Tag: satisfaction

Beyond the Naivete

When I first started writing, I felt the world needed to hear my story. Now I recognize the many thousands of stories out there and know not all will be heard.

I mistakenly believed my technical skills precluded the need for thorough editing; despite my considerable score on the SAT many, many years ago, I found that I not only needed to edit, but I needed an editor to point out the many places I made errors.

I believed my writing would rise above the other queries out there; however, I like so many others have not found an agent yet.

Optimism or arrogance, I do not know.  Naivete? Certainly. I do know what remains is that writing is a lot of hard work with no guarantee of return other than the satisfaction of creating.

I still have my dreams of being published, hopefully with a traditional publisher because I feel ill-equipped for self-promotion. I have my dreams of being read by others and being well-regarded, and I admit that I would love to sign books for readers. But those are dreams, and the reality is that I need to keep trying, keep improving, keep losing my arrogance if I’m to get published.

Satisfaction

My seven-year-old honorary niece, Marcie, asked me if she could teach you about satisfaction, so here goes:

“Satisfaction, Aunt Laurie says, is a type of happy. I like the word ‘happy’ better. There are different types of happy, and they make you feel different ways. There’s big wow happies, there’s little fluffy happies, and there’s the ‘I’m so happy the tiger didn’t eat me’ happies.

“The thing is, how you get the happy makes a difference in how you feel the happy.  If you want to do something like write a book, and you finish the book, you’re like ‘Wow! Big happy!’. But the next morning you’re like ‘ho hum, time to find something else big to do.’ It’s like eating ice cream — you want real food a couple hours later after you weren’t hungry for dinner. But if you have something you want to get good at, and you do it all the time and get better and better, you feel this little warm glow and it lasts a long time. So getting better at something isn’t as yummy but it keeps you full longer, like oatmeal with raisins and honey — not as sweet, but it lasts longer in your tummy.

“Aunt Laurie just typed 50,000 words — that’s a lot of words! — and so she won something she calls NaNo. But this morning she woke up and said, ‘Now what? I met my goal!’ Then she looked at her computer and said, ‘I still need to learn how to write better, so I’m going to keep practicing and maybe someday I’ll get published!’

“The End!”