There have been many times over the past few years where I have met some amazing writers and asked them for guidance in this field. Joseph Delaney, the genius behind The Spooks series, told me that the best thing you can do is have patience and practice. Patience isn't something I usually have in abundance, but it is something I try and practice with my writing. Sometimes though, having patience with myself is unhelpful, because it means that I don't do an awful lot sometimes. Thatt was back when I was fourteen.
I met Nicholas Sparks when I was 19. Obviously by then I had already self-published my first novel and was well into writing a couple more, but I get nervous, even when things are going well, so in the brief moment I had to spreak to him as he Sharpie'd his name into the front of a couple of his masterpeices I asked him for advice. The jist of it was to read the good, the bad, the ugly and everything in between. Seeing what is good and seeing what is bad gives you a pespective, or a scale with which you can work.
Writing is something that does require practice and patience and n understanding of the good and the bad, but more than anything it requires passion. It requires commitment, and passion and a desire to carry on even if it appears that you are getting nowhere. And it can very often feel that you are getting nowhere.
Now, I know I am nowhere near the calibre of those two wonders of humanity, but in terms of what I have learnt by myself is that you need to take care of yourself. Now I'm not just talking about needing to feed yourself properly (pizza is not a food group!!) or sleep when you need to and drink eight glasses of water, but that stuff is important. What I'm talking about is sometimes you will feel emotionally raw about things and you need to acknowledge that, and not push it.
Things have been impossibly difficult recently, and so writing happy endings for my characters can hurt, so I'm having to swap and change between things at the moment. When one thing is too much, flit to something else, and believe me it is hard. I want to finish writing a couple of things and finish editing Yours, but I also know what it feels like to take a nail brush to skinned hands and that is what it can feel like emotionally. Feelings like that you need to listen to. You need to listen and you need accept it, and you need to find the way of dealing with it. For some people, I know, writing about difficult times can help them through it, and that is completely fair enough, but you need to remember, that's not the same for everyone.
Catch you tomorrow.
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