by A.C. Williams @ACW_Author
Happy New Year! It’s a brand new start with fresh opportunities and clean slates all around. It’s a time for refreshing goals, restructuring plans, and launching into resolutions with single-minded focus.
This year is the year you’re going to finish that book, submit that proposal, record that podcast, edit that video, etc. Right? Most of us want to lose weight. Many want to develop better habits. We all want to build stronger boundaries.
All of that is wonderful. All the goals you’re planning to achieve in 2023 are amazing, and I hope and pray that you are able to accomplish everything you’ve set your mind to. However, there is one task list item that may be left over from 2022. If you haven’t taken care of it, let me encourage you to stop what you’re doing right now and switch your focus.
What is this extremely important task? Oddly enough, it’s not complicated. It’s not even a challenge. Yet it’s something that many of us forget to do.
Celebrate your wins.
That’s it. Celebrate. Make the time to memorialize what you accomplished. Be intentional about celebrating what you got done.
I have found that writers are really bad about this (Christian writers specifically). I’m not sure where the tendency to neglect our celebrations came from. It could be general overwhelm. Writing is difficult work, and there’s no end to it. There’s always more to learn, more to write, more to edit. And the typos! Ugh!
Perfectionism plays a big role in most creative careers, probably because the standard of performance is a sliding scale based on audience expectations. And that’s not to say that we shouldn’t be striving for excellence, but excellence and perfection aren’t the same thing.
If you are waiting to celebrate until you write the perfect book, you will be waiting until the end of your life. Sorry to break it to you, my friend, but there is no perfect book. There’s certainly no perfect manuscript. I had to learn a long time ago that the only way for a story to become what God wanted it to be was for me to let it go, usually before I thought it was ready.
Writing a book is a big deal. For those of us who have written many books, I think we forget how big a deal it is in the scramble to get to the next manuscript. Let’s stop forgetting. Let’s make time to celebrate that we translated our life experiences into words on paper (digital or otherwise) in a way that other people can consume. For those of you who write non-fiction, you struggled over every detail to make sure it was accurate. For you who write fiction, you strained your brain for every ounce of creativity to get a scene just right.
None of that “just happens.” Writing a book isn’t an accident. It takes time, purpose, focus, along with the requisite blood, sweat, and tears.
Celebrate!
Think back on all the long hours at your keyboard. Remember how hard you pushed yourself to find the exact word to complete a scene. Don’t just ignore the challenges you overcame to create something beautiful. We grow through what challenges us. Remember it. Rejoice over how much you’ve grown and how far you’ve come.
When you make time to celebrate your accomplishments, it changes your perspective. It’s not just because it gives you something to look forward to. It gives you an opportunity to look back on the milestones you’ve reached, the huge growth you’ve experienced in your life. I’ve found that acknowledging how much you’ve grown as an artist makes it easier to keep growing. And don’t we all want to keep growing? I sure haven’t done everything I’ve been put on earth to do yet, at least not as far as I know.
Don’t hold on to the idea of a perfect book so tightly that you forget to celebrate your work in progress. Give yourself permission to loosen up a little. Your self-imposed deadlines will be there in the morning, and who knows? If you intentionally celebrate the work you’ve gotten done so far, it may just energize you enough to keep you going until The End.
In 2023, let’s all be more intentional about making time to celebrate our creativity. Get excited. Throw a party. And be grateful to our wondrous Creator God who is exalted when His children celebrate the gift He gave them.
TWEETABLE
Featured Image: Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
Thank you! I needed this encouragement.
ReplyDeleteThe thing with writing is that there's always more to do to make something perfect. Always. So we used to say in seminary: If it's due, it's done. Thanks for these words of wisdom, Amy. As I edit, review, and edit some more, I'm trusting God to lead me to the most important things to fix. And trusting some more when I hit send. In so many ways, writing is an exercise of trust in His provision. In the end, that kind of relationship is what really matters. The process is just as important as the end product.
ReplyDelete