A Writer's Tale
Welcome! I'm glad you stopped by. This is a place to talk about the craft, the business side, the ups and the downs of writing.
Since this is a new venture for me I thought I'd begin by telling you about how I started on this trail.
I wasn't John-boy Walton as a kid. I didn't fill tablets with my stories or even have a journal. I liked reading but I was just too busy to sit and put down my thoughts. Plus I didn't have the self confidence to believe I could be a real novelist. They were "other people" not regular, everyday folk like me--a girl from Wisconsin, raised by a single mother in a trailer court. My mom was the one who talked of being an author someday--she wrote poems and dabbled in the arts, took us to the park so she could set up her easel and paint the fall colors. Then in high school I discovered I could sing--that I could use God's gift to me to encourage others. It gave me courage to explore what other possibilities lay ahead.
And then came John. We married in 1985 after graduating from college. John is an amazing man. He has vision like few people I've met in my life. He never says, "That's impossible." Instead he asks, "How can we make it happen?" He believes in me like no other. What is it about the confidence of others that makes us do things we could never do alone? But it's true.
In 1988 I took a job in the customer service department at Bethany House Publishers in Bloomington, Minnesota. I liked this job, liked helping people. When the phones weren't busy I'd go down to editorial to see if they had unsolicited manuscripts I could review. There were always far more than they could manage so they were eager to send them my way. I seemed to have an innate sense of not only what was lacking in a story but how to fix the story. So it wasn't long before I was transferred to the editorial department first as an assistant, then a proofreader, copy editor and line editor (I'll talk about these functions in future blogs). I worked at Bethany for over seven years--it was an excellent education in writing.
When we moved to the country I began my freelance editing business. I edited for many publishers--Word (now W and WestBow), Harvest House, Multnomah, Tyndale, Barbour and Baker/Revell. Then I was introduced via telephone to Lisa Bergren who was the fiction editor for a fledgling division of Random House called WaterBrook Press. Soon I was editing their entire fiction line, and loving it. I'd become the regular editor for amazing authors, including Lisa Bergren herself, Diane Noble, Jane Orcutt, Jane Kirkpatrick, Robin Lee Hatcher, as well as W Publishing authors Ted Dekker, Robert Whitlow, Frank Peretti and many, many others. (I still do some editing and it's always a treat.)
During that time, I sent newsletters to friends and colleagues about the happenings on our little farm--sheep escaping down the highway, raising baby chicks, bottle feeding calves in the spring. Lisa Bergen told me, "You need to turn your life into a novel." She kept nagging too. Her nagging, along with my husband's, birthed a new dream.
I realized I knew how to do this thing called fiction so I wrote a proposal for my first novel, A Can of Peas. It was accepted right off by WaterBrook and I was planted on a new path. I was a writer.
So, there you have it.
More tomorrow.
Warmly,
Traci DePree
