I was inspired to write today's entry by a thread on the children's writer forums over at Verla Kay's, aka the Blueboards. I hang out there pretty frequently, and over the weekend, someone posted a thread wondering whether they should stop writing. They had been getting lukewarm reviews of their books already out and were felt like if that was their future, they weren't sure they wanted to go on -- it wasn't the life they'd imagined for their books and themselves. And they were looking at the instant big hits and feeling discouraged.

I already posted my response to that particular situation on the thread there, but it made me want to babble momentarily about self-doubt, self-confidence, and creative types. And how creative types react to negativity.

It seems to me that in the course of my travels as a colored pencil instructor and portrait artist and author that I've encountered two types of creative people. The ones that get crushed when they get told "no" or when someone close to them gets what they really wanted or when life events come up and get in the way of their creative life, and those that seem to actually feed off the negative events and turn them into positive things.

The thing is, as a writer, you need to be the second. It's a business where "no" is the default answer: agents looked for a reason to reject, editors just not thrilled with a project, critique partners telling you your latest project is just not salable, etc. And it's a business where jealousy is rampant. You slave away for years on a project, and someone else writes a book in 3 months. You submit to endless agents and get endless rejections, and a member of your f-list gets four agent offers in two weeks. You sell your book for two thousand dollars, and your friend sells hers for six figures. You don't get a tour, someone else does. It is too, too easy to compare yourself to the writer in the next blog over. And then, finally, there is the stuff that always gets in the way of writing: kids, money, time, always time.

And I watch people get crushed under this weight every day. It literally eats them alive, the negativity. But here's what I've figured out.

You'll only ever be as good as you tell yourself you can be.

If you tell yourself that you're never going to get better, guess what, you won't. I can one hundred percent guarantee yourself that you won't. You will never make a goal that you never set. And you almost always make the negative ones you set for yourself. And telling yourself you're not getting any better is setting that as a goal. Not to get too airy-fairy here, but as a writer, you ought to know this: words have power. Choose the right ones. Turn the negativity of your doubts into a positive challenge for yourself. I will get better. I will learn to characterize better. I will unlock the secrets of beautiful prose, stunning character growth, etc. The next book will be better.

And then, the jealousy. Look. There's always going to be someone better than you, richer than you, published faster than you, toured more, whatever. Always. Instead of pretending that they aren't there, or wasting a single second on jealousy, turn it around into a positive. It's what I do. When I see someone who has gotten something that I'd love for myself, I grin because someone else's day just got made, and then I let myself ackowledge that I'd love that for myself, too. And then I figure out how to make it happen. Jealousy is infinitely useless. It's worse than useless. It will destroy you, I promise. But goal setting and have someone else make a concrete example of that goal? Completely positive. Absolutely better than having an abstract goal. There it is, right in front of you! Before I got published, I used to google for people's publication stories. I loved reading them. Because one day, I knew it would be me.

Don't give jealousy a single second of your time.

And finally, life events. I know how hard it can be to write when you're low, when there's money problems, when you have no time. I have two little kids, remember? And I was working full time when I wrote LAMENT and SHIVER. It would have been so, so easy to just say "this is too hard. I don't have the time. I give up." And that would've been the end. But those unwritten words festering inside me would've eventually poisoned me. I need to write. I wanted to get published. More than anything, I wanted to do it full time. So when my husband said "you have two minutes here and two minutes there and two minutes over there -- find a way to squash them together", I knew he was right. I carved out two hours ever Sunday and wrote 5-10K words each week. Because my brain knew that that time every Sunday was always writing time, it worked on my story all week long and saved up a huge burst of energy for that one little time slot. I made a positive out of a negative and . . . yeah, now I write full-time, and I can actually pay the bills when they come in. Very exciting.

So please, creative types. I know you're passionate and fragile and volatile -- that's what makes us us -- but don't let yourself be one of the thousands of people who let negativity stop them or even slow them.

And now I'm going to go. It's hard for me to sustain seriousness for this long.