This week, Writers In The Storm is kicking off a new series for the Fall...sort of a "Be All That You Can Be" series for writers. The inaugural post comes out on Wednesday.

In honor of this, our own Jenny Hansen gave us today's blog about discovering what you're good at and doing it!

What Are Your Strengths?

CELEBRATE THEM!

As a corporate software trainer, I’ve got to be ON each day I’m in the classroom.

It doesn’t matter whether I was up all night with a screaming baby or if my best friend and I had a fight. Nobody cares about those things when they come in for a day of Word or Excel or leadership training. They’re focused on what they need to learn and it’s my job to deliver.

There are personality types who would hate my job. They’d get tired by all that “on” business. I see it a little differently. Every day that I walk into the classroom, I know:

• All my problems get checked at the door.
• I’m going to provide a service.
• I’m going to have a fun day.
• I’ll get to see people learn, and light up over what they learn.

Do you see a trend with perks I listed above? It’s me, me, I, I. Even though it doesn’t look like it. Training is a vacation from my own busy head where I get to focus on other people. It works for me because it plays on some of my innate strengths.

Let me explain what that means.

I went to a training conference last year that changed the way I see the world, especially the creative world. The keynote presentation -- “Building a Strengths-Based Organization” -- shined light on a disturbing trend:

Society, starting with our schools and continuing through our workplace management teams, puts a mighty amount of focus on improving our weaknesses.

After hearing some speakers at that conference, I started thinking crazy thoughts....

What might happen if these organizations put the same amount of energy in developing peoples’ strengths?

What kind of mountains could we move as writers if we applied our efforts toward being stellar at the things we’re good at, rather than focusing all our energy on our “faults?”

I’m not talking about turning into a bunch of narcissists who can do no wrong. I’m talking about making it a primary goal to discover your innate strengths and spend more time playing to them.

Finding your strengths:

We did an exercise in the conference pre-session where we listed the things we were good at – we had 60 seconds to scribble them down off the top of our head. We were directed to find the skills we’d always been good at.

[Go ahead, grab a piece of paper and scribble yours down. We'll wait. Stop thinking! Just start scribbling a list of the things that are easiest for you, whether they have to do with writing or not. You can do a writing-specific one later if you want.]

Now stare at that list and be honest with yourself about how much focus you put on those talents. It's interesting to me that most people don’t “see” their innate skills as anything nifty or unusual. In other words, they don’t see their own "specialness."

Back to the conference...

The abilities people came up with were amazing – there was so much talent in that room and the majority of it was not being used the workplace, where we spend at least 50% of our waking hours. How sad is that? These abilities were being relegated to the hobby side of the fence.

I did that with my writing for years.

Just to give you an example, my innate strengths, in no particular order, were:
Writing, teaching, motivating others, doing hair and learning software.

I felt extremely lucky when I looked at my list.

Life pushed me early into a job I am uniquely suited for. Except for the “doing hair” part, my innate strengths describe the perfect software trainer. No wonder training feels so easy…it draws on at least three areas of my innate strengths, so it doesn’t feel like work.

This brings me to another worrisome trend:

I’ve noticed a disturbing trait that’s common to creative people, in this case writers. Many writers seem to think that, because they have weak areas, they're bad writers.

REALLY?

I have a question for you perfectionists:
Why is it acceptable for multiple attempts when learning to ride a bike, or dance the tango, or knit but it’s an “epic fail” to write a few books before you get good at it?

Note: Lots of first novels remain unpublished for a reason. They were practice for the other books. (If you're still in doubt, read Laura's Dust Bunny Books post.)

I don’t get why it’s expected to take years to learn a musical instrument but it’s not acceptable sit down at the writing page and have less-than-perfect prose fall from your fingertips.

It doesn’t mean you’re a slacker just because you like to do the things that come naturally to you. In fact, I’m going to take this further and issue you a challenge:

Pay attention to the things that are easy for you and try to do them more often. The easiest way to bring your “A” Game to your writing life is to play to your strengths.

