Gaining Wisdom From Experience (and Being Starstruck!)

Whatever area of life you want to excel at – creative, mental, physical, spiritual - it can be super helpful to get advice, hints, tips and motivation from people who are ahead of you on the journey.

As I’ve mentioned before, Cressida Cowell is one of my writing heroines, so I was very excited to discover that she was doing a talk (with her friend and fellow successful author, Lauren Child) as part of the Imagine Children’s Festival when we were down in London recently.

It was really enjoyable and full of helpful writing insights and advice.  It was also easy to feel inferior, inept and ineffective :-/  Both Cressida and Lauren are so much further along the path that I want to go down.  Rather than being jealous of their success though, I think I was more jealous of the amount they’ve been able to write.  I can’t change the fact that I’ve let my writing dream slumber for so long and I can never guarantee how much success I might have, but at least I can do something about writing as much as I possibly can from now on.

There’s a lot of life situations where it’s possible to be discouraged and encouraged simultaneously.  It’s up to us to decide which emotion we’re gonna let preside and determine our course of action.  I’ve been battling for weeks with discouragement and so I’m making a conscious determined effort to focus on the encouraging provocation of their talk.

My favourite nuggets of information/inspiration were:

- don’t necessarily listen to advice from “experts”.  Lauren was advised by some tutors not to write humour, as she wasn’t funny (she writes humour, for those of you who haven’t come across Charlie & Lola, Clarice Bean or Ruby Redfort).

- failure is an important part of success.  It makes you more determined and persistent.

- persistence is essential in the writing business.  You can learn it first from agent rejections! 

- writing is about *feeling*.  Channel those feelings and memories that you felt deeply as a child.

- a great hero needs a great journey!

I learnt some practical and professional lessons too at the book signing afterwards (stored for future reference, just in case I ever get to the point of doing an author’s book signing one day!).  Cressida asked each person if they had a question, while she was signing their books – a great idea for kids who are feeling a bit shy about asking something.  She chatted away and had a photo with everyone who wanted one.  It meant the queue took a longer time to go down, but everyone felt that they got some special time with her, rather than being rushed through on a book signing conveyor belt.

J and I got our photo with her, naturally.  It always feels a bit cheesy, but I was keen to rub up against her arm and hope that some of her writing genius and success rubbed off onto me :-)

It isn't just at talks and face-to-face events that you can benefit from the wisdom and encouragement of potential role models.  Books, videos, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc. provide a myriad opportunities to access it too.  Just make sure that you choose the people you listen to wisely, especially if you’re going to be letting them influence your life in any way!