When life gives you lemons make lemonade. When life takes you on an emotional ride, capture that energy and pour it into your writing. Make something beautiful. Remind yourself of this when people disappoint, when you are sad or angry or frustrated. Make it useful, that raw emotional energy that seeks to destroy. Use it to create so that it cannot ruin your day, your motivation, your joy and creativity. 

Turn it in to something good. When you are feeling less than what you are, put that in a character. Instead of “making a scene,” create a scene. Use it. 

Those people who don’t understand you? Who abuse you? Make them into characters and then have your way with them! Haa haa! For Christmas my friend gave me a coffee mug that says, “Don’t annoy the writer, she might put you in a book and have you killed.” Take the power away from the ugly people and use it for your story. Then, in real life, smile and practice kindness.

CLUTTER

Fiction needs drama and emotion. Real life, not so much. Readers want to feel emotion. Pass it on to them and be done with it. Marie Kondo, the celebrity guru of simplifying life, tells us we should rid our homes of clutter. She says that if something fails to bring you joy, get rid of it. These emotions that don’t give joy, pass them on. Just like taking that old holey sweater, the putrid green one with the stain on the front, to Goodwill, give those emotions away! This is funny to me but also true. As writers we get to do this. 

TREASURES

Mistakes too. Those choices you’ve made, both big and small, re-form them into art. Don’t waste them. I see a theme when I write about writing. Be grateful for even the bad things in life because you can use those to make story, to create worlds, to 

Pick through the clutter in your brain (and in your heart), find the little treasures you can add to your creation. Paste them in where they fit. 

THE HARD WORK

Do the hard work that writing requires, sweat it out, cry, laugh (hysterically maybe like a wild thing gone off the deep end), then let it go. Take a deep breath, smile and enjoy the life you have made for yourself. Later, write some more. Channel that emotion. 

POOF!

I seem to be preaching to myself and also procrastinating because I have challenged myself to write some hard stuff. I’d rather not face it. But I know that once I have written it out I can let it go and blow it out onto the wind like a dandelion. Poof.