Mental Toughness

My husband is a coach. No, let me correct that: my husband is a Coach Extraordinaire, especially when it comes to softball. Although my own athletic ability starts and ends with bowling, I have always loved watching sports. I got my daddy to explain football to me when I was 13 years old. Okay, sure. It was mainly because the Minnesota Vikings were in the Super Bowl that year and I had a crush on Fran Tarkenton, but I also wanted to know what I was watching him do instead of just admiring the way all the players looked in their football pants. (Holla, Lee Ann Ward!)

Anyway, I said all that to make the point that I understand sports and coaching and the dynamics of being a successful athlete even though I’m not one myself. One of the main things my husband stresses to his players is their need to develop mental toughness. And trust me, none of his players will last on his team if they can’t become mentally tough.

But it occurred to me recently that the same principles of mental toughness apply to writers, so I wanted to pass on my brilliance to the blogosphere.

These are the key psychological characteristics associated with mentally tough elite athletes.

Self-Belief:
~ Have an unshakable belief in your ability to achieve competition goals
~ Have unique qualities that make you better than your opponents

Motivation:
~ Have an insatiable desire and internalized motivation to succeed. (You’ve really got to want it!)
~ Be able to bounce back from performance setbacks with increased determination to succeed

Focus:
~ Remain fully focused on the task at hand in the face of competition-specific distractions
~ Don’t be adversely affected by others’ performance or your own internal distractions, such as worry or negative mind chatter

Composure/Handling Pressure:
~ Be able to regain psychological control following unexpected events or distractions
~ Thrive on the pressure of competition
~ Accept that anxiety is inevitable in competition and know you can cope with it

And the MAIN COMPONENT of mental toughness is learning to condition your mind to think confidently and overcome frustration/self-critical negativity.

Okay, so how do these things apply to writing?

Self-Belief:
~ If you don’t believe in your writing ability and love what you write, how can you expect anyone else to believe in it or want to read it?

~ Develop a unique voice that sets your writing apart from any other writer, so much so that when people read unattributed excerpts, they will immediately recognize your work.

Motivation:
~ Writing needs to be as much a part of who you are as your eye color or your sense of humor. It needs to be something inside you that HAS to come out regardless of whether you want it to or not. Everyone doesn’t have the luxury of being able to write full time, but when you’re not able to write, you should be thinking about what to write the next time you get the chance.

~ Know WHY you write. Is it for your own fulfillment, because you want to be famous, or (gasp!) because you want to make money? Or are you like me and write because you want the world to meet your characters? Whatever it is, let that be your driving force.

~ Unless your motivation is writing only for yourself, remember that writing is HARD WORK, and you must take it seriously if you want to succeed. Don’t expect anyone to do your homework for you and tell you what you need to do to get published. As my nephew Aaron used to say, “It’s Googlable.”

Focus:
~ Again, not everyone has the luxury of writing full time or having their own private writing space. Most of us have to write around family life, some more than others. I wrote my first two books between the hours of 10:00 pm and 2:00 am, after my kids and husband went to bed. But whenever and wherever you have to write, immerse yourself in the world you create for your characters.

~ As Stephen King says: “If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the tools to write.” Make time to read your favorite authors’ new books and other books in the same genre as yours, but don’t be dismayed by their talent. Even when I was an adolescent, there were some books I read and thought, “I can do better than this.” Then there were those I read and thought, “I’ll never be able to write this well.” The more I write, fewer and fewer books fall into the latter category, but I don’t ever expect it to be empty. I will never stop feeling that I can still improve.

Composure/Handling Pressure:
~ You CANNOT let rejections stop you or lessen your belief in yourself. If your self esteem is based on other people’s opinions, you will never make it as a writer. If you somehow manage to survive the submission process, you’ll crash and burn when you read your first negative review (everybody gets them!) and you’ll end up a suicidal, drug-addicted alcoholic. I guess that could be good if you’ve always dreamed of being famous posthumously, but that’s not for me. From what I’ve heard, suicide is frowned on in the Afterlife Admissions Office, and I definitely don’t want Flo on my case! (You’ll understand this if you read my novel After Me.)

~ Yeah, I know there are millions of books out there and the competition is harder than ever. But if you don’t think there is something about your book that makes it different and worthy of the time and money you want readers to spend on it, DON’T WRITE IT. There’s enough crap out there already. Sorry if that’s harsh, but I get tired of people flooding the market with mediocrity that even the authors themselves don’t want to read. I read my own books over and over because I love the characters and the stories. I wouldn’t have published them if I didn’t.

~ Does this mean I don’t get nervous when I have to pitch my books at conferences or through query letters? Of course not. I’m petrified, but I do it because I believe in my books and want as many people as possible to read them. I had to develop a tough skin early on in my writing career. That doesn’t mean I don’t still get mad or cry if I get a rejection from an agent or editor and they criticize something specific about my precious baby, but I do it in private (or on my BFF’s shoulder) and then get over it. And when I go back and look objectively at what they said, I find some way to put it to use and make my baby shine even brighter for the next submission.

So you can see that the principles of mental toughness are basically the same for athletes and writers, but I’ll summarize to remove all ambiguity:

NO WHINERS ALLOWED. SUCK IT UP AND GET BACK IN THE GAME. AND NEVER, EVER GIVE UP!

~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

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Big Easy Blog Tour

Welcome to the Big Easy Blog Tour, where writers talk about their writing process and the projects they're working on right now. I was suckered into . . . er, I mean invited to join the tour by my friend and fellow Wild Rose Press author Gloria Davidson Marlow who writes wonderfully chilling romantic suspense books that will keep you up reading all night.

