It's the Small Things

Funny how seemingly small things can make such a big difference in the end.

I had spent several years writing a novel and had contacted dozens upon dozens of agents regarding representation. To no avail. Rejection slips piled up in quantities sufficient to wallpaper our living room. I decided to shelve the manuscript and chalk it up to the fact that it just wasn’t meant to be.

Shortly after this decision, my wife and I visited our son and his family, who live in in Salt Lake City, Utah. He mentioned that he had recorded a Glen Beck interview with Richard Paul Evans. My son knew I had read all of Mr. Evans’s books and would be interested in the interview.

I was.

During the interview, I was impressed by Mr. Evans’s account of the adversities he had faced in his own life and how he was working through them. No one is free from challenges, he explained. As the interview continued, a determination came over me not to give up. Not to shelve the manuscript and chalk it up to a “learning experience.” I decided right then and there to rework the manuscript once more and try again.

When I returned to our home in Alberta, Canada, I did just that. I spent six months rewriting the manuscript and trying to instill in my characters the courage and determination that inspired me that day as I watched the interview.

After completing the manuscript, I sent out another batch of letters of inquiry to agents. Within two hours, an agent contacted me to say she loved the story and wanted to sign me to a contract.
It would be nice at this point to say, “And the writer lived happily ever after.”

Turns out there was still a long way to go, however. My agent did ultimately find a publisher, but I had to do more work on the manuscript, especially once I began fine-tuning it with a skilled editor. But I was able to sustain the momentum—started when I watched the Richard Paul Evans interview—and see the project through to completion. After a journey of years, The Anniversary Waltz was finally published in May of 2012 and is receiving encouraging reviews. My second novel is scheduled to come out in the spring of 2013, and I am negotiating another two-novel contract at this time.

And to think it almost didn’t come about.

Thank you, Richard Paul Evans. If not for your interview, my manuscripts would be sitting on the shelf, collecting dust—a shelf labeled “What Might Have Been.”

Pushing Through

Do you ever get tired of writing?

Yes, I've been asked that, and it's actually a very thoughtful question. Most people think writers write because they can't not write. That's what we writers like to say. It's part of who we are, what makes us tick. It's our passion, our glory, our holy calling. We can't imagine not pouring our souls out onto paper. We can't accept a life without creating, without storytelling. We write because it's what we know, what we feel, what makes us complete.

Okay, some of that's true, yes, the rest, honestly, is a bit dramatic.

Writing is an art and like any art it comes from somewhere deep inside the artist--from the soul or heart or maybe just the right side of the brain. It's what we are, not just what we do. But that being said, it is work as well and like any work it can get tiresome. When the juices are moving and words are flowing, there's nothing I'd rather be doing than writing. But when things jam up and the gears grind to a clunky halt, man, it's tough to get motivated.

True confession time: Sometimes I loathe writing. Sometimes I hit the alarm at 4:40 a.m. and all I want to do is roll over and go back to sleep. I don't want to think about writing, don't want to wrestle with the story, don't want to look at the computer monitor. In fact, at those times I'd be perfectly happy if I never wrote another word in my life.

But I push through. I sit my butt in the chair and turn the computer on. I force myself to write, to form sentences, to create characters and settings and conflict. Like one of those old hand-crank engines, I manually get those gears turning.

And you know what? Once I get going it happens. The right side of my noodle wakes up and starts doing what it does best. The characters find life again.

And that's where life and writing intersect, isn't it? Sometimes we don't feel like going to work, we don't feel like staying married to our spouse or spending time with our kids or talking to the neighbor. Our will rebels against what our soul demands. But if we persevere, if we force those gears to move and connect and push us forward, then eventually we find our inspiration again and the spark ignites a flame which burns into an inferno.

And we are alive again.

So how about you? Have you ever felt like giving up on something only to push through and find new inspiration, new motivation, new life?