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Tag Archives: aha moments


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A room of my own to write- at last!

My big discovery this year has been that a lot of my “shoulds” are not really as essential as I thought.

Sometimes it is possible to get what we most need, even if it doesn’t appear as if we can.

I work a very busy and stressful job and am the sole income earner for our household. Other people depend on me. I pinned all my hopes of having my life a little more how I want it (full time fiction writer, my dream since my teens, when I was firmly told that was not an option, and silly me, I listened!) for when my life situation changed and I could take early retirement and move back to Australia.

One day I realised I’d been playing it safe too long and the time to start making my life how I wanted it is right now, not five or ten or fifteen years in the future.

Next month, I drop back to part time hours in my job. Still playing it safe- it will bring in just enough to cover all the bills as long as we are frugal- but changing the balance totally. I’ll be a full time writer and part time nurse, not someone who squeezes writing in when they can, in the cracks.

The next big challenge- finding a writing space.

We live in a tiny one bedroom house. No chance of carving out any private space where I wouldn’t be interrupted. My husband doesn’t work, so he’s home all day every day. With the best will in the  world to give me peace and quiet (and as an extrovert, he is totally unable to understand anyone needing peace and quiet!), he going to have to come into our bedroom from time to time during the day. I could see myself using him as an excuse for not writing and getting angry and resentful. I had to get a writing space. I checked out all the local options. The town library? No, far too noisy, they have school kids doing classes in there every day of the week. A coffee shop? None really felt comfortable as somewhere I could buy a diet coke and sit in the corner writing for  few hours.

My solution (as my solutions often are!) was an extreme and impulsive one- let’s move house. There are a couple of two bedroom houses we could almost afford in town. One I adore and would love to live in, an old 16th century cottage, tiny and low ceilinged, but yes, it has two bedrooms.

After a lot of arguing discussing with my husband yesterday, it became clear that is not an option. There are many things he doesn’t like about our present house, but he wants to move even less.

Then this morning he surprised me. He offered my his garden shed. That’s a really big thing for him to do.

It’s a nice shed, only 8 foot by 6 foot, but that will be big enough to use as a combination writing sewing room if I design the space carefully. You can see the corner of it in the photo of part of the garden. He bought this himself when he was trying to set up a computer repair business. That didn’t work out and the shed has mainly been used for storage since, but it’s always been his space.

Something I have to admit I’ve resented. I desperately need private space, and I haven’t had that since we got married. This was his house for over twelve years before we met. My little studio flat was even less suitable for us both to live in, so I moved into his place, supposedly only as a temporary thing until we bought a place that was “ours”. That was nearly ten years ago!

So, now it’s clear we won’t be moving anywhere for a while.  And as a peace offering, he’s giving me his shed. It needs fixing up on the inside, lining and redecorating, but he’s agreed I can do it however I want. I’m going to enjoy doing that. He loses his shed, in return he gets a happier wife and no pressure to move house. He thinks it’s a fair deal, I do too!

So it actually looks like I am going to have it all, time to write and space to write, something that seemed impossible at the start of the year!

It’s definitely worth asking yourself- where are you playing it safe and limiting yourself? What are you not doing right now that you wish you could? Is there any way you could do that now?

If not, why not?


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Letting your light shine


Photo by remanufactory

I love those aha moments, the light switch moments that help us  see something more clearly. The most unexpected things can trigger them, and when they come, I grab them and treasure them for the gifts they are.

Shireen commented she had one reading my previous post. ”Don’t dull who you are…who you are might inspire someone else!”

Absolutely!

Letting our light shine is a cliche, and yet it’s so hard to even admit we HAVE a light, let alone let it shine. I noticed I had to add a disclaimer (“such as it is”) after I mentioned my light in the post.

Claiming our light and letting it shine was a capital crime in my family of origin, part of the major offense of being “big-headed”. I used to try to make myself small to the point of disappearing. Then I became fat to do the same thing. Being fat is a great way of being invisible, I could make sure no-one saw me, just the fat.

Now I don’t want to be invisible. I was not born to be invisible, none of us were.  I pray to be appropriately big-headed, with a realistic and clear sighted self-love, awake to my own gifts as well as my flaws. To see who I truly am, with no delusions of grandeur or of smallness, and live that truth.

So funny that our language has a term for people who see themselves as bigger than they may be, delusions of grandeur, but no matching term for people who belittle themselves! That’s really the same thing, a delusion of smallness.

I’ve always loved this quote by Marianne Williamson from A Return to Love -

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.’ We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

I’m ready to shine.

How about you? How can you shine your light more today, and inspire someone else to stop making themselves small?


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Why is this hero perfect for this heroine?


Photo by h.koppdelaney

I know I should be writing. I have been, promise!

It’s 100% pure dreck, but at least I finally got my hero and heroine on the page together. I think I’m going to have some cutting to do so that happens sooner. Always the same issue- too much scene setting and internal monologue before I cut to the real stuff.

