How Do We Appreciate You? Let Me Count the Ways!

Thursday night at the Team Member webinar, I ended the broadcast by telling our team members how special they are to us and how we appreciate them. Afterwards, my email inbox filled up with members thanking me, many saying they were brought to tears.

As writers—and human beings—we need to know how much we are appreciated. And what’s more, you’re so important to us, we could tell you every minute of every day from now until eternity and it would still fall short of expressing how much you mean to us.

With that truth in mind, I thought I’d tell you just a snippet of how much we appreciate each of you. As we sit down at the Thanksgiving table and bow our heads, we’ll give thanks for you. Here are just some of the reasons:

Five Reasons Why You Quit

I’ve done it. I’m sure you have too. You get a great idea and dive right in. Somewhere along the way, you chip away at your enthusiasm until one day you suddenly realize you haven’t pursued that thing in quite a while. You quit.

That’s fine if you started watching season one of Castle or took belly dancing lessons. There comes a time when those things naturally come to an end. But when it comes to quitting your writing dream, it will leave you empty and utterly unhappy.

There are any number of reasons why individuals throw in the towel on their pursuits, but here are ones I have found to be the top five:

Take a Deep Breath

You’re six days into the NaNoWriMo and MBTWriMo writing marathon. You started out great. Thousands of words flew from your fingertips and onto the computer screen. Your writer friends envied your massive word count.

But today, the cursor on the blank screen taunts you. The blink-blink-blink flashes your zero word count to the world. When you finally force words to come out, they resemble your “See spot run” sentences of your first grade reader.

Ahhh… to be a writer.

Okay. Sit back, take a deep breath and relax! It’s all good. Your creative juices come in waves just like the tides in the ocean. Sometimes they come crashing in with the force of a tsunami and words flood your work in progress. Other times you’ll walk a mile just to reach a trickle.

You can’t hammer out word count every hour of the day. It’s unnatural. Unhealthy. It wouldn’t be wise for you to any more than you should eat constantly for all those hours. Your body has to have time to process what you’ve consumed. So it is with your word count.

When words won’t come and the contest pressure is sucking the life out of you, these things will help you get back on the right track:

What Are You Harvesting?

Right now all over America, farmers are hard at work bringing in the harvest a year’s crops have yielded.

If they planned well, did their diligence and were fortunately enough to avoid severe storms, they most likely have a bumper crop.

Just like Farmer Brown in Iowa, you are harvesting as well. Maybe you’re not picking the last of the tomatoes but you are reaping the writing seeds you sowed way back when you began your year.

Hopefully, you decided on what you wanted to harvest right about now and planted the right seeds. You worked on that craft and made sure you got in your weekly word count.

Things come up just like on the farm. Perhaps you’ve dodged more than your share of early spring snows and late summer tornadoes. But what did you do after the storm? Did you care for your writing crop or did you throw in the towel?

The answer to that question determines what you’re reaping at this moment. If you are a farmer, you always farm. When things get rough and don’t go your way, you farm. When storms come across your crops, you still farm. When the tornado leaves, you pick up the pieces and, well, farm.

Writers—true honest to goodness committed wordsmiths—write. When things are good, they write. When things are bad, they still hammer out word counts. When the storms of life cause waves of despair to crash over them, they still write.

Why? The farmer can answer that better than I can. Right now—today—he’s very glad he kept farming because his silos are being filled, his cupboards are being stocked with food for the winter and his bank account is busting at the seams. He’s reaping what he sowed.