Today's post from me was going to be about another of my favorite authors and what I had learned from her. But just like TV shows, sometimes life interrupts our schedule with a big whack upside the head of reality. On Friday of last week, my husband got laid off from work. He has six weeks before final termination to find a new job. I knew that his company was struggling, and that maybe it was time to start looking, but this came seemingly out of nowhere. Needless to say, this weekend (and yesterday) has been a roller coaster of emotion. The Lord blessed us with the opportunity to go to the temple Saturday morning, where the Spirit was so strong, whispering peace and promises of a bright future. Sunday was also great, where I got to help out another sister from ward who broke her foot, so I subbed as Primary chorister for her. Service always brings the Spirit. But Monday. Oh, Monday. It was the most depressing, overwhelming, bitter day. Oh yes, I wallowed. I moped. I complained. I got crabby with my kids. I indulged in food therapy, even though what I really wanted was retail therapy. And up until 8pm, I was misery personified. The cloud began to lift as the kids went to bed, and Tuesday morning, I woke up fine. Happy. Excited for the future. Exited to write. Knowing that even though the road before us will be bumpy and filled with obstacles, the peace sent by the Lord is undeniable and will buoy us up during this time. The reason I share this is that the road to publication is filled with obstacles, just like normal life. But if we know that this is the path we must tread, then we can do it with a light heart, knowing the Lord with support us in this course because we are following His direction.
I learned one of my most important life lessons when I was 12 and attended Girls’ Camp for the first time. Every camp is different and has varying degrees of roughness -we slept in tents with cots on wood pallets. Very out-doorsy but we didn’t sleep on the ground. I don’t have to try very hard and I can smell the musty green tent, but oh, how I loved waking up and hearing the birds chatter. The New England morning air had a crisp coolness in it, even in August, and I’d cling to my sleeping bag until the second wake up bell. I could go on, but I think I was trying to make another point. A life lesson.
That first year, I was assigned to a tent with a girl I’d never met, but soon learned was a little eccentric and not at all popular. And there were popular girls at camp. Silly, I know. After the first night, one of ‘them’ asked me what it was like to bunk with ‘her.’ I was 12 and hadn’t learned yet what I was about to learn. I opened my big mouth and described all her strange habits. It didn’t even take two hours before we were sitting at breakfast and fake-friendly popular girl number one started talking to my tent mate. I listened in horror as popular girl 2 and 3 chimed in to the conversation –or whatever you would have called it. They teased and taunted her with the ammo, uh –info, I’d provided. Dumb!
I couldn’t eat. I was sick. My tent mate shrugged it off. I was stunned for days. I wrote in my journal, “Never talk to so-and-so again!” That was a little extreme. I was too young to have the words of the hymn come to mind, “Nay, Speak No Ill.” But I did learn, even if I couldn’t articulate it then, sharing is powerful and it’s one of the ways girls bond and it can be used for good. Or not.
And my point today? What is a blog but sharing – a lot? Let’s face it, there is a lot of blogging and writing and sharing going on in the blogosphere. It is one of the reasons I am glad to be here – on MMW – sharing my thoughts about writing. It enhances my creativity and if I give support – it comes back to me. That is my point in a nutshell. To say it like you’ve heard it before, ‘what goes around comes around.’
I’m guessing if you are a writer you already know this: Words can be powerful and they have a way of coming back to you. So. If you meet any popular girls wanting to dish – do what I wish I’d done –keep your mouth shut and hand over your dirty mess kit. And whatever else you get to do today – send good words out into the world.
I found this poem among some others I was reading and thought I'd share it. I have a hard time deciphering poetry for some reason, but I kinda liked this one. I'd love to know what you think.
THE AUTHOR TO HER BOOK
THOU ill-form'd offspring of my feeble brain, Who after birth did'st by my side remain, Till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise than true Who thee abroad, expos'd to publick view, Made thee in raggs, halting to th' press to trudge, Where errors were not lessened (all may judg).
At thy return my blushing was not small, My rambling brat (in print) should mother call, I cast thee by as one unfit for light, Thy Visage was so irksome in my sight; Yet being mine own, at length affection would Thy blemishes amend, of so I could: I wash'd thy face, but more defects I saw, And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw.
I stretcht thy joynts to make thee even feet, Yet still thou run'st more hobling then is meet; In better dress to trim thee was my mind, But nought save home-spun Cloth, i'th' house I find.
