How Long Should You Keep Working on One Story?

My name is Connie Lansberg and  The Perfect Tear is my first book. But, it is by no means my first attempt at writing. No, that has been going on since I was eight. I wrote pages and pages of rhyming poems and I loved to sing  as a child, (even now I sing for a living) so it was only natural that I wrote songs.  I fell in love with jazz standards, the writing being as close perfect as there is and got myself a great band and worked very hard ever since. I live in Melbourne Australia and I gig around the city having a wonderful time. However, for the event that prompted my  writing career, I need to go back a few years.

I was doing a tour of Australia in a very bad play, but, a play where I got to sing one of my own songs, every night. The rest of my time on stage was spent listening to terrible dialogue by bad actors. I learned a valuable lesson. Either go mad, or find a way make it work. I remember a director saying to me once, "you really know how to listen. That's what makes you a good actress." I took this to heart and decided I would listen as if I had never heard the dialogue before. Each and every night I learned to stay in the moment; A difficult but powerful thing to do. This has nothing to do with writing, however, listening and staying in the moment is something we all can benefit from.

Back to the bad actors and their terrible play. They were TV stars in Australia and they simply put together two episodes of their bad but popular sitcom and put it on the stage. The four other actors in this play spent all day writing new episodes for their TV show which left me in strange cities all by myself, with nothing to do! This is where I learned my most valuable lesson ever and one every female on the planet needs to conquer.

I realized I had a choice. I could be horribly bored and lonely or... I could learn how to be alone and be happy with my own company. I set about this task every day. I took long walks, wrote songs, read books, practiced singing, anything and everything I could think of. I went into training over the next nine months of the national tour to learn how to happily alone.

To be honest, I'm too good at it now. At the end of the tour I realized I was a different person. I would never be that needy kind of girl always looking for validation and attention from the outside. Because I was happy by myself and never bored, the company I did keep was exceptional. As a writer, you need to be happy spending hours alone. You need a good relationship with your imagination. I would say to all women, one of the most powerful gifts you can give yourself is to learn to be happily and productively alone! You will never run out of things to do if you are a creative person with a burning desire to achieve something wonderful.

The other thing that happened when I finished that tour, was I realized,  that if I did not want to be stuck in stupid, vapid roles, that did no justice to my talent, I would have to learn to write, for this is where the real power lies.

TO BE CONTINUED:

This blog is going to document the journey of The Perfect Tear and what it took to get it this far!