Tag: quotes

My Most Inspirational Quotes: #4

Laura Highcove

This one is the quote from my pile of inspirational quotes that makes me feel the best. While the rest of the quotes are sort of for the ‘down in the trenches, let’s keep at it’-ness of life. This one has the ability to lift me up.

Because in my head, I can hear the lightness and wonder of the person saying that last time. If I am completely honest, it’s the voice of the Godmother from the Law of the Prince Charming. Something about hearing her saying it and having it be someone who is not me saying it, and believing in me in that way, never fails to lift me up.

This is a quote I’ve had forever, but it wasn’t until I did this post that I found out this quote is attributed to someone, and that there is actually more to the quote. While not entirely relevant, it was an interesting tidbit for me.

Do any of you have some sort of quote that never fails to make your day a little brighter when you hear it? I hope that you do.

My Most Inspirational Quotes: #3

Laura Highcove

Third in my series of posts about inspirational quotes that have changed my life is one that I came up with and use for myself to help deal with feelings of overwhelm. It might be more like a mantra, but either way, I’m going to share it. When I was a far younger writer, still new and unsure of myself I used to get discouraged a lot when seeing the success of other writers. I would get stuck in one of these complaints:

I’ll never be that good.
I don’t write enough.
My website/social media account is crappy.
I don’t know enough.
I don’t have enough time.
I’m not good enough.

Or something similar. And then one day I responded to myself with: “So are you going to quit writing completely then?”
To which the answer was: “Well …no.”
“Then take one step and worry about the rest later.”

Nowadays this is shortened in my head to a more mantra-like statement that I use whenever I have a feeling of inadequacy or overwhelm when it comes to my writing. I just say to myself, as a question, with no malice or judgment: “Are you going to quit?” And then I keep going because the answer is ‘no’.

It’s basically become an interrupt for my negative thoughts, which immediately allows me to focus more on what I’m doing at the time and not worry about everything I might need to do.

The other thing that helps me with this problem is making lists, because that shows me my steps and then I can put them in order and cross them out. In addition, most times the list I come up with, of things to do, has some that can easily be put off (not an immediate deadline) which makes the list shorter and easier to manage.

Do you have a statement/mantra or ritual that you use to help with feelings of overwhelm? in order to help push you to a more positive mindset? Please share it in the comments.

My Most Inspirational Quotes: #2

Laura Highcove

Following along in the vein of this post, where I talked about an important inspirational quote that I use nearly constantly to remind myself that I am progressing with my writing is the following.

I was going through a Google image search looking for random inspirational quotes to put into my Facebook feed when I ran across this one:

I was immediately completely overwhelmed with emotion and started crying right then and there. The truth is, I cry a lot. For a long time, I hated that about myself. I, of course, hate how I look when I cry and how I feel while I’m crying, but the thing that really bothered me was always how I worried how it made the people around me feel. How people immediately go into ‘Oh, what’s wrong.’ or ‘Don’t cry.’ And so I had, over the years, internalized that crying was bad, or wrong, or something to be fixed.

After I saw this quote, I made a rather abrupt mental shift. I began to tell myself that it was okay to cry because that meant I needed to cry, and that helped me stop feeling guilty about crying. I also made the decision that I was no longer going to apologize for crying in front of other people. (I still avoid crying in public, I’m talking about crying in front of friends and family.) The apologizing itself was like an admittance that what I was doing was bad or wrong. Instead, I move on with the conversation without drawing attention to the crying itself, and then I thank the person for supporting me.

And truthfully, I haven’t looked at this quote since I posted it to my Facebook. It was a strong enough influence that one time that it stuck with me. Do you have a quote or other experience that has immediately and drastically changed the way that you respond to the world? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

My Most Inspirational Quotes: #1

Laura Highcove 2 Comments

I see lots of inspirational posts on my Facebook feed, and not only because I tend to post a number of them. I like both the joy and inspiration they bring me and hope it brings a little bit of that to the other people who see them.

Most of the time I look at one of these quotes, it makes me happy, and I go on my merry way. The content of the quote usually does nothing further to effect my life. However, there are a few inspirational quotes that I have come across (or made up myself) that are a more constant source of inspiration for both my writing and my life in general.

The first of those is a quote I came across a while ago. I posted it on my Facebook feed, and then I found myself continually going back to it. So one day I pulled out a note card and I wrote that quote down so that it sits just beneath my monitor so I can be inspired by it daily.



This quote means a lot to me because I struggle daily with not feeling like I’m doing enough with regard to my writing. I rarely go a day where I don’t write at all, but I have a constant nagging that any ‘down time’ could be instead spent on my writing.

But when I see the quote by my monitor, whether I’m at my computer for work or pleasure, I can look at that and remind myself that I am still moving forward, that I am still going to come back and write more, even if I’m not doing it at that exact moment. This constant reminder is helping me to reprogram the habitual behavior that makes me worry that I’m never working hard enough. Such that I can remember the quote even when I’m not in front of my computer.

