Today I want to make a case for conflict. Nobody likes it, of course, except maybe drama queens, adrenaline junkies, or lawyers.
I personally try to avoid conflict as much as possible. Heck, the subtitle of my memoir is ‘How I Found Peace in Betrayal and Divorce.’ Sometimes, during not so peaceful times, I look at that and feel like an imposter. Or I might repeat the words I found peace, I found peace as if I can make it so.
So now that I’m in my 50s, I’m proclaiming it the official “I don’t give a damn” decade.
I made this proclamation after dropping my teenage daughter off for three weeks of summer camp. Though she was handling this milestone in a calm, mature way, I found myself remembering the kinds of thoughts I had at her age when I went to camp…(read more)
I’m from Holland, Michigan, and when I was a kid, my grandma taught me a children’s rhyme in Dutch. She didn’t speak Dutch fluently, but her parents had and this little ditty was one of the things she remembered.
She wasn’t completely sure of the meaning, just that it was something about a cart before a horse.
Last week, I wrote about how ‘Keeping it Real’ can be hurting your writing. I shared the reminder that if our goal as writers is to create dramatic action (and of course that’s the goal!) then we need to remember that fiction is not reality. It’s concentrated, intensified reality.
I told the story of my humiliating attempt, at age nine, to jump off the high dive at the local pool. Both that story and the idea of turning real-life events into fiction elicited some great responses that are too good not to pass on.
This week the word perseverance has been scratching at me, wanting to be written about. It’s pestered me with all the doggedness you would expect from it. So here I am, struggling to come up with an opening story to illustrate what it means to persevere and why it interests me.
I don’t have a story. But that in itself is perfect. Because the essence of perseverance isn’t in the moment of triumph, realization, or reward. It’s not about the outcome. It is, by definition, the steady persistence in a course of action—and here’s the best part—in spite of difficulties, obstacles, or discouragement.
👉 Enjoy dedicated writing space just steps from Lake Michigan
👉 Benefit from one-on-one developmental editing sessions