Measuring Success as a Writer

 

Today I am bathing in a peak watershed moment of my life. After a lifetime of longing to “be a writer,” and twenty years of gestating the story of Fruit of the Devil,  my first novel is being published this week.

I was recently asked to write about “How I Measure Success as an Author.” Following is the answer that developed:

I take delight in beautiful and original phrases, descriptions, and narratives. I’m happy when I make the effort to push a sentence beyond its most readily available words and easiest clichés, and the effort yields what feels like a better-written piece.

Success in writing is the ecstasy of having my characters come to life and talk to me, and dictate where a story should go.

I feel successful when I receive external validation—when something I’ve written is deemed worthy of publication, when I’m told my dialogue seems believable and my characters relatable and interesting.

Being accepted into the community of writers, including my professional associations and critique groups, belonging to a shared order of wordsmiths that is ancient and global—like-minded people initiated into a certain set of understandings and assumptions—confers a sense of legitimacy and belonging.  Receiving admission and scholarships to prestigious conferences, being invited to speak about my work on radio and TV, in panels, and in public appearances, and receiving awards for my work makes me feel successful as a writer.

Meeting people who want to buy and read my work is an amazing affirmation.

But for me, true success as a writer lies beyond the need to be told my writing is good enough to publish, beyond the quest to make pretty or clever words and images or to develop well-crafted story elements. I feel I’ve succeeded when someone makes it clear to me that they truly understood what I was trying to say.  And when they thank me for articulating what they also have been feeling and thinking. And when a reader shares with me that I showed them something new—an unexplored Earth landscape or unfamiliar inner territory.

As a writer, I feel truly successful when a person tells me that my writing has moved them, changed them, helped them find an answer or insight that was always there inside them, but that they didn’t fully see until my words illuminated their own deep private knowing.

Mostly though, I measure my success as an author by how fearlessly I dig deep, deep down into the unrealized core of my Truth—my most Personal Truth, which is also Universal Truth–and write it purely, and then when I read it over, it resonates viscerally and I feel surprised because I didn’t know that I knew that thing, and it’s real, and simple, and far more profound than me.

And then when I offer it to others, they read it thoughtfully, with attention and maybe even with pleasure, and—in those words that I wrote, they awaken to something within themselves, their relationship with other beings and with the Earth, which gives them release from existential loneliness; gives them solace, peace, hope, love, redemption, joy—one of those things we thirst for. And they carry to their shore that seed that came to them from my writing, and it grows and becomes something greater and more beautiful than any of us were before, until our collective inter-being blooms into the Eden we long to be.