Writers Must Believe in Themselves

 

Our quote today is by Teddy Roosevelt. He said, "Believe you can, and you're halfway there." Considering all that he accomplished over a lifetime, he must have lived what he said. 

It sounds so easy to merely believe in yourself and then sprint right on to success. Pretty words but having confidence in yourself does not come easily for some people. Others appear to be born with the attitude of 'I can do this!' 

Life experiences definitely play a role in how we feel about ourselves. If you grew up in a family that told you over and over how dumb you were or how you could never do anything right, you'll start believing that as an adult. Teachers who belittle children's accomplishments can knock down confidence in a hurry. Those comments seem to stay in the back of your mind and pop up at times when you begin to doubt your abilities. People who fit this category have a much harder time believing in themselves. Some do it out of sheer determination, and for others, it's very difficult.

The child who grew up with parents who praised and encouraged has little trouble believing in him/herself. When you've been told you are an accomplished person, you can go right on making accomplishments. 

How do you gain the confidence needed to believe you can be a good writer? The lyrics from an old song say it well: 'accentuate the positive.' There are positives in every situation, just as there are negatives. Grab onto the positives and hold tight. Ignore the other side. 

Remind yourself often of the good parts of your writing journey. It may be something as small as feeling satisfied when you sit down at the computer and start writing something new. It could be the number of acceptances you've had or the ones that came close to being accepted. Or your passion for writing. All of those things should help you believe in yourself as a writer. Consider any and all compliments you have received from readers. That should give you a real boost.

Repeating 'I can do this!' over and over whenever self-doubt creeps in can help you come to actually trust in yourself. A speaker I heard at a meeting many years ago spoke on being able to say "I am a writer" even if you had not published. She told the group that, if you write, you ARE a writer. She went on to recommend that each person stand in front of a mirror and repeat those magic words over and over--"I am a writer." Say it often enough, and you begin to believe it.

No one else can make you believe you can be a writer. Others can give you guidance, but it's you who must believe in yourself. Then, as President Roosevelt told us--'...you're halfway there.'

A Writer Who Practiced Patience and Persistence

A friend recommended that I read a WWII themed novel called The Plum Tree by Ellen Marie Wiseman. The story is about a German family from a small village during the war and immediately after. Heartbreaking but a well-written story which allows a view of what it was like on 'the other side' since we so often read stories of that period that are from the Allied view. I am not going to review the book but you can read the summary and reviews at Amazon should you be interested.

Instead of a review of the book, I want to concentrate on the author and her publication journey, which I read about in a conversation with the author at the conclusion of the novel. I found it fascinating.

Ellen Marie Wiseman is the daughter of a woman who grew up in Germany during WWII. She married an American and lived in the USA. She told story upon story of what life was like during her childhood to her own three children. Ellen, the oldest, was inspired to write a WWII novel told from the viewpoint of a German family after she learned in high school about the Holocaust. Her dreamworld her mother had instilled with her stories caused her to have mixed emotions. She continued to question her mother about this era of life in Germany. Years went by and she felt the need to write the novel about an average German family.

Much of what she wrote is true--mostly the everyday living of the family, the hardships they endured during those years, the Allied bombings and Dachau. The characters are fictional but she based some on the grandparents she visited in Germany with her mother.  

The author attended a small rural school that had no creative writing classes. Besides that, she did not go to college. She worked on her writing on her own for years, then turned to the internet  where she located William Kowalski, an author who became her '...editor, teacher, mentor and friend.' She says his faith in her pushed her to believe in herself.

Over the years, Ellen Wiseman received 72 rejections from agents. Ask yourself right now--Would I have persevered in sending queries of that number to agents? In 2008, she and her husband had to file bankruptcy in a family business. They each had to search for work after 26 years of managing their own business. The time was a difficult one but Wiseman persisted in following her dream about getting her book published. When told the story was too long, she spent months cutting and revising while still fighting financial battles. She began querying again.

In January 2011, she came close to giving up. After all, 72 rejections from agents were not the stuff of encouragement. Trying one more time, she secured an agent who sold her novel in three weeks!

She has had two more novels published and another coming this year. I have written about my two keywords for writers--Patience and Persistence. This author is a perfect example of a writer who practiced both and found success because of it. Ms. Wiseman writing journey should also be encouraging to writers who have not received a degree in creative writing, those who strike out on their own, learning as they travel down their writing path.

When you feel like you are ready to give up in your own journey, think of this woman. I'd like to put her on a pedestal ten feet high as she is definitely someone I would look up to. I enjoyed the book but reading about Ellen Wiseman's writing journey was the icing on the cake.

Is Grammar Important?

I admit that I am a stickler for grammar. It's also apparent to me that not everyone feels the same way. If you are a writer, however, you should be on top of the game with grammar and punctuation.

The chart above shows the most common grammatical errors. I remember doing pages and pages of grammar exercises in English class in grade school, junior high and even some in senior high. By senior high, we were expected to know the differences in the spelling and meaning of the words shown here. Occasionally, we'd have a short review or a shouting lesson when too many of the incorrect spellings were used in an essay paper. I remember my Freshman English teacher lecturing on same with fire in her eyes and smoke ready to pour from nose and ears. My, oh, my--she was irate about what she termed 'careless' errors.

Perhaps her word--careless--is right. We can be so intent on the gist of what we are writing that the grammar/punctuation part slides by us. That's the reason we write a first draft, then go back and edit more than once. It's a good reason to put your work up for a critique by one other person or an actual critique group. Others will find these small errors quicker than he/she who wrote the words.

I have seen news flashed across the tv screen that uses words like your and you're incorrectly. When that happens, I actually cringe. The one thing I need to remind myself of is that half the people who see that error will not even be aware of it because they do the same thing themselves. Am I try to put people down by saying that? Not at all. It's merely reality.

As writers, we need to learn to care about the grammar and punctuation quotient in our stories, articles and poetry. We should set the example for our readers and, yes, other writers. As important as what we are saying is, it's also of relevance that we say it in the proper way.

Include Food In Your Writing

While going through some files yesterday, I noticed that I've written a lot of memoir pieces or personal essays that deal with food. Why not? Food is definitely a part of our everyday life and special foods and the people who prepared them linger in our memory bank for many years. 

Even novelists can use food to liven up a scene, or to move a plot along. A lot of dialogue can be enhanced by letting one of the people talking prepare food or be eating it. Then again, they can gag on it, throw it across a room, squash it. Whatever the author wants to do with it. 

One of the best parts of using food in your writing is that sensory details are a natural addition. Think of your favorite food; then consider how it looks, smells, tastes, what it feels like on your tongue and maybe even a sound (popcorn!) 

It's a natural for memoir writers to write about the foods of their childhood or perhaps what they ate in a college dorm or at their wedding reception. Maybe their own early attempts at preparing food that looked so easy when Mom did it. 

When I think back to the foods of my childhood, I can almost smell them. Of course, I am one of those people who live to eat, not like those who eat to live. 

Try writing a descriptive paragraph about each of the foods in this list:

• fresh baked bread
• an apple
• chicken noodle soup
• chocolate chip cookie
• fried chicken
• potato salad 

Here's a sample of a personal essay that deals with food. Just one food--my grandmother's special muffins. You could write an entire book of personal essays that deal with food.

Love On A Plate
By Nancy Julien Kopp

My grandmother moved away from Chicago about the time I started grade school, but, once in awhile, she would come back to visit us for a few weeks. At least once during her visit we had a “muffin day”--unannounced, and a happy surprise.

I walked the eight city blocks home from school every noon with my classmates. It was the late forties, and grade school lunchrooms were never a consideration. Each day was much the same. My classmates and I laughed, chattered, and played games like Stinkfish on our way home for lunch. The group diminished, as, one by one, kids disappeared into their various houses. Mothers waited inside with lunch on the table, soup or a sandwich in most cases.

I lived farthest from school so traveled alone on the final block. The sight of our large red-brick apartment building usually made my stomach growl with hunger. I'd walk a little faster, adding a hop, skip, and a jump now and then. Cars rumbled by on the brick street, and trains that ran parallel to the road often rolled and clattered by. Our vestibule doorway, one of seven entryways, was reached from the formal courtyard in the center of the large U-shaped building. Every day I ran around the bushes and grassy area that led to our entrance, my degree of hunger setting the pace.

I could count on there being one special day during my grandmother's visit. The day announced itself with the aroma of hot muffins the moment I opened the vestibule door. At the first sniff, my heart skipped a beat, and I felt a flutter of excitement deep inside. My nose twitched with genuine pleasure at the scent of the hot muffins, for the aroma floated down all three flights. My feet slid quickly across the cold, tiled floor to the softer, carpeted stairs. My fingers touched the smooth stairway railing only once or twice as I flew up the steps following that ever-stronger fragrance.

I burst through the unlocked door, heading straight to the kitchen in the back of the apartment. Grandma waited there, face flushed with heat from the oven, a plate of her special muffins in her wrinkled hands. Mother smiled at me, her delight nearly as great as mine.

