A Grateful Writer

On Christmas Day of 2011, I ask you all, why is it important to be a grateful writer? There are so many people who think about the work they haven't written or the fact that they haven't been published. Many writers think of missed opportunities or missed sales or how someone made a million with an idea that they wrote first. On a day when we receive so many wonderful gifts from families and friends, it's important to think about the gifts we were given when we came into this world. I believe you should be a grateful writer because you were given the ability to write in the first place!

Every writer has a different innate skill set. Some are able to translate tons of information and turn it into a wide sweeping epic. Others have been given the gift of gab, able to make dialogue sound both realistic and engaging. Occasionally, writers have also inherited a sense of humor that makes their readers laugh out loud with alarming frequency. One of the gifts I'm a grateful writer to have inherited is the ability to come up with a near unlimited amount of ideas. I've also inherited faults, everyone has, but on a day like today when we see how gifted we truly are, it's best to concentrate on our strengths. Learning to be a grateful writer all year long may be difficult for some of us who know that they could be better or more prolific, but if you can channel your particular gift into your writing, you will find a degree of success no matter what difficulties you've endured.

Sit down with a pad of paper and list out what your possible innate gifts as a writer are, or ones that you've developed through school and practice. We like to say how our parents or genes have screwed us up, but let's try to focus on how we've been blessed for this exercise. Once you've written down your inherited strengths, write a few ways in which you could take advantage of each of them. For my idea-generating strength, I funneled my ability into a book of writing prompts to help others to generate ideas as well as I could. For my strength at writing silly dialogue, I wrote a novella based on one of my favorite shows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Study those practical applications and choose one of those projects to start working on as soon as possible.

When you finish that project (and you will) you can be even more grateful about riding that strength all the way through to a published or self-published book. Then make sure to promote it, because a paid writer is a grateful writer. 

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