Known as the UK’s best-selling living poet, Donna Ashworth first rose to prominence during the 2020 lockdown, when her poem “History Will Remember When the World Stopped” went viral and helped raise funds for the NHS. In the years since, her work has continued to resonate, offering reflections on resilience, connection, and hope.
Here’s one of my favorites…perfect for the season:
On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.
In a recent post on Writers Unboxed, author and coach Kathleen McCleary shared her reasons for writing. Here’s an excerpt from that post:
The answers to the Why do I write? question are as varied as we are, we writers, we joyful, tormented souls. You can find a great compilation of quotes from well-known writers on why they write here. When I really thought through this question for myself, I came up with this list:
I write to process my own feelings. I became a novelist in my forties, when my husband and I made a cross-country move and I had so many intense feelings about leaving behind our home in Oregon—the first house we’d ever owned, the house we’d brought our babies home to, the neighborhood where we’d established deep, life-long friendships—that I didn’t know what to do with it all. So I started writing a story about a woman who had to sell a house she loved because she was getting divorced. I could pour all my sadness about the move, my passion for my house and my hopes for the future into that character. And a side effect of processing your emotions honestly in fiction is that what you write rings true for readers. Crazy as my main character was (a little crazier than me), I found an agent and sold it in a pre-empt very quickly because it had an emotional truth that resonated with people. I can’t tell you how many readers and reviewers wanted to tell me about the houses they’d loved and lost. No matter what feelings you’re processing, you’re not the first or only human to feel that way, and that resonates.
I write to connect. Author Jami Attenberg said “I write because it is the thing I have to offer, the sharpest skill I have. I write to make people—and myself—feel less alone. I write because I want to communicate messages with the world.” It’s deeply gratifying to have readers respond to what I write because it resonates for them, as with all the people who wanted to tell me about their beloved houses, and makes them feel seen and understood. One reader wrote to me: “You managed to describe thoughts and feelings I couldn’t even begin to put into words. I found myself saying to myself, YES. That is exactly how it feels.’” Do I write to elicit that kind of response in readers? Well, hell yeah.
I write stories so I can control my own narrative, give my characters some of the experiences, choices, and emotions I wish I’d lived. We can provide our fictional characters with the deeply empathetic parent we wish we’d had, the lover who “gets” us on a soul-to-soul level, the wild career success we wish we’d enjoyed, the son we wish we’d had—not to mention creating characters with qualities we wish we embodied. George Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo) says, “The result of [the] laborious and slightly obsessive process [of writing] is a story that is better than I am in ‘real life’ – funnier, kinder, less full of crap, more empathetic, with a clearer sense of virtue, both wiser and more entertaining.”
On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.
In her latest book, Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life, New York Times bestselling author Maggie Smith breaks down creativity into ten essential elements. Here’s a thought-provoking excerpt:
Tenacity means sticking with it even when it’s not making you feel good. Even when your ego isn’t surfing a big, wonderful wave. Maybe your ego has been pulled under and is being trashed around.
This is where patience comes in: You have to keep trying, persisting, without instant gratification. We have to press on even if the conditions are less than ideal, even if we experience pushback, even if we don’t have the time or materials we wish we had, even if it’s taking longer than we expected. Remember that progress is often gradual, incremental, sometimes two steps forward and three steps back. Transformation rarely happens in some eureka or aha moment, because this isn’t a movie, it’s life.
When it gets difficult, stay with it. Don’t use difficulty as an excuse to “take a break”—because we all know that in this life, it’s all too easy to be sidetracked. To close the laptop or the notebook, to pick up your phone or the TV remote, to go make a snack, to do those chores you’ve been meaning to do. An intended fifteen minutes can turn into two hours, or a day, or weeks.
STOP. The laundry can probably wait, the clean dishes in the dishwasher aren’t going anywhere, there’s nothing good streaming (and if there is, well, it can wait). Your creativity is calling. It needs you. Work on your endurance and stamina. Wring your mind out like a rag over a bucket, until it’s bone-dry. Get every drop.