Anyway, I’m doing a bit of blog surfing in a ten minute break. And I’m thinking about my character and what her emotional growth will be through the story.

I tend to have an issue here. I want my characters to be likeable, so I make them too nice to start with. I don’t give them enough room to grow.

Now, sometimes being overly nice and agreeable is a character flaw in itself and that character’s arc might be to start developing some no-power and stop letting everyone walk all over them. Or it could be that I suck at writing characters who actually have realistic emotions and characters!

I realised early on than in first draft my hero forgives the heroine far too soon. He’s not angry enough. He can quite rightfully be pissed off with the way she’s behaved. That will be tricky for me to handle, but I can see it’s needed.

What I hadn’t realised was that she also forgives him far too soon.

She starts off angry and upset and determined not to get close and them wham halfway through the story it’s like one slow dance later and she’s melting in his arms, all is forgiven? Come on! Time for me to get real here. There needs to be a bit of a growth process here. The one-step-forward-two-steps-back dance of can-I-trust-him-or-can’t-I, has he really changed?

I realised something big last night. She’s not just angry with him over what he did to her when they dated in their teens. She’s taken that hurt and attached a whole lot of other stuff to it, stuff other people did to her that she’s kidded herself she’s totally okay with. In her mine, he’s the only person who’s hurt her, the only person who’s done something so bad it’s unforgivable. Because he’s wearing her anger over EVERYTHING that’s gone wrong in her life. It makes no sense why she’s as angry with him as she is, why she didn’t just demand he explained it then and there, back at age seventeen when it happened. It also makes perfect sense looked at another way.

Not only is her sudden jump from anger to forgiveness in the first draft not the least bit believable, she’s also being too nice. She needs to be a lot more angry. A lot more hurt and resentful. A lot less likely to forgive. It’s going to take far more than one slow dance to get over this one!

Lightbulb moment- characters don’t have to be ”nice”. Their feelings don’t have to be the least bit rational. They just have to be understandable.

I read a good little free e-book on Crafting Unforgettable Characters last night, by K M Weiland. She said a lot that resonated with me.

When we write characters who are fighting both their circumstances and their own natures, we create characters who are instantly real.

 That’s external and internal conflict explained in a single sentence!

Then today during my ten minute break that seems to have stretched just the teensiest bit, I read a post on Natalie Hartford’s blog, quoting a line from This Means War.

Don’t choose the best guy, choose the guy that brings out the best in you!

That’s exactly why Morgan is the only man for Tash. He may be the man she sees as her worst enemy, the man she loves to hate. But he’s also the only man who will see past her prickly defences and help her change, help her heal her past, help her find the courage to love. He’s the only man who sees the truth of who she is.

And now, that brings me back to what I already knew and had forgotten, Michael Hauge’s advice on writing romance. The reason the characters should be together is because only with each other can they be all they can be. Only with this man, this woman, will they be the best self possible. He talks about the other character being the only one who can see through the self-protective mask the hero or heroine wears, to see the real person within. They may clash on the superficial level, but at the deeper level they, and only they, connect. I bought the recording of his lecture at the RWA Conference last year, which is amazing. He also has this article among many others on his website that are all worth reading- Writing Romantic Comedies.

This quote always makes me get all teary-

In movies, as in real life, both the joy and terror of intimacy grow out of our exposure to those we love. To be accepted for who we are is magical. But once we allow ourselves to be seen in this way, all the dark parts of our personalities – our weaknesses, desires, fears and shortcomings – are brought into the open. The possibility that someone might peer beneath our carefully constructed persona and see who we truly are becomes terrifying. So the dance of pursuit and retreat continues endlessly.

Conscious or not, the lies in romantic comedies are always designed to protect the hero’s image. Better to lie to the person he loves than to expose the unworthy person he believes himself to be.

But of course, the hero’s deception can never work, because it is only by standing up for who he truly is that the hero can achieve real fulfillment and self worth, and connect with the love of his life. The romance character is TRULY the hero’s destiny; she’s the reward for finding the courage to grow and change.

Romantic comedies concern the continual battle between comfort and longing, between fear and desire. We’re all terrified of intimacy, pain and loss, so we all shut down emotionally in one way or another. But the beauty and power of a romantic comedy is that for two hours in the dark we can identify with a hero facing the same eternal struggle. And in the movie theater, we will always grow, and we will always win.

I hope and pray I can bring that level of emotional realness to my stories. Tash isn’t just lying to Morgan about how she feels and how her past has affected her, she’s lying to herself. I hope I can write well enough to do her justice.

And now I better go actually do some more writing instead of talking about it! Back to work tomorrow and I have nowhere near as much written as I hoped to.

Just wondering- what is it that makes your characters perfect for each other in your WiP?

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