So, I know it's been a while but now I will finish up these "be's" I was talking about a while ago.
The sixth one is Be Convicted in Your Writing. I find this helpful as to writing because if you're not convicted in it, you won't get very far in the first place. Although this is a very hard one to handle dealing with how lives these days are moving so quick paced that we can't get everything done that we want to get done and if we aren't getting paid to write--why make more time out of your day to do it right? Wrong. Dead wrong. If you want to get paid to write, such as for magazines, newspapers or getting published, you MUST be convicted in your writing. Believe in your writing abilities and what you are writing about.
For me, I have a 4 year old who goes to school 4 hours Monday through Friday now. Well, I've tried to setup a writing regime but get distracted by the games on Facebook or Cafemom. Even solitaire looks more inviting on my computer than what I should be doing. This is a bad example of not being convicted in your writing. I really think that I should put the games away for now and get working if I am to become a published author one day. I need to be convicted in what I'm working on, learning more of the craft of writing and sharing it as well. This is why my new writing group is so exciting for me. I can give my writing to people right then, we can review it, get help that I need (and this isn't all just for me it is for their writing as well) and keep on going.
You know, with the internet these days it is very easy to get distracted doing research for the story as well. For me, I LOVE to research and create this whole huge back story of all the characters, figuring out how old they all are, who their parents were, how these characters grew up, what time period are they from, etc. That, I believe is good research for writing a good fiction story (makes it more believable), but also can be so much and so overwhelming that I have become TOO convicted in my story itself. I can gather so much information that will blow my own mind as I go along that I don't know what to do with it.
So, you see, there is a way that we, as writers, need to balance the conviction we give our writing. Yes, take a break from it once in a while. Yes, do the research. But don't overwhelm yourself.
The biggest way I have found (and have been trying to do lately as mentioned earlier) is setting up a writing regime while my daughter is at school those 4 hours every day. I need to take two of those hours and do writing. Even if I put out nothing on the page and just sit there thinking of where the story should go. Or just working on the outline itself is good. I have come to notice that if you have a schedule, you become more convicted in what you are doing. If at 6 p.m. every night you sit down to scrapbook one page a night, that's 7 pages a week if you really do this every day. If you sit down for 2 hours, 5 days a week, you can easily get ten pages written each week giving you at least forty pages a month and 480 pages a year. But yes, life doesn't work out that way. That is what we, in society, do to ourselves now-a-days. Everything is rush, rush, rush. We never take the time to really be involved in what WE want to do for ourselves. We all need timeout each day to work our craft and keep on learning it. We need to be convicted in what we do. We need to love what we are learning and doing. If we can just even try to schedule in writing for at least 2 hours every day, it will become habit, and habits are hard to break. And this, is a good habit I fully intend on being convicted in.
Ciao!