Remember: Attention is a form of love.
Source: Dear Writer, pp. 205-206
On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.
Here’s a thought-provoking reflection from international speaker and bestselling author Joyce Meyer:
In your effort to enjoy life, you need to have a vision—a clear picture of what you would like to have in the future. For example, what would your life be like if you felt energetic and had excellent health? What would it take for you to reach your goal? Or, what would it be like to be debt-free, and how can you work toward that?
God has only one gear: forward! He has no park and no reverse. He wants you to start progressing toward your goals, but before you can do that, you must get a clear image of those goals. Don’t merely “wish” things were different in your life, but have a clear goal and work toward it.
If you are hung up on your past disappointments, you are never going to escape them. Think and talk about your future, not your past! Talk about the new you that you are becoming. Every successful person starts off by envisioning his or her success.
Create a vision of the ideal you. Writing down your goals helps bring them into the real world and makes them solid. Keep your vision and a list of your goals somewhere handy so you can consult it periodically and see how you are doing. Your list of goals can serve as stepping stones on your way to becoming your ideal self.
It’s time to get out the road atlas of your life, pick your destination, and slide that transmission into gear: forward!
On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.
Each Sunday, I receive an inspiring message from poet Donna Ashworth’s Soul Mail newsletter. Here’s the latest:
For anyone who needs reminding today, there is no such thing as a straight road in this life…
You are never really ‘there’, never fully healed and perfect.
Rather I see it as a bendy, twisty route we walk. And it often feels as though we are going backwards. But I think we are actually looping. As all things do.
I like to imagine it as a figure of eight, an infinity shape.
We loop around the same lessons, the same heartaches, over and over, but each time we do we are a slightly different version of us and so we are not truly going backwards.
The loop always moves ahead. We are always moving ahead.
So if you feel like this today, if you feel you are in a place you thought you’d left behind; mentally, emotionally, or literally… be comforted by this image of infinity shape of life that we all tread.
You are exactly where you are supposed to be and the only thing you need to keep hold of as you loop around, is love. And perhaps faith and hope. All these things make for the very lightest of luggage (in fact I think they carry us).
And as you loop don’t forget to stop sometimes and appreciate the view from where you are. And congratulate yourself on how you travel so bravely. You never give up. And that is a thing so very worth celebrating.
On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.
In The Rules of Life, international bestselling author Richard Templar shares a personal code for living a better, happier, more successful kind of life. Here is an excerpt from Rule 25, “Have a Plan”:
You’ve got to have a plan. A plan is a map, a guide, a target, a focus, a route, a signpost, a direction, a path, a strategy. It says that you are going to go somewhere, do something, be somewhere by a certain time. It gives your life structure and shape, gravitas and power. If you allow life to turn up any old thing, you’ll be floating downstream as quick as you like. OK, so not all plans work out, not all maps lead to the treasure. But at least you’re in with a better chance if you have a map and a shovel than if you just dig at random—or, like most people, don’t dig at all.
A plan indicates you’ve had a bit of a think about your life and aren’t just waiting for something to turn up. Or, again like most people, not even thinking about it but going through life perpetually surprised by what happens. Work out what it is you want to do, plan it, work out the steps to take to achieve your goal, and get on with it. If you don’t plan your plan, it will remain a dream.
So what happens if you don’t have a plan? Well, you reinforce, to yourself, your sense of being “not in control.” Once you have a plan, the logical steps to achieve that plan also become available and accessible. A plan isn’t a dream—it’s something you intend doing rather than something you want to do. And having a plan means you’ve thought through how you’re going to do it.
Of course, just because you have a plan doesn’t mean that you have to stick to it, to follow it, to obey it to the letter, come hell or high water. The plan is always up for review, for improvement, for changing as and when you need it. The plan shouldn’t be rigid. Circumstances change, you change, your plan changes. The details of the plan don’t matter.
