Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Ask O: What Are You Grateful For?




Happy Wednesday, my writing friends!

Today I’m going to pause my “Tips from the Journey” series. This week I finished edits for my next book, Love Finds You in Glacier Bay, Alaska, and as I cut, edited, and re-wrote, I gained a great sense of gratitude for this awesome privilege of being a writer.

Here are some aspects of the writing life, I’m most grateful for:

A New World. I love traveling to new places and experiencing marvelous adventures through my characters.

Emotional Intelligence. To create real characters, I’ve become an amateur psychologist in a sense. This knowledge blesses my own emotional health (a little shaky sometimes LOL!), and it also gives me tools to help those around me.

Healing. Along with emotional intelligence, digging deep into character emotions often heals my own. In my latest book, a character lost his mother. My mom died when I was in my twenties, and tapping into my characters' emotions renewed and refreshed my own journey.

Friends. If you’ve been to a writers conference, you know what I’m talking about. I’ve made some of my best friends through writing. What a joy to meet others who, like me, hear characters in their heads.

Dependence on God. If I ever think I’ve got even a tinge of control over my life, writing shows me otherwise! Just this weekend, I had hours of editing ahead and a deadline looming, when along came my enemy—migraine. Stuck in bed for the four hours I’d planned to work, I had to trust that God would give me strength to finish the next day. And He did. I have so many more stories of how God helped me through a tough writing moment. I’m sure you do too. Writing constantly shows me my need for the Lord. That’s the best part!

I could think of many more areas about writing to be thankful for, but I’ll leave some for you. Share how writing blesses you. We’d all love to hear.

God bless and happy writing,

Ocieanna

photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/supersonicphotos/5611737162/">kelsey_lovefusionphoto</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">cc</a>