In this array, 'mongst Vulgars mayst thou roam, In Criticks hands, beware thou dost not come; And take thy way where yet thou art not known, If for thy Father askt, say, thou hadst none: And for thy Mother, she alas is poor, Which caus'd her thus to send thee out of door.
I read an article from the Liahona. I can't help but say that I love the story that James E. Faust told and it has never left my mind. I thought it would be nice to share this with you. It has touched my life, and even though I am not a daddy, I believe this would apply to mommies too. ;) "Brethren, noble fatherhood gives us a glimpse of the divine attributes of our Father in Heaven. A father should be many things. He should magnify his priesthood and be an example of righteousness. In companionship with his wife, he should be the source of stability and strength for the whole family. He should be the protector and the provider and the champion of the members of his family. Much of his love for his children should flow from his example of love, concern, and fidelity for their mother. By his uncompromising example he should instill character into his children. When Elder LeGrand Richards left to attend college, his father, George F. Richards, said to him and his brother, George F. Jr., “I would trust you two to go anywhere I would go myself.” Their hearts swelled with love and pride in his words. LeGrand later said, “They put rods of steel in our spines, and we couldn’t do anything that would disappoint him.” 10 A father should never consciously disappoint his wife or children. In 1989 there was a terrible earthquake in Armenia that killed over 30,000 people in four minutes. A distraught father went in frantic search of his son. He reached his son’s school only to find that it had been reduced to a pile of rubble. But he was driven by his promise to his son, “No matter what, I’ll always be there for you!” He visualized the corner where his son’s classroom would be, rushed there, and started to dig through the debris, brick by brick. Others came on the scene—the fire chief, then the police—warning him of fires and explosions, and urging him to leave the search to the emergency crews. But he tenaciously carried on digging. Night came and went, and then, in the 38th hour of digging, he thought he heard his son’s voice. “Armand!” he called out. Then he heard, “Dad!?! It’s me, Dad! I told the other kids not to worry. I told ’em that if you were alive, you’d save me and when you saved me, they’d be saved. … “There are 14 of us left out of 33. … When the building collapsed, it made a wedge, like a triangle, and it saved us.” “Come on out, boy!” “No, Dad! Let the other kids out first, ’cause I know you’ll get me! No matter what, I know you’ll be there for me!”
—Elder Robert D. Hales of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles
The process of creative thinking reminds me time and again of the work we used to do on my uncle’s ranch. The steps used in growing crops offer a good guideline: 1. Prepare the soil. Start with prayer to clear your mind and set the proper atmosphere. Research the problem thoroughly. Develop a positive attitude that a solution can be found. Establish an atmosphere of trust in yourself and in others. 2. Plant the seeds. Investigate what you can do to help. Determine where you may need help. Ask for counsel when you are ready to act on the advice given to you, but don’t ask someone else to make the decision for you. 3. Let the seeds grow. Don’t uproot your idea before it has a chance to grow. Back off and give the idea time to develop. But you must be willing to face failure with a willingness to try again. 4. Examine your crops. Weed out ideas that don’t belong. Through obedience to the Lord, you are entitled to inspiration. Review D&C 9:7–9. Inspiration comes when we ask if we have made a correct decision. 5. Harvest. The most productive farmers in the world would be unsuccessful if they didn’t harvest their crops. Do something about your ideas. Take the initiative to share your thoughts with others and to take action on your own.
I've been writing a LDS non-fiction book about our bodies, and using our spirits to make changes that will help us grow. Here's a small snippet from that book that relates to writing, I thought I'd share it with you all:
Goals are exercises for our spirits. They cause our spirits to control our bodies and natural man tendencies, doing so causes our spirits to grow stronger and stronger. Imagine doing jumping jacks, how does your body feel? I’ll tell you what happens when I do jumping jacks, after just three of those things my lungs are burning. I start thinking of how to only do them half way because it’s just too hard. And let’s not even talk about the incontinence issue that arises when I’m jumping up and down after having four children.
How do jumping jacks relate to setting and reaching for goals? Setting and working towards goals are hard. They require the body and the spirit to work together. After awhile, you begin wondering how you can change your goal or work half way to achieve it. When you first begin a goal, your spirit sets it, then your body must perform the actions to achieve the goal. Our bodies sometimes reside in a permanent rebellious teenage state where complaints come immediately. Our minds begin telling our spirits that we can’t do it, we’re too weak, too young, too old, the excuses begin piling up. Our spirits that came from our Father in Heaven know these things aren’t true, but sometimes buckle under the pressure. When this happens, our bodies are training our spirits and not the other way around. Only then do we truly fail.
