It’s been one bad time after another this year. I felt as if I’ve been a boxer running a nine month string of defeats lately. One disappointment after another, a broken promise after another, a string of defeats and bitter blows that normally cause people to give up.
During times like this, the soul suffers. There’s no feeling like that of a bitter disappointment – a promotion that goes to someone else, being turned down for a raise, doing your best to outperform everyone and still get pushed to the side. We all can understand these feelings. We all can relate.
In my case, the hope of a sale of a script that would have been the big break… scuttled. The loss of a favorite computer. Loss of a beloved cat that put me in a work slump I still haven’t recovered from.
These events in life are a crucible, melting us.It’s very painful to go through this process. The feeling of the impurities rising to the surface, and scooped out. Then the reheating, and melting again. Usually these events go in a chain lasting a year.
What’s left is pure silver, the impurities blasted out in the forging process. We emerge battered, bruised and bloody, but still unbroken.
The process of writing changes within us. The impure parts of us sloughed off in the forging process as slag takes away weaknesses in our writing. As we learn to deal with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, our writing matures.
Whatever you are going through, it may be for a reason, and usually just for a season. We emerge stronger than before.
And this time may well forge your writing as well. The dithering and maybe’s we incorporate into our writing seems so weak now. We spot it and eliminate.
The pain you endure in this season is tempered into a pain in your novel that the reader falls in love with – at last, someone understands. Someone else has gone through this.
Know and understand that there’s reasons we endure senseless affliction. It’s how we respond to this and pull through that strengthens us.
Go ahead and cry. Let the hurt out. That’s the impurities being scooped out of the silver.
When you emerge, you will shine like the pure silver you are.