Having a plan gives you a fall-back position. When life gets hectic—and boy does it do that sometimes—it is easy to forget what we are here for. Having a plan means that when the dust settles, you can remember, “Now what was I doing? Oh yes, I remember, my plan was to…” And off you go again, back on course.
Source: The Rules of Life, pp. 38-39.
On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.
In a recent post on the Writer Unboxed blog, award-winning author Greer Macallister shared the following insights:
I don’t remember the time before I was a reader, just as I don’t remember the time before I was a writer. I’ve always read for the joy of it. Now, as a published author, I read for a number of other reasons as well, but the joy, if I look for it, is still there.
It’s one of the reasons I don’t have much patience for people who think they should write a book but can’t remember the last one they read once that wasn’t assigned in high school or college. People who say “I’m going to revolutionize [genre]!” without ever having read a book in that genre. People who claim proudly that they’re the first to write a book that addresses a certain situation or worldview without doing the research to figure out how many books exist in that space already.
Because for most of the writers I know, we can’t un-link the two. We started writing because we loved reading. We’re over the moon that we have become the people we once looked up to, creating stories that fill readers with emotion. We may not read at a blistering pace given life’s other demands and temptations, but if you give us the freedom and space to choose an activity, reading is going to be high on the list.
Reading is also an important job responsibility as an author. I used to say that I read less frequently for pleasure these days because I’m so often reading for professional reasons, like manuscripts to blurb, books I’m reviewing, or novels I’m interviewing fellow authors about for in-conversation events. But I’ve realized that all the reading I do, even with an expectation attached, is still a source of pleasure for me. I’ve never subscribed to the aphorism that “if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life” — it’s still work — but it is significantly easier to get through that work if you find it enjoyable.
On occasion, I do find that my identity as a writer influences how I read. I fully admit that if I know a novel has been wildly successful, I too often go into reading it with a chip on my shoulder, jealous of the writer’s success. I acknowledge the bias. It also turns out that in most of these cases — most recently for Lessons in Chemistry, The Wedding People, and The Correspondent — midway through the book, I find myself acknowledging Oh, yes, I get it. I’m reading differently than I would be if I weren’t a writer, yes, but being a writer doesn’t make it impossible for me to enjoy someone else’s book. I may be more conscious of structure and technique than the average reader, but when the book is good, I can still get fully lost in it.
All this to say that if you are a writer, you are also a reader. What we read changes, but why we read remains the same. We read because we are readers. We are readers because books bring us joy. And we are writers (at least in part) because we want to bring that joy to others.
On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.
Here’s a thought-provoking reflection from international speaker and bestselling author Joyce Meyer:
What is confidence? I believe confidence is all about being positive concerning what you can do and not worrying over what you can’t do. Confident people do not concentrate on their weaknesses; they develop and maximize their strengths.
Let’s say you are not a “numbers” kind of person. On a scale of 1 to 10, you might be a 3. You could obsess about your inability to “do the math.” You could buy Math for Dummies and take a class at the community college. But your math obsession could eat up time that could be devoted to stuff you’re an 8 or a 10 at—like teaching God’s word, creative writing, or rallying support for charity. In other words, you might rob time and effort from the 10s in your life just to bring a lowly 3 up to a mediocre 5. When you look at it this way, it’s easy to see where you need to invest your efforts.
The world is not hungry for mediocrity. We really don’t need a bunch of 4s and 5s running around, doing an average job in life. This world needs 10s. I believe everyone can be a 10 at something.
Confidence allows you and me to face life with boldness, openness, and honesty. It enables us to live without worry and to feel safe. It enables us to live authentically. We don’t have to pretend to be somebody we’re not, because we are secure in who we are—even if we’re different from those around us. God has created every person in a unique way; yet, most people spend their lives trying to be like someone else and feeling miserable as a result. Trust me on this: God will never help you be some other person. He wants you to be you!
Joanne Guidoccio 