Finally, seated at the table with a tall glass of cold milk and a steaming muffin on my plate, I sniffed the delectable treat to my heart’s content. The anticipation part was over. It was time to break the golden muffin in half and heap a generous pat of real butter on each piece. The first bite tasted of the salty butter and the sweet dates, all mingled together. Heavenly!

On these special days, that was all we ate for lunch--as many of these treats as a stomach could hold. They were so much better than a bologna sandwich. This was love on a plate. It’s a wonder that little red hearts didn’t escape into the air as I broke each muffin in two. My grandmother knew only one way to show her love, and that was through the food she prepared for those close to her heart. No amount of effort, time, or cost was too big when she cooked and baked for her family.

What has kept those date muffins in my memory bank for over half a century? Was it that they were especially delicious or that they were made with love? Perhaps a little of both. Which brings to mind my grandmother’s bakery…but that’s another story.

"Grandmother Studham’s Date Muffins"

Grandma mixed her muffins in a big blue crockery bowl, and she always wore an over the shoulder Mother Hubbard apron.

1/3 c. butter, softened 

2 c. cake flour

¼ c. sugar 

3 level tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt 
1 egg

¾ c. milk 

scant 1 c. dates, cut up

½ c. chopped pecans (optional)

Cream the butter and sugar. Add the egg and mix well. Mix the flour, baking powder and salt together. Add alternately with the milk. Fold in the dates. Bake in greased muffin tins or use paper liners in the tins. Fill each ½ to ¾ full. Bake at 400 degrees for 15-18 minutes or until done. Makes about one dozen muffins.

Note: I substitute margarine and 1% milk to make a healthier version, and they’re still wonderful. You don’t even need that generous pat of butter we used ‘way back when.’

My COOL Guest Blogger

Today's Guest Blogger is Maureen Rogers, a Seattle writer friend who has a lot to say about slang words. 

COOL - still the Freshest

When was the last time you heard something described as a doosy, copacetic, hep, or hotsy-totsy? If you’re under 40, these expressions probably seem like a foreign language. Words are disappearing as fast as our culture can create new ones and as the 21st century rolls into its second decade most of these funny old sayings have been left in the dust.

Slang has evolved and moved in and out of the English vernacular for centuries but the culture of the 1950s, those early baby boomer years, seemed to speed things up. The introduction of the transistor radio brought disk jockeys spinning rock and roll along with their platter patter. Television became the new vehicle for cultural images. The Beat era was popularized by Maynard G. Krebs  on “Dobie Gillis” for his unconventional approach to life.  Edd “Kookie” Byrnes, an aspiring PI, parked cars and combed his hair constantly on “77 Sunset Strip.” American slang exploded. Young people in particular were eager to adopt the words of their new ‘modern’ heroes.

The expression COOL has been around since the jazz age of the 20s but its popularity rose in the 50’s during the era of Big Daddy, cloud nine, bread (money), pad (home) and that word we boomers often had for your parents –  square. From the hip and cool cats of the 50s, the surfer beach crowd impacted our words. Slang moved on to cool dude, boss and bogus in the 60s. The war protesters and hippie movement that followed us into the 70s had a stronger influence. Dropping out became the theme for many. We were groovy, funky, psychedelic, sometimes veering toward radical.

In the 80’s when the war was over, the ‘me’ generation came up with new words for COOL such as outrageous, bad and bodacious. Meanwhile punk influence brought about more extreme expressions for COOL like sick. In the 90’s culture veered into new territory with rap music and the black gangster culture. Expressions like whoa, jiggy, the bomb, ghetto, and phat became the words of the day for many. Somewhere in the last couple of decades awesome slipped into everyday lingo for kids and many adults.

In the 2000s COOL branched out into fresh and adopted a popular cousin, chill. The expression hot, which has been around forever, is making a strong comeback these days.

But anyway you look at it, COOL is still hands down, the grand prize winner -- the slang word that has survived all others for almost a century. So what is it about temperature? Either up or down, these words have a power to express our emotions so succinctly that they hang on through generations.

When words fail to describe something wonderful, absolutely fantastic, COOL always fits. I still find myself using it, my adult kids use it, I even recall my mother using it a time or two. As baby boomers of the mid 20^th century, we may never be the bee’s knees or the cat’s pajamas but hopefully, as long as we’re here, we’ll still be COOL.

Maureen Rogers is a transplanted Canadian who has lived in the Seattle area for over 40 years. Her writing projects include fiction, poetry and essays. She has been published online, in newspapers, anthologies and is currently working on a collection of short stories.