Unleash Your Story: Make a Difference

Just do it (let those words come)

Welcome guest blogger, author Leanne Shawler

When I found out about Unleash Your Story: Make A Difference, I was excited to join in for two reasons. The first is, that even though I am published, I was in a bit of a writing slump at the time.

All right, let’s make that a giant writing slump. As in no writing. At all.

It was a darn good thing that I wasn’t on deadline.

Which was part of the problem. I’d gotten used to writing to deadline, pacing out my pages, but without it, writing could always wait until tomorrow.

Writing never waited until tomorrow when I was unpublished!

So it took me a little while to reorganize myself and get going again. There are plenty of stories I wanted to tell but suddenly I just didn’t have the time. (Going back to work almost full time didn’t help.)

In the end, I just had to sit down and do it. I took back my lunch hour and spent it isolated from the rest of work, cranking out pages and getting stuff that surprised me. That’s what I love about just typing without worrying about grammar or spelling or how many times I’ve used a certain word. The characters start speaking to me and doing stuff I had simply not planned.

And this coming from someone who’s a plotter! (Ok, so I’m actually a mix of plotting and pantsing.)

Another great helper for me to get going was to get an AlphaSmart. They’re nifty items where you can’t do anything but type: no games, no internet. I started taking it to work and my lunch hour got so productive that I didn’t have to write once I got home!

So it took a slightly expensive tool (and then the need to justify that purchase) to get me going with my writing, so hopefully you won’t have to spend your hard-earned cash on a writing product instead of giving it to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation!

And that’s the other reason why I’m participating in this event. My second cousin had cystic fibrosis. They lived about three hours away from us, so we didn’t see them often, but they came to stay with us once, and then we discovered just how much this family went through each day just to keep their daughter in good health.

OK, so by now you know what CF is, so I don’t need to go into that. But the memory of what this bright-eyed, red-cheeked (her big sister had rosy cheeks too) little spark had to go through just to breathe is impetus enough to write more and write faster.

She died when she was eight.

That’s enough for me to write, even if my pace is not up to our illustrious pace-setter.

We all do what we can, and now you can too. So stop reading this and get writing!

Leanne Shawler http://www.leanneshawler.com

September 9, 2008 at 6:43 am Teresa Bodwell 2 comments