People often said how brave I was to give up work to write, and see where it took my life. Yet for me, going back to work was a far greater challenge.
Challenges are part of all our lives: we face them every day and it is in overcoming them, or at the very least managing our response to them, that we learn and grow.
I was watching the launch show of one of my favourite time wasters tonight – Strictly Come Dancing – and it occurred to me that challenges expose the very best and worst in us, in a lot of ways. They can bring out tenacity, strength of will, unknown talents; they can expose weakness, poor sportsmanship, childishness. In learning about our best and worst traits we can learn how to harness them, if we’re smart. In experiencing different facets of ourselves, and others, we can explore what I call the human experience. We can explore life.
From a writing perspective, challenges build us up to face rejection, and feed our subconscious and conscious minds with data that we draw on for characterisation and storytelling purposes. We build up a mental log of body language, facial expressions and verbal retorts. We see that responses aren’t illogical, that they come from somewhere inside – and we build that into our characters.
But don’t forget we all respond differently to the situations in our lives; our characters must too.
In other news – we missed book 49 of the list, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos. Honestly, I didn’t know this was a book; I’ve seen the film and enjoyed the music, and Madonna’s subsequent ‘Material Girl‘ video in homage to it 🙂 It’s something I might look out though – relatively short, an a little dark under the top layer and the basis of an iconic film, what more could you ask?! Book 50 is Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf; this sounds a little heavy-going and although Virginia Woolf is on my ‘must read’ list for the future, I think it’s going to take a little too much out of me at the moment!
And finally – I’ve got one possible guest post for when I’m away on honeymoon, but I’m still looking for a couple more guest bloggers so if you want to share your experiences of writing here, please let me know!
Until next time,
Happy writing,
EJ
🙂
Becoming a writer 
Congratulations on the big event, and happy honey moon!