When authors get together, conversation often drifts to these questions.

“When did you know you wanted to be a writer?”
“How long did it take you to get published?”
“What was your writing journey like?”

We are fascinated with each other’s stories, because the call to be a writer is such an overwhelming force in our lives. Sometimes we’re afraid we have it all wrong.

Maybe we’re delusional. Maybe we were never supposed to take this road.

So, for those who are interested, I decided to trace the “call to write” in my life.
Not because I love talking about myself (although that’s probably true), but because it’s a chance to notice some of the amazing fingerprints of God in a life that has sometimes seemed like a hopeless muddle.

Stories always fascinated me.

I remember writing a story in second grade—horribly derivative, involving three pigs, and their homes, and their adventures in the woods. I drew paths across the page and glued Dixie-cups onto the paper to create the houses. I still remember the thrill of forming a world that felt so real with pencil, lined paper, and cups.

In third or fourth grade I crouched over an old Underwood typewriter on a day that I was home with a high fever. My two index fingers pecked out a story on sheets of onionskin paper with a carbon page between. Why carbon paper? Perhaps even then I knew that stories are meant to be shared.

I wrote a story full of pathos and anthropomorphisms—about a horse.

In sixth grade, I wrote spy stories—lurid tales with the heroine fainting, and plenty of guns and villains.

In seventh and eighth grades, I began to write songs on my guitar—melancholy expressions of adolescent pain.

In high school, I wrote to rage against war, to proclaim my faith in God in large letters, to process intense emotions. Teachers wrote comments on my papers about becoming a writer, but writing was a release (like laughing, crying, hugging) and I couldn’t imagine it as a career.

Had God planted the writing call in my heart during my childhood? If so, I never saw it as that. But I read voraciously and loved the power of words. And I continued to write—essays, short stories, poems, songs, sermons, letters, scripts.

(More to come! Tune in next week for Part Two!)

A strange shift occurs when a writer signs her first book contract.

A pre-published writer is treated a bit like a wanna-be. Usually subtly, sometimes overtly.
Many folks are kind and helpful. Some are even interested. But there is a definite feeling of being on the outside and pressing one’s nose against the window pane, longing to join the party.

Then the magic moment occurs. The door opens. Inside the lights are a bit blinding, and the music is loud. Laughter and conversation bounce the new author from side to side. Not only is she “in,” now she is in demand. Other writers want her to critique manuscripts, judge contests, teach classes, offer endorsements. It could be a heady feeling.

Except for one thing.

Five minutes after signing a book contract, I was the same person I had been five minutes before signing it. The same cranky, self-absorbed, obsessive, giddy, goofy, weary human being. I had no new level of intelligence. No brilliant wisdom imparted from the Orb of Publication.

So what do I make of the strange phenomenon? Why would someone with little interest in my thoughts before the contract, now suddenly find me valuable?

Okay, I understand that having an editor and publishing house believe in me adds some credibility to the stammered declaration, “I, I’m, well, a writer.”

But should it?
I know several wonderful, gifted authors whose novels aren’t in print yet. They haven’t found that perfect match of an editor who loves their style, at a house that has a hole to fill, with a genre that bookstores are clamoring for, in the right time. Or God simply is steering their path the long way around.

And I’ve read plenty of published books that are poorly-constructed drivel.

It’s important for me to remember that truth.

I have a book contract. Praise God. I worked for it, prayed for it, yearned for it, and I’m delighted by it. It’s a gift from Him.

But I haven’t suddenly become someone worthy of being “inside.” In fact, the writer who steps out of the cold weather of seeking publication and inside the ballroom, soon finds there is an inner study where only the REALLY cool folk are invited. And I’m guessing inside that room is a door to the truly exclusive library. It never ends.

C.S. Lewis gives a delicious description of a man corrupted by his longing to join the “inner circle” in the sci-fi novel, THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH. And once “inside,” the man compromises almost anything to keep his position.

Lord preserve me from that deception.

I’m not hot stuff.
Not as a writer. Not as a human being.
I’m a mess, only imbued with beauty and purpose because God, for an inexplicable reason, loves me.

That’s the only inner circle I need. And we’re all in that one together.