Where Were You Today by Sue Duffy

Sue Duffy

I know that place where you go to write. It is hallowed, a proving ground where you go to wrestle thoughts and words into a story worth telling. Leo Tolstoy once said, "One ought to write only when one leaves a piece of flesh in the inkpot each time one dips one's pen."

What compels writers to spend years writing a book? Perhaps an insatiable hunger for the proving ground, the welling up of a story that must be told. Perhaps merely for the promise of royalties, but I think not.

When I was writing my first novel, my oldest daughter would call me at night and ask, "Mom, where were you today?" She meant, what scene in the story had I inhabited that writing day. I would tell her I had sailed alone into a dark cove in Bimini, or fled a cult in the Connecticut countryside, or stalked a U.S. senator through Midtown Manhattan. And she would understand the powerful reality of my imaginary journey. Like life, it’s the journey, not the destination that resonates and changes us. It’s the writing, the doing, that strums that deep chord inside those God’s called to write. In turn, the power of the story changes our readers.

In A Circle of Quiet, writer Madeleine L'Engle said, "…For most artists, the world of imagination is more real than the world of the kitchen sink…When someone comes to me when I'm deep in writing, I have a moment of frightening transition when I don't know where I am, and then I have to leave the 'real' world of my story…"

That's why some write ─ to harvest those imaginary fields inside us, for the mystery, romance, adventure, and humor that balance and enchant life at the kitchen sink. Ours and our readers’.

It’s nice to win literary acclaim, but not necessary. The thrill is in the writing. If there's a story you've wanted to tell for years, a rhyming of words that comes to you late at night, a memory of something that changed your life ─ write it with all your might. As if all the world will read it, when perhaps only a few will. After all, Christ would have died to save just one, wouldn’t he?

Where were you today? Why do you continue to spend hours and hours on that story? What's your reason to write? Leave a comment; let's start a conversation.

Click to Tweet
Write as if all the world will read it. Click to Tweet
Like life, it’s the journey, not the destination that resonates and changes us. Click to Tweet

About the Author

Red Dawn Rising
by Sue Duffy

Sue Duffy is the author of four published novels, all suspense-thrillers. Fatal Loyalty and The Sound of Red Returning were finalists for ForeWord Review’s Book of the Year Award (inspirational category). Her latest release is Red Dawn Rising, second in the Red Returning trilogy. Book three releases in 2014. She is former editor of Lake Murray Magazine and Reach Out, Columbia Magazine. A journalism graduate of the University of Florida, she lives in Columbia, SC, with her husband, Mike. They have three children and six grandchildren.

Red Dawn Rising
She is a young set designer on Broadway. He is a former KGB assassin trying to outrun his vicious past and the underground revolution he once served. What they have in common are painful secrets that fester deep inside them, and an urgent quest for answers that can save the U.S. from a massive terrorist strike . . . and famed pianist Liesl Bower from assassination.

Connect with Sue: http://www.sueduffybooks.com/
Twitter: @sueduffy2
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sueduffysuspense