We all need time to refill our emotional and spiritual well, whether it’s doing something creative, or getting touch with nature, volunteering, or meditation. This is an essential part of human-ness we need. Not only does it bring perspective in our relationships to the people and things around us, but it brings joy back into outlives.
I’m not much of a people person. My nature tends to be solitary and very much internalized. I am perfectly happy being by myself. But I’m also an energy vampire—I feed off the energy of those around me. At Disneyland I’m happy and childlike, at the Day Job I’m analytical and jaded, and being around creative people feeds my creativity. It’s at once exciting and invigorating and life affirming.
This weekend I took a day off from the Day Job and spent it at the quarterly in-person meeting of the Orange County Romance Writers. I could physically feel myself relax as all the stress of daily life left me and I got into the flow of creativity.
I love meeting days. It doesn’t matter if I’ve heard the speaker before, or if I’m familiar with a topic, I always get a new nugget of wisdom that I can apply towards my writing. We had two wonderful speakers—Greta Boris on building your author brand, and Janis Thomas on dialogue. Some key takeaways from the meeting were…
- Crafting a mission statement for your writing is a good way to focus yourself and your readers on what you do
- Narrowing down “what you will find in my books” and “what you’ll never find in my books” is a great way to attract readers to your work
- Dialogue is crucial to development of both character and relationship in romance. Every word should move the story forward.
- With dialogue, less is more. The best way to say something is to say nothing at all
- Use silence when you can. Silence ramps up the tension
These are such wonderful tips, I can’t wait to get started on putting them to good use.
Not only did I pick up some new nuggets of wisdom from some seriously talented authors, but I got to meet up with some writing friends I haven’t seen since 2022! We caught up on what’s new, and talked about our stories, and all things writing and publishing. Even though we’re all active on social media, it was so good to see everyone face to face. I can’t wait until October when we can do it again.
I didn’t write anything new this weekend, but I did get a couple of new ideas out of it, and I have a lot of work to do to building my mission statement and maybe even rework the tag line to my website. I love it, but it’s not very specific and doesn’t say much about what I write. I’ll definitely have to stew on that a while.
Question of the Week: What is something you do to refill your well?