storyfires

Hubby put the Christmas lights up and I mailed off Hepzibah to my agent at last. I expect to do some more revisions before we send her out into the publishing world, but I feel a little bit like I've just sent my baby to her first day of Kindergarten. Except I couldn't cry. I did laugh aloud. There's a little story behind all this. It begins Once upon a time, H was my first novel ever, and I worked on it non-stop for about a year, all the while attending conferences and reading like a mad-woman, but I never found a beginning I liked, so, after about 35 *&%$#! beginnings, I got sick of it and set it aside for a couple of years. Meanwhile, I wrote a second novel--the novel which got me an agent--and began three others. I learned a lot in those three years of writing and reading every day and studying novel-writing. When I picked H up again, I realized she needed a complete overhaul, poor girl. I kept getting her out and tin...

I cringe whenever I hear an author say, "I don't write for an audience; I write for myself." Well, of course she writes for herself. So does probably every other writer, including me. Writing keeps us sane.  But I have three teenage girls, and when they pick up a book, that story isn't just the author's anymore, it belongs to my daughter; it's in her head and how she responds to it could change a lot about the way she thinks. If you're published, you're writing for an audience. If other people read your stuff, you're writing for an audience. Anyone who takes their manuscript out of its drawer and hands it off to someone else has written for an audience. And there's a certain amount of responsibility that comes with that, like it or not. Words have power to change lives, and that's something you've got to take into account when your work goes out into the world. As John Gardner points out in The Art of Fiction , somebody who re...