Okay, on to the questions we're all supposed to answer.

1. What am I working on?

In between promotional efforts for my women's fiction book Symmetry and my YA novel After Me that's coming out this summer, I'm redoing my first novel, True Blue Forever, as a trilogy that includes a prequel about the main characters when they were children. This means I'm in the equivalent of Writer Heaven. Not only do I get to revisit my four favorite characters, I get to take a trip back in time to the days of playing outside until the streetlights came on, pinky swears and lifelong friendships, first loves and first kisses, broken hearts and broken promises, and that moment when you meet the person you're going to spend the rest of your life with and can't tell anyone because you're both eleven years old.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?

Actually, fitting my books into any one genre has always been a problem for me. One reason is that I have a penchant for writing about young characters dealing with adult issues. And although all my books include a love story that's central to the plot, they also feature sub-plots and other relationship issues for the hero/heroine that keep the books from fitting neatly into the required structure for romance novels. This has caused me a few problems in the past when pitching them to publishers and also with reviewers who were expecting a category romance and didn't get it. That's regrettable, but that's me. I like multi-dimensional plots when I'm reading, so that's the only way I can write mine.

3. Why do I write what I do?

Two reasons: First, I write stories that entertain me and just hope others will enjoy them as well. I've been making up stories to entertain myself since I was four years old. Sometimes I couldn't wait until bedtime so I could lie in the dark and envision the stories in my head. It wasn't until many years later when I began plotting my first novel that I realized I'd been plotting books all my life. The only difference is that now I write them down. This is why I don't really understand it when writers say they're so sick of their own book by the time it's published that they never want to read it again. I never get tired of reading my own books because I wrote them to entertain myself in the first place.

Second, I follow that age-old advice for writers to "write what you know." I write about epic loves that were meant to be because that's the only kind I know. My husband is my hero, the love of my life, and my absolute favorite person in the world. My characters might all be fictional people, but the love between them is the real thing. And since everybody in my family is a wise-cracking comedian, my books always have plenty of humor in them too.

However, I guess I probably need to point out here that the psychotic killer and other general scumbags in my upcoming YA novel After Me do NOT come from my real life. Neither does the smartass dead girl. Well, the dead part.

4. How does my writing process work?

I always start with the characters. After I have a clear picture of my protagonist and the other main characters in my head and my Blue Spiral Notebook, I ask myself the "what ifs?" What if this happened to them? What if somebody was trying to do this to them? What if they had to do this and couldn't get out of it? Etcetera, etcetera. Then I write a narrative overview of all the major plot points, making sure I have a strong beginning, middle and ending. This ensures that I don't get halfway through a book and stop because I don't know how to end it.

However, the overview sometimes changes as the actual scenes are written, because the characters often decide they don't want to do what I had planned for them. Sometimes the bad guys steal my heart and become not-so-bad guys. Sometimes my heroine doesn't end up with the guy I thought she'd pick. And sometimes someone just has to die no matter how hard I try to save them. When these things happen, I go back and adjust the overview to match the new plot developments.

And although I don't get stuck without an ending, I sometimes get stuck between how to get from Major Plot Point A to Major Plot Point B. I once left a pair of characters in a Jacuzzi for two weeks while I figured out what happened in their next scene. (Aside from a lot of wrinkled skin, they didn't seem to mind it too much. They were naked, after all.)

Luckily, I found a solution for when I find myself in one of those literary bogs. I use a tip I got from the amazing Laurie Halse Anderson and make a list of 25 things that could happen next, making sure that at least some of them are nonsensical. This works every time and has resulted in some of my favorite scenes.

Once I have the first draft completed, I try to let it sit for a couple of weeks before I start editing and revising, but I don't always make it that long because I actually love the editing process. When I do begin editing, I print out the manuscript so I can read it aloud to myself and Princess Tilly, my rescued Pomeranian. Not only does this do wonders for spotting stilted dialogue and problems with flow, Tilly thinks I'm the greatest writer in the world, so it also does wonders for my ego.

So that's the way I do it! Next up on the tour will be these talented ladies who'll tell you next Monday, June 9, all about their own writing processes and their upcoming books.

Lee Ann Ward -- Lee Ann is a former Senior Editor for a digital romance publisher and a multi-published author of adult and YA fiction. She's won several awards for her fiction and can't remember a time when she wasn't writing, having completed her first novel at the age of sixteen. She has four gorgeous sons, a sweetheart of a husband, two lazy cats, and the most rambunctious poodle in existence.

Brenda Barry -- Brenda is the author of a four-part saga of star-crossed lovers separated by the war in Vietnam titled Seasons of Love and War. Her husband was in the military for 21 years and gave her help and encouragement while writing her novel. They now live in Roseburg, Oregon, and when Brenda's not writing she can normally be found walking the trails with her husband and their little dachshund or traveling in their RV.

Angela Quarles -- Angela works at an independent bookstore and lives in a historic house in the beautiful and quirky town of Mobile, Alabama, with her two matched gray cats, Darcy and Bingley. When she's not writing, she enjoys the usual stuff like gardening, reading, hanging out, eating, drinking, chasing squirrels out of the walls and creating the occasional knitted scarf. She's had a varied career, including website programming and directing a small local history museum. She has a B.A. in Anthropology and International Studies with a minor in German from Emory University, and she has a Masters in Heritage Preservation from Georgia State University. She was an exchange student to Finland in high school and studied abroad in Vienna one summer in college. She is represented by Maura Kye-Casella at Don Congdon Associates, Inc.


~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

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