Essays

A while back, I received WMG’s “Motivational Mondays” as part of a Kickstarter reward. It took me a while to get to them. At this point, though, I’m looking forward to listening to one session a week.

The idea behind Motivational Mondays was to encourage writers to keep moving. That has been difficult these past few years due to the plague et al.

I’m right now sort of “lined up” with the series, that is, I played the most recent one, which was recorded a year ago for the last Monday in February, this year, on the last Monday in February. I will keep them lined up this way. If I ever miss a week, I’ll just listen to two.

One of the recent ones was all about keeping yourself, as a writer, moving forward. Dean had four areas that he recommended that people pay attention to.

  • Keep writing
  • Keep publishing
  • Keep reading
  • Keep learning

This really resonated with me. Not that I’m falling down in any of these areas, but I agree with Dean wholeheartedly on how important all of these are to a writer.

You have to keep writing. Yes, there is going to be downtime, when you have a life roll and the writing has to be put to the side for a while. It has certainly happened to me. Sometimes for a long while, like after my mother’s death. Other time for merely a day or a couple of weeks.

You don’t have to write millions of words a year. A page a day, that is, about 250 words, means a novel by the end of the year. I have a friend who’s an award-winning children’s author. Her goal is always two sentences a day. Most days she does more, but having that reasonable goal keeps her moving forward.

Keep Publishing doesn’t necessarily mean that you go Indie. I would encourage you to do so. But writing is meant to be shared. Get it out there. Keep putting yourself out there, whether that be by publishing your work on your own or by submitting it. (I still occasionally submit short fiction to traditional publishers. Never my long fiction.)

I think it’s important to keep publishing because otherwise, the writing turns insular. I’ve talked with people who claim to be writing, but all they’re doing is rewriting the same story over and over again, working on the same novel for ten years, that they’ll never finish. (Though that’s a whole other topic, finishing what you start.)

Keep reading. I will admit that I stopped reading for a while. That was a mistake. I feel now as though I’m behind on the trends, what it is that other people are reading, and what readers are wanting. There were reasons why I stopped reading. (And hear the cry of, “Never again!” echoing in the background…)

I slow down now and again. I appear to go through bursts of finishing a new book every two-three days, then not reading anything for a couple of weeks.

Not every writer reads, though. Some consume stories in other formats. I know of a fairly famous author who primarily consumed TV shows and movies. That’s okay. Just keep feeding the creative well.

Keep learning. While all these are important, there’s a part of me that feels this one should have an extra star by it. It’s a primary pillar of my life. I have the whole “anti-stodgy” campaign, trying something new, that I’ve been doing for more than fifteen years. Both Blaze and I feel as though this has helped keep us young.

I am always learning. Some of it is more formal learning, like the Hungarian and Spanish lessons that I take on Duolingo. (As of today, I’ve been speaking a foreign language for 1315 days in a row.)

Part of my learning comes from reading—from seeing how other authors treat a subject or build a character or structure a novel. I have so many more ideas than I’m ever going to have time to write, and part of that comes from reading.

I try to stay informed about the publishing industry, watching the news about the latest court cases regarding AI, listening to a podcast about entertainment law and plagiarism, running across some neat fact, and then doing a deep dive on it, searching out as much information as I can.

I hope, that even as I get older, I will continue to live by these four principles, which will help me stay young.

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