Believing

I recently read a headline through my Substack feed that said the hardest part of being an author is not writing a book, it's the promotion of it. While I do find this to be somewhat true, the issue for me starts well before promotion: believing in my work.

The kind of belief I am talking about is not centered around whether what I write is true or not. It's fiction after all. No, the believing I'm talking about here is the honoring work. It's the belief you have in your child when they think they can't do something. It's the kind of belief you may even find in a pew when you don't know how it's going to turn out, or if it has meant anything at all. Once a story is written it needs someone to believe in it to open and think these words will impact their life in some way. This is where my belief gets challenged.

A part of this writing/publishing journey I don't hear many people talking about is how long you have to believe in a book. Writing a book can take years. You have to believe in it the whole time. Then you try to get it picked up by a publisher. That could be another year or more. Believe in it some more. Then it goes into the publishing schedule; another one or more years (at least for the small publishing houses I've been working with). Belief again. Then it comes out and all kinds of fun promotion happens; for a year or more. And that takes - you guessed it - a whole lot of belief. All the while a writer (me) may be working on one or two other projects. I'm falling in love with these new characters, these new storylines. So when you see me, and we talk about my book, it can almost feel like talking about an old lover like we're still dating. Not saying I don't still feel something for that book, but I have these other loves in my life now.

Let me be very explicit here: I am not fishing for compliments, not humble bragging, and not lamenting success. I'm pointing to how my belief in my writing gets challenged by time, by my own evolution, and by other peoples' stories. See, by the time we talk about my book, I'm not sure my words have the value they had when I wrote them. I've moved on. I'm different than when I wrote it. And there is a lot of brilliance out there. Each year over two million books get published globally. It's hard to imagine mine has something more to say than all of that. So when I go to a book signing or stand in front of a group of people who listen to me read and talk about my book (like I did this past weekend), it's hard for me to still believe that anything I say in the book, and definitely anything I could say about the book, would bring truth to the world that completes it in some important way.

This is why a reader is essential. Not only does a reader give a book a purpose, but a reader makes me believe again. Listening to people talk about what they liked in something I wrote, what it meant to them, and how they interpreted it (often in deeper ways that I wrote it), makes me believe in the book again. I fall in love with a reader's story of the story and the people in their lives the characters reminded them of. Now my book belongs to both of us. We have a shared belief in it.

The more I think about it, maybe it's not belief that I seek. Belief is the acceptance that something exists. With this definition, it's hard to accept that my book has the kind of value that would make me work on it for years. I think what I need is faith: a complete trust in something or someone. I don't necessarily trust my writing. I do trust the process of writing. But maybe most of all, I trust that you, dear reader, will make the story even better just by reading it.