One Writer's Journey
This entry was posted on Monday, June 02. 2008 and is filed under Posts by Rebecca Luella Miller,Fantasy.
Write what you know they say. In non-fiction, such as blog posts, you can change that phrase to read, Write what you learn. Problem is, I am in a pinch today. I took too long on my blog post at my own site and have put myself on a schedule in order to get back to work on my trilogy.
That means, I’m running out of time to figure out something wise, insightful, or even interesting to write here.
So, I’m reverting to what I know, which is my own writing journey. It’s not the kind most people want to read because I have no publishing contract at the end of the road to report. I may or I may not end up seeing The Lore of Efrathah in print some day.
Still, I am excited about a recent writing success. But let me back up.
The first agent I ever contacted, back in 2001, asked me if I considered trying to publish with a general market publisher. My immediate and unprompted thought was, my writing isn’t good enough to get published by a house that puts books in Barnes and Noble.
That revealed so many things to me. What I thought about Christian fiction, what I thought about my own writing, why I was trying to get published by an ECPA house. My thoughts have changed a lot since then.
Back in 2004, one editor asked in his Mount Hermon Christian Writers Conference workshop how many of us had read Christian fiction. When no hands went up, he pointedly scolded us (in a nice way), saying that we ought not try to publish our fiction with those houses if we didn’t even know what kind of fiction they were producing.
That started me on a quest to learn about Christian fiction. In the three years plus, I’ve seen big changes. Those first books I read were, regrettably, quite predictable, even the ones that went beyond a formulaic approach to storytelling. Now? Not so much. I’ve read some books I think could hold their own with the majority of books in the general market. Christian fiction is growing as an art form. Which brings me back to my own writing experience. As I’ve labored away at an epic fantasy, I also dipped into editing, article writing, and short stories, the latter as a result of contests.
Probably because of my competitive nature, I’ve gotten hooked on contests. Short story contests. I started writing Christian fiction for a couple of Dave Long’s (Bethany House editor, founder of Faith in Fiction) contests.
Eventually I moved on to the Writer’s Digest Short, Short Story Competition. I tried contemporary moral fiction first, then wrote something symbolically Christian. At that point, I read one of their articles about the importance of voice in short fiction.
Now I had something specific to work on. My next piece, I believe, was a contemporary multi-cultural story. It didn’t place in the contest, but I did sell the story, my first fiction in print.
I followed that with a longer story for the Genre Short Story contest. This time I wrote a fantasy. It didn’t win, but it was a story I genuinely liked and hoped to sell elsewhere, too.
Another contest, this one held by a webzine, netted another sale. Then the 2007 Short, Short Fiction Competition rolled around. Stories of all stripes vie against one another. I made the decision to write the kind of fantasy I write—symbolic, Christian. And lo and behold, out of 6000 plus entries, “Haj” placed in the top twenty-five.
Not first or even fifth. Seventeenth, earning me a certificate and $50 worth of books. But here’s my real take-home, and the thing that excites me. Christian fantasy can find a place in the general market.
Some people are probably laughing because they’ve known this. But I didn’t know that the kind of Christian fantasy I write could make it. Will it? Or will God open up a place in a Christian house? Or will my epic fantasy never make it? I don’t have a clue.
Am I sad about this? No, not really, because I and my writing are in God's capable hands. Of course I hope to publish The Lore of Efrathah one day, but for now I'm happy to know that I'm growing as a writer, that Christian fiction is growing as an art form. Will the twain ever meet? That's the hook, isn't it.
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Tuesday, June 03. 2008
Wyldeirishman wrote:
The writing IS the catharsis; it needs no justification as to sacred or secular, as the talent is both God-given and God-glorifying. Luther's milkmaid (in his famous illustration contrasting "worldly" callings with monastic ones) is unconcerned with so many whys and wherefores; she simply draws the milk, takes it to market, etc.
Likewise, to write is the thing, and how we tend to measure progress is very often different from how God does.
