the keep going

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Use What You Have On Hand

The free writes, the stray and floating ideas–what do you have on hand?

On Season 1 of The Writers’ Block Podcast, I talked about the this concept. I talked about how we, as writers, don’t truly know the wealth that we have! In understanding that wealth you have, you created, you may have to create something that I call, the draft-drawer.

The draft-drawer is a place where you put all the work you haven’t gotten to yet, aren’t sure where to go next, or things you got stuck on. This could even be snippets of plots, titles, or even snippets of conversation you jot! Your draft-drawer is a both a well and wealth of information!

With the new year, new decade at slow hum, don’t think that you need to recreate the wheel! That can be stressful for a writer, trust me. But you need to know is the new, potent, powerful work may just be hidden in a file. It may be incomplete. It may be in the transition from the thoughts in your head to the words and worlds on the page.

The work is there. The work has always been there. It’s your job to either find it, complete it, or find more of it.

Be brave. The world is waiting.

Encouragement Pages-12/04/2019

Last week, I found 3 drafts of books I wanted to start. Not one. Not two. But three of them. This is the concept of the Draft-Drawer that I talked about on the podcast, The Writers’ Block.

In this, the last month of the year, the last year of this decade, I invite you to look at your Draft-Drawer. Look at what you planned to do. What you wanted to do. It is sometimes when you are faced with what you planned for yourself, that you actually being to do it.

Get to work, dear ones. Don’t let the year end with your work not done.

You’ll thank me later.

With Love & Ink,

JBHarris

Writers’ Self-Doubt: Part 2

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Self-doubt can be a sumo wrestler that sits on your chest and yells in your face. It tells you that you can’t write, who are you to be a writer, who would even what to read your work and what you create? It’s not work.

Self-doubt is the roommate that won’t move out, and will never seem to get off  your back about dishes or laundry and eats the good leftovers you asked them not to.

But there is a way for you to make it better, to make it move. And it will never not involve work, or belief in yourself or writing. There is no other way.

Write.

Rewrite.

Read.

Believe in every word.

Self-doubt can ever motivate or cripple your ability to create. This sumo wrestler will taunt you and tease you until you collapse on the floor. Once you are on the floor, it’ll sit on you to make sure every portion of your that is writer and creative is dead. It will make sure that you won’t do anything your mind has already seen.

                                           

Push off the sumo wrestler.

In becoming a writer, in writing, you must be able to contend with sumo wrestlers whom become inner demons hellbent on never letting your write another word–and the only way to shut them up is to write, and keep writing. Your talent and your own ability must sync together to form an army—there is no other way to shut the hoards that oppose you.

Today, at your reading of this, you have the power to shut up the wrestler sitting on your chest, pining you to the floor telling you not just that you cannot, but you will not.

That story on your desktop or in the drawer? Read it again.

That idea you have been rolling around, and scared to write down?  Write it down.

That person in your life, intimate partner or casual acquaintance, whom tells you being a writer is a pipe dream? You must decide what voice, what desire will carry more weight–your desire to write or the desire to please someone else whom does not value what is important to you.

Rage against the dying of the light–don’t let the sumo wrestlers and inner demons kill the words.

FIGHT.

WRITE.

Jennifer P. Harris

Founder, Shekinah Glory Writing Services