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| Lisa J, Lickel |
I don’t have much adversity in my life, at least not
compared to others, and my success is in the eye of the beholder. So what can I
pass on to you, other writers, about this topic?
Pluckiness!
Plucky means being:
Brave
Courageous
and practicing
Determination in
the face of Superior Odds
Adversity also comes
in small packages. It’s not losing a loved one to a dreaded illness or
accident, or being let go from your job, and being diagnosed with a horrible
disease; sometimes it’s succumbing to a bout of depression, or getting into a situation
that’s beyond your capability, or having the power go out when you’ve written
the most beautiful chapter and the cloud sucks it away to la-la land forever
where you hope God enjoys it because He’s the only one who will get to read it
now. It’s spilling milk on your keyboard—at work—and forgetting how to spell
American because you’ve been reading those British books again. It’s getting
one more denial from an agent who can’t put her finger on why she doesn’t want
you (your work, but really, we all know it’s us), or watching your sales figure
plummet on Amazon.
Brave Writers get
out of bed in the morning.
That’s a euphemism for facing the day, dividing the moments
up into the chunks necessary to get the most work done, and jumping into it.
Brave Writers Write. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what, if you’re lost or stuck
or fed up with your current project; we just start writing something else. We
blog, we toot someone else’s horn, we read, we write a note to someone we’re
following…goodness, we might even pick up a pen and handwrite, using that lost
art of cursive, a letter to put in the mailbox. We could do a character sketch
of a plucky person.
Courageous Writers
learn something new every week, if not every day.
One of my goals this year is to learn to market in at least
two new ways. I’m told that if I practice something long enough it becomes a
habit. If I work on these marketing ways, it’ll become a habit, and often
that’s enough to get me out of a rut that’s failing and onto a path toward
success. I will find new publishers, I will meet new people, I will write
something that makes someone else drool or cry, I will learn not to mix
modifiers, and I will discover the best place to start and end my story.
Determined Writers
keep pitching, because they can only say no.
They can’t say yes unless you ask, right? Okay, I have an
agent—at least at this moment I do—but that doesn’t mean I roll over and play
dead. I go to conferences, I ask my agent for advice about the best person to
pitch to and how to do that; I look at newer publishers and point them out to
others; I take a chance with working with a friend to co-author a book and see
where it gets us; I keep writing new samples of work—a theme, a plot,
characters and synopsis—in hopes of successfully pitching the idea to my agent
and then to a publisher. Writers are Determined to meet publisher’s and
reader’s needs.
Plucky ain’t just a spaghetti western female character
looking off in the distance, y’all! Plucky is you and me, and we can get the
job done, even if it’s not the same one we started.
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| About the Author |
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| Meow Mayhem by Lisa J. Lickel |
Award-winning author Lisa Lickel started writing
professionally in 2004 after finishing the Christian Writers Guild apprentice
course. She welcomes several more traditionally published novels this year,
starting with Meow Mayhem from
Whimsical Publications in January, another cozy mystery set in Illinois and
challenges Ivy and True to discover what’s rotten in Apple Grove; the much
anticipated re-release of Healing Grace,
a story about love and sacrifice and the gifts of the Spirit; and book three of
the Buried Treasure cozy mysteries sometime in the fall, The Newspaper Code, where Judy Wingate and her not-BFF, newspaper reporter Olivia Hargrove, solve a murder. She is
editor-in-chief of Wisconsin Writers Association’s Creative Wisconsin literary magazine, collects dragons, loves to
travel and people watch. Find out more at http://www.LisaLickel.com.