President Spencer W. Kimball at the Regional Representatives Seminar of April 3, 1975, said, “I believe in goals, but I believe that the individual should set his own. Goals should always be made to a point that will make us reach and strain. Success should not necessarily be gauged by always reaching the goal set, but by progress and attainment.”
Just like physical exercise, our success should not be gauged by the weight we lost but by the healthiness of our bodies. We must remember that setting goals are how we keep our spirits healthy. The Faith In God program starts us off learning to set goals and achieving them, then we go to the Young Women’s program that has even more ambitious goals to conquer. After we go to Relief Society it doesn’t mean we can stop being goal oriented, it only means that we should know how to set and work towards the goals that are right for us. We need goals that make us reach and strain as Pres. Kimball said.
We need to glory in working towards a goal and not just achieving them. All too often we don’t consider a goal successful unless we achieve it. This is not true. We must recognize our growth along the way and praise our spirits and our Heavenly Father for our progress. This will keep us energized to continue to the end. The success of some goals are out of our control, like my goal of publishing a book someday. All I can do is write the best book I can and hope that publishers are looking for what I wrote. Does this mean if I’m not successful that I have failed? No, it means I have learned so much about the craft of writing, it means I trained my body to sit for hours in front of a computer, it means I trained my spirit to listen to the promptings of the Lord as I wrote, it means my spirit exercised control over my body. How could we ever view these things as a failure?
“True happiness is not made in getting something. True happiness is becoming something. This can be done by being committed to lofty goals. We cannot become something without commitment.” (Elder Marvin J. Ashton, “The Word is Commitment” Ensign, Nov. 1983)
Last week I talked about finding my voice and balance between myself and absorbing the flavor of the authors that I read. This week I wanted to introduce one of the writers whom I've actively admired and tried to emulate (not too much, though.) Orson Scott Card is a famous Mormon writer. He's been around longer than he'd like me to point out, and while it wasn't his first effort at novel writing, Ender's Game was, in it's time, as amazing as Stephanie Meyer's Twilight is today. I've read every book by Mr. Card, and own most of them (which is a serious investment with several kids to supply basic needs for.) OSC has also written How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. Even if this isn't your genre, its principles apply to the basics of good writing. Two things have stuck with me over the years about OSC's writing. First, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue. Perfecting your dialogue, the voices of your characters through what they say is key. Dialogue, more than anything your characters do, will bring the reader closer to being a part of the story. Dialogue reveals more about the people in your novels, whether they are liars or perfectionists, sly or simple. Or all of the above. As much as we want to be able to put the things we see inside our heads on the page, we don't want to take up 1000 words of our novel to describe the view from the doorway. Our readers don't want that, they want to know what happens next. Dialogue propels the action forward. So the sooner we get a handle on our dialogue, the better. The other thing that I've heard from him several times is that evil characters are boring. The whole “anti-hero” fad is annoying in the extreme because what really fascinates him in a book is when a good man (or woman) is faced with agonizing decisions, choices that have us as readers screaming at the book in heartbreak over these people we love having to deal with such horrible options. I have to agree. I have a hard time sympathizing with characters whose motivations are so alien from my own. I don't mind reading about them every once in a while, but it's like looking at some odd creature of nature, safely behind glass at the zoo. I'll look for a while, but I won't ever fall in love with it. So when I write, I try to have my MC be the kind of person that is good, faced with difficulties that seem impossible to overcome. Of course you need bad guys, and they can't be one dimensional, either. But they're the bad guys. They don't need to be sympathetic. They can be alien to our way of thinking. That's why they're the antagonist. Next week I'll talk about another author who caught me young, and changed the way I thought about narrative in novels.
I ran a 5k on Thanksgiving Day last year. Before I give the impression that I am more of a runner than I am – a 5k is 3.1 miles and that is about as far as I can run without stopping. It was my second year to do it and I felt like I was in good condition. I woke up on the morning of the race and oh, was I tired! I got to the starting line and my legs were lead. I changed my focus from how fast I wanted to run to getting across the finish line without passing out. I started with a very slow pace. Most of the runners passed me and I remember thinking, “What am I doing out here?”
