Since today is Good Friday, I figured faith would make an appropriate. If you’re an aspiring writer, like me, you already write with faith. You just might not have thought of it in those terms.
The simplest definition of faith is the belief in something of which there is no proof — guarantee, if you like that word better. To break it down further you can say it’s belief in the unseen, whether it be God, ghosts, or even a government which has the best interest of its people at heart (snark, snark).
Writing for publication is tough business. Day after day we write and read, revise and write some more, over and over again in the pursuit of validation for what we’re doing. I’m not talking about writing for the love of it here — that type of writing is easy. There’s not a single first draft of anything I’ve written which I didn’t love. That’s what the first draft is all about, loving the story and the act of creation itself.
Writing in faith comes later, when you’re revising and start to worry how this reader or agent or editor might react to this scene or character. Faith becomes critical when the inner critic starts whispering that everything you’ve written is crap, mundane, or been done before. This is when you’ve got to believe in things unseen. And here’s how you do it — keep writing.
Think about it. It’s just like trying to lose weight. You work out, you eat right all in the hope — the faith — that sooner or later those pounds will come off and you’ll fit in those skinny jeans again. You can’t see the pounds coming off. They just do, sooner or later. So long as you keep at it. So read, read, read, write, write, write, revise, revise, revise. That validation might be unseen, but it exists. You’ve just got to believe and never stop.
Keep looking up…
