But isn’t it really about personal fulfillment?

I have been asked this question often, usually by friends who mean to encourage me. I’m sure this is because I have come on a long and frustrating journey as a writer, years of rejections and “almost but not quite” letters from editors. So sometimes I’ve asked myself the same question. Can’t putting words on a page be an end in itself? The process as payoff.

I have certainly found joy in the process, in the many “yes!” moments of writing fiction: when the image or word you’ve been searching for inexplicably arrives in your brain as you’re doing the dishes. Or when your characters, who began as shadows, morph into people as real to you as if they lived next door. And that moment that comes as close to miracle as this writing thing gets – when you realize that you can actually begin a novel on a blank page 1 and live to finish it several hundred pages later. I love the process of writing. Yet, despite my questions, I always reach the same unequivocal conclusion. I write to publish.

So when I learned that my fourth novel manuscript, Absolution, had won the 2007 Novello Literary Award and would actually be published, I was ecstatic. This was the payoff, fulfillment – even though nestled within the ecstasy lay seeds of panic and paranoia. What would it mean to “put it out there?” To subject myself to critics?

One of those panicky days came when I received a large envelope of page proofs of the novel set in type. The pages came, however, with a caveat. “Don’t make any changes to the novel itself. Only correct errors.” But what if the errors were in the dialogue and narrative? What if a character or story element needed fixing? Worse, what if these proofs were proof I wasn’t the writer I wanted to be? I let the pages sit for much of a day, untouched on my desk.

I decided finally to approach the page proofs as an editor. After all, I had been an editor years ago for Good Housekeeping Magazine and the Winston-Salem Journal. But I had not read far when I experienced another of those magical “yes!” moments. I wasn’t an editor. This was my novel and it was going to be published!

It’s about vocation, you see. One’s chosen profession. Correcting page proofs is one piece of a greater whole – from learning the craft and doing the research, to creating the work and finding an audience, whether it’s a New York publishing house or the Internet or self-publishing. Vocation encompasses all that comes after publication as well – talking about the work and taking questions – and yes, exposing the work to critics.

Vocation. Profession. Two words that originated from the Latin verbs “to call” and “to declare publicly.” Work as dialogue. Writing, like other vocations, should connect us with people who share our neighborhoods, our towns, our planet. Otherwise we work in a closet. We may do the actual writing there, but personal fulfillment comes with the conversation. That, for me, is what publishing means.