How Change Can Be a Good Thing – In Life and In Writing

I’m moving.

This week has been spent packing, painting, and making seemingly endless to-do lists.

I’m partially moving to be closer to friends and family, partially to be closer to my new job (that I took partially BECAUSE of it’s proximity to the aforementioned friends and family), and partially because it’s cheaper there than it is where I am now.

That’s a lot of change.

I think it’s going to be a good thing.

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Getting Away From The Status Quo

In life, if you don’t make changes, you end up doing the same thing, day-after-day, year-after-year. If you want to reach your dreams, you need to be actively working towards them, changing your life to get you there. Wishes are only useful for the direction they give you.

In writing, if you don’t read and practice and learn how to use criticism to grow, your writing won’t improve.

In your stories, your reader cares about change. Stories are about things HAPPENING and that means change. Sure, there are some stories about daily living, but something, even if it’s internal growth or understanding, should happen. “May you live in interesting times” might be a curse, but that’s where stories are.

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Trying Something New

You weren’t born knowing what your favorite food was, you had to try it to find it.

Just because one writing style, one point of view, one tense comes naturally to you, doesn’t mean that a different style can’t compliment your writing better! If you don’t try something, you’ll never know.

Whether they like it or not, your main character is probably going to have to step outside their comfort zone if they want to fix the problem caused by the ‘inciting incident’ (assuming a traditional style novel, and most non-traditional).

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Embrace The Unknown

This new thing you’re trying might be a complete disaster. You might make every mistake in the book–and invent a few new ones along the way.

You won’t know til you try.

OR

This new thing may be just the thing you didn’t know you were looking for. Sometimes the ‘mistakes’ you make are just how you figure out what comes next.

Less esoterically? There’s a program I used at my old job that I learned how to use by breaking it. Repeatedly. And having to unbreak it was how I learned the ins and the outs.

And now, at my new job? My current task is to switch most of the projects to use this program.

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What changes have you made that turned into a complete disaster?

What changes have you made that turned out better than you could have ever dreamt?