Do you have a quote or some other kind of reminder that you have posted in a place you see every day? I’d love to hear what those are in the comments.

Revision Update: Let’s Try Ditching the Outline

Laura Highcove

So I’m glad I gave myself the week ‘off’. I was able to finish my specific measurable result, in which I just wrote out the scenes in that folder. I’m not happy with it but I did it.

On the last DIYMFA 101 Q&A call I brought up this point to Gabriela and she says she has learned that she needs to write despite whether she feels good or bad about what comes out. It’s the first piece of advice she’s given that really hasn’t sat well with me.

I am certainly to the point in my writing career where I can just sit down and force myself to write because it’s time to write. Sometimes I don’t want to, sometimes it comes out pretty rough but most of the time I feel like I am able to push through the ‘ick’ to something that works. So the idea that I’m somehow supposed to write something, and dislike/hate it, but then have that be a part of my book is …well counterintuative at best.

I am beginning to feel like a broken record as things keep not working, but I am continuing to looking for new methods for working through this revision.

I spent part of this week thinking back to how things used to be with my writing. I remember just writing a story. Just writing it and not having any sort of plan. Now I feel like I’m so worried about the craft that I just get stuck.

The feeling between the beginning of this story (the one I’ve been writing the revision blog about in specific) and the end is just so …different. I really wish someone could just come down and tell me why I’m having such trouble. Is it my lack of structure? Is it my over-reliance on structure? Are the characters not developed enough? Is the world not developed enough? Does the story suck?

Part of me wants to be able to finish a novel length story just so I have the fact that I have done it to hang in front of myself. Right now I’m grasping at a future that I have to convince myself I can achieve with no actual proof.

Huh, I wrote that and then realized: Well that’s life isn’t it? Everything we do, we have no idea we’ll be able to do it until we do it. But it doesn’t change the fact that I feel like that.

I love my neat little list of what to do with the dates and the plan of it all. I also don’t think it’s working.

I sit down to write and nothing works. I am stuck in my head about where the story is supposed to go, what my outline says I should do, and omg, I have to write a blog post on Friday …

So I’m going back to something that has worked for me in the past. And that is giving myself a word count goal. Something that I often tell myself when I’m stuck is that the answer (to my stuck spot) is out there somewhere. There is some series of events, some actions the characters can take, which make the story make sense. It exists, and all I have to do is find it.

And in order to find it I just have to write. I think better on ‘paper’. Obviously writing an outline is just not doing it for me. It helps me organize stuff I’ve already written just fine, but it seems to be seriously hindering me in my push forward. I get too caught up in where my outline says I should be going that I don’t let the story develop naturally.

My specific measurable result for this week is 750 words a day. So 5250 words through next Thursday. I’m not limiting myself on what I’m going to write. I am just going to get words on the page without thought to where I’m going or what I’m expecting myself to produce, and we’ll see what happens.

Revision Update: Main Character 3

Laura Highcove

I failed at my specific measurable result. I spent the entirety of the week on one scene, which I rewrote at minimum, five times.

But as I’ve said, failing is fine as long as I learn something from it.

Something 1) I am a hoarder of secrets. I am convinced that letting out my story’s secrets in anything earlier than the last possible second is just horrible. I must keep my secrets. Keep them all!
In this scene, I was trying to explain five secrets at once, and so it was a jumbled mess.
I had to step back and figure out if I could reveal some of these secrets earlier (blasphemy!) so that they were already in place by the time I got to the bigger reveal. Now I will be aware of this issue, so I can better parse out secrets.

Something 2) This blog is a great tripwire. Sometimes I can rewrite a scene several times and something good will pop out of it. It has happened. That did not happen this week, and so I know now that it’s time to change tactics.
So I will be finishing this scene, even if I’m not happy with the final product, and moving on. I will have to get critique on it and see what works and what doesn’t.

Something 3) I am really learning to go easier on myself. I’m not making great progress on my story. I don’t know how my speed rates against other writers, as I don’t have any data to compare, but I feel like I am stumbling a lot.
And yet I am moving more quickly to the place of ‘this is me learning my process, step back and try something else’ over ‘omgiamnevergoingtogetanythingpublishedandi’mtrash’ and I’m proud of myself for that.

That being said, I’m giving myself the weekend off. I am going to a wedding on Thursday (in Florida mwhahaha!), and while I will probably write some on the 13 hour car ride, I am not going to expect tons of writing when I’m losing my weekend, which is when I get most of my writing done.

(btw, I’m setting this post up to post on Saturday, but I didn’t want to do all kinds of funky talking in the past tense stuff about when I’m leaving. I wrote this Wednesday night.)

So my specific measurable result is to finish my current folder. I’ll have to move my timeline around a bit, but such is life. The journey is more important than the destination.