I hope your tale sees the light of day sooner than later, just as I hope to seriously endeavor to pen my own tales before I am a withered old clover :)
Slainte,
Sean
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Wednesday, June 04. 2008
Rebecca LuElla Miller wrote:
Thanks for your thoughts, Sean. Your point about God measuring our writing in ways that aren't always the same as ours is well made.
But here's the thing for me. I've always understood writing as communication, apart from journaling. That's more like meditation, I think.
With fiction, the thing is to write supposing there will one day be an audience. But that's a leap. Maybe there will be and maybe there won't be. And if there is, will these people be mostly Christians? Or non-Christians?
On and on the questions go. To what degree should the answers affect the writing? Am I just shouting out my story with no thought to who might be listening?
On the other hand, can we become so conscious of the audience we forget what it is we actually have to say?
I think that's the place I was at when I first started writing for secular contests.
Anyway, the process has served to nudge me forward. And that's good, I think.
Hope you get your nudge too!
Becky
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Wednesday, June 04. 2008
Wyldeirishman wrote:
Assuming an audience is not so much a leap, given what we are considering, or, more appropriately, Whom we are considering, is it?
Your point about writing being a sort of meditation is well-founded, and very often I find that the lines between it and communication, when mixed well, tend to bear the imprint of a finely crafted tale. Then again, it's also easy to see why a man like Hemingway drank as much as he did (this owing to my own frustrations with the stop-start creative juice-flow that occasionally eeks out from my cerebral cortex).
This frustration, this type of tension, is what I recognize to be commonplace in the lives of the Body, a foot firmly planted in both the kingdom of the right and the kingdom of the left. Hopefully, this realization is a tension-breaker more than it is a tension-maker, and the business of writing the thing(s) can be gotten on with.
And, for the record, I fear that I have in fact gotten my "nudge," but what appears to be needed is a box of dynamite :)
Slainte,
Sean
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Wednesday, June 04. 2008
Wyldeirishman wrote:
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Monday, June 09. 2008
Rebecca LuElla Miller wrote:
Sean, then I wish you a box of dynamite! ;-) Thanks for your thoughtful interaction. I appreciate you thinking the issue through with me.
Becky
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Thursday, July 17. 2008
Mark Lucashu wrote:
Rebecca, I'm probably missing the main point of your post entirely, as I'm not quite sure what the final verdict was that you and Wyld came to, but I felt compelled to encourage you. I personally have struggled with this sort of thing for several years now, and I wish to offer to you the same realization I have come to.
You said that the sad thing was, it was the kind of story you're not that passionate about that got published. Maybe I'm misreading you, but I take that to mean you really find your joy, your "buzz", in writing the epic fantasy that you have stored on the shelf. Maybe you enjoy other kinds, but those don't really encompase what you want to say. Am I right?
If so, let me say this. The sad truth is, I find it HIGHLY unlikely that ANY modern Christian publishing house will publish your epic fantasy soon, no matter how much allegory or symbolism you put in. If it deals with the supernatural and is not gospel-oriented, decidedly Christian-esque, or metaphorical, Christian publishers will undoughtedly glance at it, dismiss it as not fitting their target audience, or simply refuse to even look. I would suggest instead that you seek to publish it with a non-Christian publishing house, perhaps without making a point of showing the Christian themes, and see what happens. If it's good (and I don't doubt that it is), and it is published, then Christian publishing houses will be more likely to see that it is something the secular world wants to hear. And if they see that, THEN you can show them the Truth you communicate through it. That, most likely, would further help you get your foot in the door for publishing similar stories with a Christian publisher. Or, you may decide that the secular editors are the ones who really need to hear the message, and stick with them. Either way, don't give up.
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Thursday, July 17. 2008
Mark Lucashu wrote:
EDIT:::
Ha, sorry, I just saw your post on another page and realized what I said above would be totally meaningless. Nevermind. Disregard the man behind the curtain ;-)
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