In American League Baseball, they can use pinch hitters or pinch runners. Why can’t we do a little of that in our own writing groups? Here at Writers In The Storm we have:

• Pinch World Builders (Fae Rowen)
• Pinch Steamy Scene Pros (Sharla Rae)
• Pinch Description Writers (Laura Drake)
• Pinch Theme Builders (that would be me)

I've got several "writing weaknesses" that have driven me nuts for years. Until I went to this conference and got some perspective on this need for perfection.

My list of writing "weaknesses":

• I can’t write a transition to save my life. I've had it take me an entire page to get my characters from an elevator to the front door of a building. (Yeah, that was embarrassing.)
• I want to cover my eyes when my characters’ clothes come off.
• I can’t figure out how to build a space world.
• Fight scenes give me fits.
• The thought of writing a full-length novel makes me sweat.

Does this make me a crappy writer? No! It just means that my strengths lie elsewhere. I have to go to my A-Team to get my “A” Game sometimes. And that’s OK.

I want to know when the Writing Police decided that we have to be great at every single aspect of our writing.

Even though the 400 page novel makes me sweat, writing a single scene gets me all fired up. That’s the way I’m wired. Writing short is fun, and falls into the playtime category. Writing long (as in a novel) is extremely hard for me. But, since it’s a dream of mine to publish novels, I keep at it. Plus, I'm learning Scrivener which is a scene writer's nirvana.

We need to keep learning and pushing ourselves...but maybe we can all get an early start on our New Year's resolutions and stop beating ourselves up over not being stellar at everything. Deal?

What are your innate strengths? I’m not talking about the things you’ve learned to be good at. What were you always good at? Share your uniqueness in the comments section – we want to hear about it.

Happy Writing!
Jenny

p.s. One of the things I am good at is making people laugh. If you need a Monday giggle, hop over to More Cowbell where we're talking about Missed Connections. (Oh Lordy, these people are a crazy hot mess.)

About Jenny Hansen

by Laura Drake

It’s been about two months since I wrote my post about writing two books at the same time (you can read it here.)  The only thing I’d change about my original advice is, do not work on two books at the same time that are at the same level of completion.

I’m now in the horrid, sagging, interminable middle of two books. It’s like traveling from NY to London in a rowboat -- I may be getting somewhere, but it sure doesn’t feel like it! I think in the future, I’d do it again, if I were in the first third on one, and the last third on the other. It gives you something to look forward to.

But that’s not what this blog is about.

This blog is about resurrecting your ‘Dust Bunny’ book. You know, your first, or second book. The one you started because it called to you – the idea that wouldn’t die. So you wrote it, learning along the way. Maybe you even shopped it, but it didn’t sell (mine went out to 150 agents!)

So you put it under the bed.

I don’t know about yours, but mine was like Poe’s Telltale Heart – it kept calling to me. I mean, I lived the longest with this book. I felt like I could drive to Widow’s Grove, and visit Sam, and her dog, Bugs (oh wait, the original dog’s name was Rocky.)

I hate the trite term, ‘Book of my heart,’ but I’ll admit, that’s what this book was for me.

So, when my agent asked me, in that first phone call, what else I had, I mentioned my Dust Bunny Book. She liked the premise and asked to see it. After the excitement wore off, I panicked.

Holy crap, what had I done?

I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t looked at it in years. So I pulled it out, and dusted it off. The plot wasn’t too bad. The heroine was awesome. The craft needed a bit of work (I'd written it pre-Margie Lawson.)

But for the Love of Stud Muffins – the HERO!  I was red-faced, reading his preachy dialog, his clueless shallow personality. Why the heck would my heroine ever fall in love with a loser like that? He was the literary equivalent of a Ken doll, all hair and teeth and plastic.

p.s. Am I the only one who has problems writing men? Not their irritating habits, or their snappy dialog, or bathroom humor, but the deep down GUYNESS.  I feel like a voyeur, being in the hero’s head.  I don’t belong there.

Then my agent sold the book.

Okay, just because I’ve never done something before, doesn’t mean I can’t, right? That's what I keep telling myself.

