Patience according to Jackie

Jackie Rod is having computer problems, so I offered to post her blog under mine. 

Patience

Patience is a virtue that isn’t always easy to practice.  We find ourselves getting impatient in traffic jams or long lines at the grocery store, and losing our tempers when our children don’t take care of chores we expected them to do.

Fretting over little stuff seems to be the norm.  Most of our troubles are small but become powerful, if we allow them to overwhelm us.  We must learn to be patient with ourselves as well as with others.

The word patience comes from a Latin term meaning endurance, suffering, forbearance, etc.  John Quincy Adams said, “Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.”  Writers and readers certainly can identify with this.

Most writers have experienced both sides of this coin.  It is so hard to be patient when our characters won’t cooperate but have minds of their own and take us down a bunny trail.  It’s difficult when life interferes and we don’t have time to write.  Hitting a dry-spell or writer’s block can test the patience of the best of us.  Teaching ourselves to be patient can be fruitful and produce new ideas.  When the juices begin to flow again, we will be ready to enrich that work-in-progress.

Readers need to practice patience, also.  Who can be happy-campers when we don’t have time to finish reading an interesting chapter or the last few pages of a good book?  We need to know what happens next!  But the laundry must be done and dinner doesn’t cook itself.  While we’re doing those chores, we think about how the story will end.  When there is time to finish the book, we realize that our imaginary ending was better than the written one.  At that moment, we know we can be writers.

This is how many writers began.   If you decide to write a better book, go for it!  Go for it and send your work to Gilded Dragonfly Books/Editors.  We will patiently evaluate ‘the baby’ that only a highly creative mind like yours could have produced.