes and Talenti this weekend). My favorite coffee creamer is Silk Oat Yeah! Oatmeal cookie flavor. Mm. Every day is fall with that creamer. But shout out and congratulations to all the coffee drinkers out there who drink it black – I admire you, and maybe one day, I, too, will be able to drink black coffee.
Secondly, I’ll reassure you that I do have an English degree, so lots of these writing tips are a compilation of things I’ve learned throughout my college career and in my personal experience in writing.
Now, if I were you, I would probably want to know more about how I got into writing.
Well. Like I said in Saturday’s post, I was always writing – always creating stories in my head. While writing seemed to pop up physically (The Fox’s Birthday, my great seven and eleven poem, and then a small book of poetry for my Mother for Mother’s day), I didn’t start taking writing seriously until I was around thirteen.
I had just gotten a laptop – my first laptop! I had my first laptop, and so far, I only knew how to play solitaire. I was also at my Grandparents’ house – a beautiful farmhouse – but I was thirteen, so going outside and enjoying the sun and fresh air wasn’t really my thing. Really, I was bored. So, I was inside staring at my laptop when I just opened Word and started writing a story. My first fanfiction. Now, my brother informs me that currently, fanfiction means creating a romance out of an already existing story. This was not what I was doing with this first story! I was just impressed with this fiction series (that I will not mention yet) and wanted to add my own characters. So I did.
I worked on this story for probably a year before I felt like I should stop writing it.
Stop. Writing. A story. If you’re a writer, maybe right now, you feel the hurt I had. Stop writing a story? That I loved? And enjoyed?
It hurt. But I deleted the whole thing. Everything. All of it. For months, I don’t think I wrote too much. I wrote some other stories (including a spy story that didn’t go very far), a superhero story (that didn’t go very far), and some poetry (that was more productive). But nothing seemed to stick, and when you like writing, you like having a story that you can stick to and…write.
Now, this is exactly how I remember it. I was sitting in the basement (we have a finished basement at my house, where my desk was…right near the TV. Not recommended), staring at a blank Word Document and feeling upset because all I wanted was a story.
“God,” I said. “Give me a story.”
And no joke everybody, the opening lines to the first draft of what would, eight years later, become Undaunted, popped in my head and after a couple of clicks came straight on the screen.
That’s how I began writing seriously.
So maybe today, you feel stuck. Stuck in your writing, your job, your emotions, you feel stuck. You just feel stuck.
Ask God for help – He wants to help you move forward! He is more willing to help you more than you are willing to ask. Now, does this mean poof everything just…resolves? Maybe. I don’t know. God can do anything. But for me, that meant giving me a story, and as I just flowed with that story and kept writing and growing (both physically and intellectually), the story got better and better until voila! The story God had for me all along right in my hands.
So, ask God, the Heavenly Father, Who wants you to succeed even more than you do.
Sometimes we get stuck, and God sends us people to tell us to move forward. Which is exactly what happened to me with this blog. I was stuck. I wanted to move forward, and do something, fulfill my destiny, enjoy every day, but I felt stuck. So, God sent me a very loving Uncle who told me that I had everything I needed to go out there and get it. Just go for it. Take it and run with it. Get the job I wanted (which for right now, is working on this blog). Write that book. Take every day and squeeze every single bit of it that I can, and then start again the next day.
Maybe somebody else needs to hear that today. You have everything that you need to succeed. Go for it. Get that dream. Get that job. Write that book. Start that blog. Go to the gym – whatever dream you have, this is your permission to move forward. That’s what I needed. I needed someone to tell me that one season had ended, and it was more than okay – it was time! – to move forward into a new season of hope, love, and abundant life. So, c’mon, people. Let’s move forward.
Remember, you are deeply loved.
Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash
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