I had to strip out the old Ken doll hero, and insert a living, breathing one. He went from being a tall, lanky vet with red hair to a blue collar mechanic. (I used a young Springsteen as my model – yum!)

But of course, this changed the whole book. I wasn’t about to start over; after all, the bones of the book were there, right? Kinda. The problem is, the line between the old book and the new is blurring. The new hero is a recovering alcoholic. I forgot, and had the heroine give him a beer.  Duh.

It was made harder by alternating chapters with the other book I was writing at the same time.

Can you hear the panic in my voice? Time is ticking by.

Today I came to a decision. (No, my Alpha Dog won’t have to hide the razor blades.)  From today on, I’m working on the Dust Bunny book until it’s done.

No more alternating books – I’m just getting lost doing that.

The moral of the story:

DO NOT resurrect a Dust Bunny Book. You’re going to want to, I know. But remember Stephen King’s book, Pet Semetary? Once something dies, what gets brought back isn’t the Book of your Heart. It’s something else – something twisted. Sinister. Evil.

Writing this blog, I feel like I’m watching a scary movie, and the teenage girl is standing at the top of the dark stairs to the cellar. I’m screaming, Don’t do it!!!!

Leave the book to whatever horrible thing lives under the bed. Trust me, it’s safer that way.

Have you every tried to resurrect a Dust Bunny Book? What kind of outcome did you have?  Have you ever been tempted?

Laura Drake is a city girl who never grew out of her tomboy ways or a serious cowboy crush. She writes Women’s Fiction and Romance, and in December, she sold three novels set in the world of professional bull riding to Grand Central. THE SWEET SPOT, in which a couple struggles to reclaim their lives after a tragic loss, will be released May of 2013.

In January, she sold her ‘biker chick’ novel, (Dust Bunny Book!) Road Song, to Superromance. It will be released sometime in 2013.

Laura resides in Southern California, though she aspires to retirement in Texas. She’s a corporate CFO during the day, and a wife, grandmother, writer, and motorcycle chick in the remaining waking hours. She is the current President of the Women’s Fiction Chapter of RWA.

http://LauraDrakeBooks.com  @PBRWriter

Sharla's been getting receiving tons of love at Writers In The Storm this week. As part of our "thank you," we're bumping this amazing post of hers up by several days. ~ Jenny

by Sharla Rae

The idea for this blog was generated at one our recent critique meetings. We were critiquing a first draft and whoa! I heard an echo of one particular word all over two pages.

As it happens, way back in June of 2010, I wrote a blog called Echoes - Repeat Offenders and explained that they are words and phrases writers over use. Sometimes echoes are caused by a writer’s own speech pattern, that is, words we use a lot when we talk. But sometimes they pop up because we used weak or lame verbiage.  And sometimes the lame verb “is” itself an echo.

Ladies and Gents – I give you GET! 

I will admit that a character’s dialogue may sound more natural using the word “get” when he or she speaks BUT that’s no excuse to echo this nasty offender in the rest of your writing. As Fae once told us all during a critique discussion on using too many ellipses . . . “It’s lazy writing.”

Get accomplishes little. Get doesn’t act out anything. Get doesn’t grasp the subject. Get doesn’t generate a strong picture. Get lacks understanding. Get cannot salvage a bad description. Get won’t move a reader’s emotions. Get won’t snare any readers at all.

Get is a nasty little spawn of a weenie sentence that succeeds at nothing and makes for immature writing.

Get it? All of the above bolded words could be substituted for get or got or some form thereof.

SO GET RID OF GET!

Easy to say I know. But the following Get Rid Of Get List offers some handy dandy substitutes.

Examples:

• Instead of get information use: ask, inquire, obtain, glean
• Instead of get things together: gather, group
• Instead of get their business: acquire, contract, procure, attain, bag
• Instead of get enough money > earn, obtain, acquire, procure, attain, gross, profit, borrow, reap
• Instead of We got enough to > achieved, obtained etc.
• Instead of we got it back > regained, recaptured

How about you? Can you add to this list?