Month: June 2019

Motivation

When I began teaching, I was thrilled at how intrinsically motivated my third-graders were. They were excited about learning new things and I did my best to nurture their passion. There was a lot of discussion and controversy at the time about giving rewards to students for learning and how it could affect them in the future. It seemed to me as a novice teacher that rewarding students with prizes or parties could diminish their natural, intrinsic motivation and they would learn and work hard only if there was some kind of tangible reward.

As a new author with my first published book out in the world and working on my second, I am finding that rewards go a long way in motivating me to work even harder — on my writing, my marketing, virtually my whole writing career. My granddaughter Leah recently asked me if I was going to get rich from my book. I smiled and told her no, and explained that wasn’t why I wrote and published, that I love writing and telling a story and am just happy people are reading my book. The rewards that motivate me are not as tangible as money.

I was contacted recently by Prudence Brighton, a freelance writer who wanted to interview me for a feature article in The Lowell Sun. This was my first interview as an author.  Yesterday, I had a telephone interview with Angie Sykeny, a reporter from HippoPress, a New Hampshire weekly. Discussing and answering questions about A Better Life, talking about the story, the characters, my writing process, my background, was an incredibly motivating reward.

I am forever grateful to and motivated by everyone who takes the time to read and discuss my novel, my blog, and the articles that will soon appear in The Lowell Sun and HippoPress, with hopefully more to come. I was wrong all those years ago when I believed motivation had to come totally from within. There can be a beautiful balance.

Trust The Process

One of the most important lessons I have learned over years of writing is to trust the process. That being said, what exactly is the process? For me, it’s a messy one.

First, of course, is the simple (or not simple) act of moving the pen across the paper or pressing the keys. I need to trust that by doing this I am going to be able to create a rich and meaningful story. The first words are often not incredibly well-written, usually lacking depth and sensory detail, but they move me towards something true.

Much of the time I do not have a clear idea of what is going to happen, exactly what a character is going to say or do, until it is visible on paper or on the screen. The process of putting down one word after another, one sentence following another to create a scene, brings knowledge and insight and truth.

A little more than 45,000 words into my new novel, I had about fourteen chapters from three different points of view. As I learned about the lives and secrets and goals of my characters, I had written a few flashbacks throughout, images and scenes and conversations my characters revealed to me. Sometimes they blurted something out and sometimes they whispered, but it was all important and became part of the chapter, even if it didn’t fit neatly into the scene.

At one point, I thought of beginning each chapter with a scene from the past, in italics, then getting on with what was happening in the present. An awful idea.

This past weekend, I restarted the novel. I pulled out most or all of the scenes that happened in the past and used them to create new and better beginning chapters.  Now I am revising what I have so far, the scenes and chapters that come after, and they are richer for knowing what came before.