Meet Diane Covington Carter

We were lucky to catch up with Diane Covington Carter recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Diane, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?

Bold Journey
How did you find your purpose?
I am an award-winning writer, but if someone had told me early in my life that I would become one, I would have told them they were crazy.
As a Freshman at UCLA, age 17, a teaching assistant in my freshman English class wrote all over my papers in red ink and gave me grades like C-. I had never received a C- in my life.
I decided that I was a terrible writer and would avoid all English classes or any others that required writing.
That worked for the first two years when I was taking basic requirements.
But in my junior year, when I began taking classes that required writing papers, I felt terrified. By chance, I stumbled across a place on campus called the “Learning Skills Center”. I crept in and talked to a nice man and burst into tears, crying out, “I can’t write!”
He handed me a box of tissues and listened.
He then proceeded to look at a paper that I was struggling to write, pointing out the strong points and encouraging me to come back in a few days with the next draft.
I left with a tiny bit of hope.
Week by week, he kept offering encouragement and validating what worked in my papers.
Week by week, I began to gain back confidence.
I remember the moment when I sat at my typewriter and realized that I had something unique to say and that I enjoyed the process of ferreting out the right words to express my thoughts.
I received A’s on all those papers and graduated two years later with honors in Cultural Anthropology, which required long papers. One of those papers required keeping a journal of the rules of American Society. The professor told me that my 200-page paper was one of the best he had ever received.
I love the experience of finding the right words, then sending them out into the world and hoping that they contribute to the readers in their lives.
I found my purpose and it sustains me in my life.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

When I receive emails from readers or reviews on Amazon telling me that my book or article has touched and moved them, that makes it all worthwhile.
Writing itself is solitary, just you and the blank page or you and the blinking cursor on the computer screen.
So that contact with readers feels wonderful.
One of my most beloved stories is how I found the orphan who my father had tried to adopt during World War II in France. I had grown up with the story of this little boy Gilbert who had almost become my brother but didn’t.
For the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994, I traveled to France to accept a medal in my father’s honor. Dad had died three years before.
While there, I put an ad in the paper to look for Gilbert. By amazing serendipity, we connected at the end of my trip, on what would have been my father’s 80th birthday.
Gilbert had never forgotten dad and his love and caring and had been waiting for 50 years, telling his family that someday someone would come.
I have kept close to what is now my French family for 30 years. I speak French, which has been a passion I could never explain, growing up in Southern California.
When I was able to tell Gilbert, in French, that dad had never forgotten him, he wept.
Telling and re-telling that story has inspired readers about the power of love.
In my award-winning memoir, “Finding Gilbert, A Promise Fulfilled,” I express it this way.
“I discovered that, in the end, it is all about who you love and letting them know.”

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

I have always been curious about discovering answers to deep questions in life. Questions such as, how do we become happy? How to find and keep love? How to overcome fears and doubts about myself? What is my true purpose?

I had a very challenging childhood with an abusive mother, so I searched for answers in books, seminars, journaling, therapy, even becoming a counselor myself for many years.
I did find answers and my true work as a writer and teacher of writing. Those answers and knowledge have sustained me in the profession of writing where you must overcome your doubts about yourself to write words that will go out into the world.
My advice, is dig deep, don’t stay in the shallow end of the pool. Keep learning, growing, risking, stepping out beyond your comfort zone. Find your true work.
My award-winning Young Adult novel, “Beautiful Courage, A Young Woman’s Journey West,” took a lot of courage on my part to plunge into fiction writing after success writing three memoirs. But the story would not leave me alone until I told it.
In that book, my heroine’s qualities of courage, strength, resilience and depth are the same as what are needed to follow your own true path in life.
Poet Robert Frost expressed it well in his poem, “The Road Not Taken.”
“I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
Happy traveling.

Do you think it’s better to go all in on our strengths or to try to be more well-rounded by investing effort on improving areas you aren’t as strong in?

As I have expressed in my previous answers, I believe that your strengths are like guideposts to lead you to your own true path. Follow them, trust them, strengthen them.
Put your energy into developing them and don’t waste it on areas where you are weak.
You were given those strengths for a reason. Value them.
Let them carry you along to unknown adventures and discoveries.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.dianecovingtoncarter.com
• Instagram: Diane Covington-Carter
• Facebook: Diane Covington-Carter Award-Winning Writer
• Linkedin: Diane Covington-Carter

Image Credits

Photo by Carrie Dobbs