Guest Post: Laura Howard, author of The Forgotten Ones

Creative people all have one thing in common: They start out creating for the simple joy of it.

Sometimes it grows into something different all together. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about a singer, a painter, or an author — when your skill level increases, hope tends to grow. You start to imagine yourself going to the next level, whether that means entering a competition or turning your creativity into a career.

The major difference between success and failure is hope. Hope can be defined as an expectant wish.

If you lose the expectation of success, you are doomed to fail.

I’ve always loved to create. Putting words together was something that came naturally for me. When other kids would struggle to write essays, I wondered why it was so easy for me. I’d write stories for fun, and I still remember others thinking that was strange. Why would I do that if it wasn’t for a school project?

Writing — creating — gave me joy.

After having my kids I rediscovered one of my joys that had fallen by the wayside. Reading for pleasure had been overshadowed by late-night feedings and diaper changes. But after making up for lost time by devouring multiple books a week, story ideas began to swirl in my head just like they did when I was a kid.

Hope was growing again. It started small, I just wrote twists to the books I was reading. But I was writing again, and it felt great to be creating after all those years. 

 

 

My current protagonist introduced herself to me in October of 2009. She grabbed on and hasn’t let go ever since. The plot of this story fell together bit by by over the next year until my youngest son was born in 2010. I took some time away from writing and went back to the feedings and the diapers.

But, those characters that were born wouldn’t get out of my mind. I thought about them every single day. I never gave up on them, even after several months.

I can still vaguely remember when my creative spark fanned into a flame of hope. I started thinking of having my book published someday. It seemed like an unachievable goal, but I had this voice in the back of my mind that kept saying –  What if? What if you are good enough to be a published author?

And if you aren’t right now, what if you could be one day?

I’ve now turned that hope into an expectation. It’s concrete for me, and I have the goals in place to make it happen. 

Because, after all — what is hope? It’s just an expectation that you repeat until you reach your goal.

Laura Howard is a mother to four young children and an author of New Adult fiction. Her first novel, The Forgotten Ones,  will be published in spring 2013. You can learn more about her from: