Enthusiasm

This week, I spent Friday night nannying at someone’s house.

Because I party hard, ya’ll.

I don’t normally nanny anymore, mostly because I work forty hours a week in an office, then get home and work on side hustle/personal career/books until I go to sleep. But this particular job fell into my lap, and I couldn’t say no. I mean, who DOESN’T need a little extra cash the month before Christmas, right?

At least, that’s what I told myself when I got home at 10 o’clock and realized I’d been awake for seventeen consecutive hours and really, really wanted to have been asleep a long time ago.

Not that I was counting.

But, aside from a little extra cash and an excuse to go out to dinner, this nanny job also gave me an excuse to sit on my butt and read for an hour or so. I mean, the kids were in bed, parents weren’t headed home for a while, and I had time.

And time, lately, isn’t something I have a lot of.

Actually, my reading has slowed down a little in the last few months. And by slowing down a little, I mean it’s fallen off a cliff into the ocean. I generally read a lot—in fact, I’ve read 96 books this year. But finding time to read when you work forty hours a week and run your own side hustle is a little—demanding.

So I listen to audiobooks in my car—with the volume all the way up, because due to personal reasons, my car sounds like a monster truck. Please don’t ask. And I sneak in a chapter here and a few pages there. I’ve started to bring a book to work with me, so I can read during my lunch break. That tends to have mixed results. Mostly because I do want to be social as well and hang out with my coworkers.

Because being social is definitely a priority in my life.

Wink wink.

Just now, I am working through Seven Years In Tibet. Actually, I’ve reviewed this wonderful book on my blog before, and I can truthfully say that it is just as magical and engaging the second time around. Despite having to read it in bits and pieces. I also have an audiobook waiting for me, which I WILL start today. Lately, the temptation in my car has been to turn on the radio and listen to music on the way to work, and several of my audiobooks have been returned to the library unheard.

Definitely not my proudest moment.

But today I am jumping back on the bookwagon, so to speak, and am determined not only to listen to this audiobook, but to fill up my queue again.

Soo… any suggestions?

What kind of crazy things do you do to find time to read? Tell me about them in the comments!

Creating-8

I still get excited about my writing.

After seven years on the same set of books, that sounds crazy doesn’t it? Don’t the characters get stale? Doesn’t the world get boring?

Actually . . . they do.

Sometimes.

I have days when I’m not excited about what I’m writing. We all do. In fact, I have weeks when I’m not excited about what I’m writing, especially when it comes to the last rounds of revisions and editing. Once I’ve written a chapter eight different times and it still isn’t right, I start to get a little irritated with it.

But for the most part, I love my stories. I think they’re worth all the frustration I’ve spent on them, all the years I’ve devoted to their creation. And . . . I honestly just like the story. I like the characters. I am endlessly enthusiastic about writing them because I want to read what happens. And that fuels my writing more than any dream of getting published I can come up with.

But I learned a long time ago that enthusiasm wouldn’t write the pages for me unless I paired it with discipline.

“In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm . . . in the real world all rests on perseverance.”

~ Johann Wolfgang Goethe

It’s great to be enthusiastic about your stories. I highly recommend it, in fact. That love is going to shine through in your writing and eventually in your pitching. Your readers will be able to tell if you love a character, story, or even a setting. Or if you don’t care about them.

But sometimes I think we as writers—and as humans—don’t realize that enthusiasm doesn’t last without a little help. It’s easy to be enthusiastic about a new idea—for about two weeks. Maybe even a month, if you’re determined. But to be enthusiastic about a story for seven years—that’s a little harder. But if you continue to foster that attitude of enthusiasm for a project long after everyone else would have given up on it, you may just find yourself far ahead of those authors who refuse to stick to one idea for more than a year or two.

Tips to Cultivate Enthusiasm.

1. Think of enthusiasm less as something you feel—and more as something you choose. Feelings fade. They are fickle, flighty things that pop up at the most inopportune times and vanish just when you need them most. If you are a writer who writes only when you feel like it, you will probably never finish a book. So choose to be enthusiastic. Choose to love your characters when you don’t like them, and appreciate your story when you would much rather hate it. Give it love when you don’t feel like it, and the feelings will follow.

2. Prioritize. Give your writing time precedence. Value it. Make it special with tea, a writing companion, or a well-worn ritual. Know when your best writing time is and take advantage of it. Start with a hundred words, or two hundred. Once you’ve started, it’s much easier to keep going—and to remember why you loved this story in the first place.

3. Spiral journal. I got this idea from one of the loveliest author/speakers in the industry. (Hi, Nancy!) Sit down with your journal, ask your character a question, and give them two minutes to answer while you scribble frantically to get down what they say. Then choose a sentence you’ve written that you want to dig deeper into, write it down, and set your timer again. Have your character talk a bit more about that. And so on and so forth. Believe me. It’s brilliant. Nancy taught us this technique at the last writing conference I went to, and it built my sixth book from the ground up. I was so very grateful.

4. In the end, worry less about being enthusiastic and more about being committed. I’m afraid this is what it comes down to, O writer. It’s lovely to be enthusiastic about your story. It helps a great deal and pours a lot of love onto the pages. But in the end, what really matters is that you are committed. That you are going to show up, even when you’d rather not, and write the next page when you’d rather trash the whole thing. A writer who can do that will conquer any story they touch.

Good luck, dearest writer! May your tea be hot and your dreams wild.

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