Commitment to The “Word”

Commit yourself to the ‘word.’

Write your story. Don’t worry about who will publish it.

–author, educator, Shon Bacon


Shonell Bacon, this week’s guest on Book Talk, Creativity and Family Matters, urges writers and would-be authors to write without thinking of how they’ll get their stories to readers or who will publish their work. The most important thing is to write that story. In the words of Shon, the editor, “There must be something to promote or sell. And in publishing that’s the story,” or one’s novel.

So often writers sit down with their mind befuddled by who’s going to read their story, who will like it, or burning with the deeper and more imposing question of, “Will anyone like my story?”

Again without having written a story, the question and all others that follow become moot.

So many things can and do stand in the way of writing one’s story. We all live crazy, busy lives, our days filled with more than any one, two or perhaps any three of use could accomplish in a reasonable amount of time.

Inundated with questions about a piece of fiction yet to be written–the answers of which have less to do with the work itself–and are more related to the business side of publishing, places before us a hurdle few, if any writers are ingenious enough to surmount.

Perhaps this is why the most seasoned and acclaimed of novelists say more often than not, that beginning each new book is like starting all over again, learning writing from scratch.

One thing I’ve learned over the 15 years that I’ve been studying and practicing the art of fiction writing is that the true writer is a perpetual student. The more I learn and discover, the more I am humbled by what I do not know.

So it is in this profound ignorance that encompasses me each time I face the blank page I find my way to filling it by committing myself to the ‘word.’

Thanks Shon, for this incredible wisdom.

How do approach filling the blank page?

What keeps you writing?

And so the question