Last week I attended a seminar on dealing with difficult people. If only I had known this when I worked in retail. Of course it’s different when you’re in the firing line rather than a seminar room, I can’t imagine thinking about ego states when a customer is yelling at you and accusing you of stupidity. I had to leave retail before I bit my tongue in two.
What excited me about the seminar is that it was all about conflict ( I know, kind of obvious from a seminar entitled “Dealing with Difficult people”) and for a writer conflict is gold. It gave me a nice surprise – something I can use in writing! I love it when I stumble across serendipitous gems; random articles, websites, music. Things that seem to open up what I’m working on and make me look at the work in a new way.
So I’ll be looking at all my work with my new ego state eyes, particularly in the relationship between Zeke and Mary in Kiwiana Charlatan.
Speaking of which…
I’m aiming to have a draft done by the end of this week, which is already feeling a bit ambitious! But this morning I had an inspiring plan; to finish off the play and then for the next two months do some serious research/planning for my novel. Then in November, write the third draft. In a month.
At the moment it feels do-able. And I figure it might be good training for next year’s NaNoWriMo which I have foolish ambitions of completing.
And of course I’ll let you know how it goes!
2 Comments
August 12, 2008 at 2:06 pm
You inspire me, girl
And NaNoWriMo sounds like quite the challenge!
August 12, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Yeah, it’s all big talk at the moment though! Last year I had even bigger ambitions for NaNoWriMo that may still happen…but not this year!
Speaking of inspiring, I’ve written a Drabble thanks to your post on Flash fiction and whanau. I wrote it for an internal newsletter at work so as soon as it has been “published” there I’ll post it here.
With a trackback to you of course!