"Yeah, That's Okay..."

(or living in a family of writers)

We are honest with each other. We are honest with each other because we respect each other as writers and have an abiding faith in each other’s talents and visions. I told my daughter, in her early teens after expressing my disappointment in some recent literary effort, “At least you can trust that I’m honest. When I tell you it works, it works.”

“It’s lovely,” said Clark after I read him the latest installment of my current book. “Nice!” said my writing buddy Mary (follow her magic here.) Lovely. Nice. The two subscribers who commented echoed these sentiments. Literally. “Nice!” “Lovely!” Honestly? At that point, I didn’t even dare show it to my daughter. (follow her magic here, if you don’t already.)

And “lovely and nice” were not what I needed for the last third of my book. I needed “wowza” and “I’m speechless” and “that’s astounding” I needed the Bulgarian judges to give me a ten. To get a ten you have to stick the landing. Nice is not a ten. Nice isn’t even a medal.

That’s the hardest part of being a writer—acknowledging that your words may be lovely and nice, that you may have something important to say even, but that your perfomance was, ultimately, okay but lackluster. Novice writers often think that anything they get down on the page is great—but sometimes you’ve got to come up with a whole new routine and practice it for the whole next year. Behind every successful book are very frequently three or four books that never saw the light of day.

(People are always saying to me, “I can’t believe The Madonna Secret is Sophie’s first novel! It’s a masterpiece.” And I tell them, “It’s not her first novel. She wrote a thousand page epic fantasy longhand that she revised for three years. She wrote a young adult novel that she re-conceived and rewrote at least four times.” Personally? I have three novels in a folder on my desktop…that taught me how to write if nothing else.)

So in that spirit. I have rewritten my piece on prayer for Chapter Seven in my book. I’ll link to the first piece and you tell me how the new version lands. Be honest. I can take it. (note: these works in progress are available to my paid subscribers. I share a lot of free posts but writing this book is SCARY and so I need people to make a commitment to me who want to read it. I am incredibly grateful to my paid subscribers who have all helped me, in so many different ways, step into my courage.