At the halfway point of the race, the runners were to make a u-turn at the end of a street and run back the way they came. As I approached the u-turn, all the runners ahead of me were passing me on my left. What I did next wasn’t premeditated, but I am still surprised today by the result. I looked at each runner and smiled –you know a big, happy-to-see-you smile and a few times I said, “Good job!” I laughed at myself because these were the runners ahead of me.
I kept nodding and smiling and then I made the u-turn and braced myself for the slight hill. There were a few runners behind me and I kept smiling at them, too. And instead of feeling each heavy stride, I felt like I was gliding over the road. What I expected to be the hardest part of the run turned into the most enjoyable stretch. Cheering on the other runners changed me. I felt happier, lighter and physically better able to do what minutes before felt impossible. I finished the race, shaved a minute off my time from the year before, and I didn’t pass out. I also walked away with a newfound appreciation for the power of encouragement—receiving it and giving it.
So even though I feel like the new kid on the block today, this is me, with a big smile on my face saying keep up the great work you are doing. For those further along in their writing journey, I am happy to be following in your footsteps and for those just beginning, I am here to say, you can do it!
Cheri Chesley believes in magic and miracles. When not writing she can be found reading the dictionary for fun or improving her photography. She lives with her husband and numerous children in Tooele, Utah. Look for updates on her latest works at www.cherichesley.com or check out her blog at http://cherichesley.blogspot.com
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I used to be a writer in the dark. By this, I mean I used to write because I felt the urge, or need, but lacked true direction.
Then I got a phone call. It was August 2006 and my brother called to tell me our cousin, with whom I share a name, died suddenly after a routine gall bladder procedure. It broke my heart, not so much that Cheryl died—but that her daughters found her. One crawled into bed with her mother’s body and held her until the authorities arrived. Cheryl was 34 years old.
What no one knew until the next day was my grandmother, who had struggled more than ten years with an inoperable tumor, fell that night and broke her hip. She spent the last days of her life in the hospital, where we visited her when we went down for Cheryl’s funeral, and then in a care center where she died on my birthday, September 1st.
That October I saw a specialist about my sinus problems and learned I had a severely deviated septum that would require surgery. But I was assured it was a routine procedure the doctor had performed many times. The words “routine procedure” freaked me out. My overactive imagination began to wonder if Cheryl’s untimely death was a portent of my own. By the time the surgery day arrived, I’d pretty much reconciled myself to the idea I’d never wake up. I’d even written letters to my family and loved ones with all the things I’d always wanted to say.
When I not only survived, but recovered the use of my nose, I began to seriously re-examine what I’d been doing with my life and my writing. I’d hit 31 years of age. Did I ever plan to become a published author, or should I just relegate it to a hobby and move on with some other career? What would my grandmother want me to do? So why wasn’t I doing it?
I knew even then I couldn’t simply make my writing a hobby. It’s too big a part of me. I had to pursue publication. I had to make something of the words that came to me like projectiles on a besieged castle. I was going to be an author. Which meant I would have to evolve from an introvert to an extrovert.
Have I ever mentioned I like quiet, I love being alone, and I hate drawing attention to myself? I thought not.
But God has a wonderful understanding of me, more so than I think I understand myself. He has given me writing friends, author mentors, and supportive family and friends who keep me buoyed up and pave the way for me as I follow my chosen path. He gives me guidance and inspiration, and has in no uncertain terms made it clear to me this is my role in His kingdom.
I only had to stop fighting and accept it. I remember that day clearly. Late April 2009. See, even after deciding to be an author it took me almost 3 years to accept this as my role, as the part Heavenly Father has been waiting for me to play. That day, I’d received an inspiring Priesthood blessing. After taking some hours to process it, I sighed and said aloud, “All right. I’ll do it. I’ll be the writer You want me to be.”
This doesn’t mean I’ll ever be rich and famous. I mean, a person pretty much has to hit the publishing lottery to become rich and famous as an author. It’s been done, but there are no guarantees.
What it does mean is I am doing what my Heavenly Father wants me to do. And that’s good enough for me.
**Cheri was one of our applicants for the blogger openings we had a few weeks ago. You can tell by her wonderful blog how difficult the decision was for us to make. I hope Cheri can come back soon and be a guest again. Thanks for hanging out with us today, Cheri. ~Christine
