Dear Fellow Writers: No Man Is an Island

Did you enter the eBook giveaway yet? It’s still open, and you can enter as many times as you like, so be sure to jump in! Now, enjoy my latest missive. 

Dear fellow writers,

I need your help.

We’re in a war. This is the age of information, and books are written quickly and in huge quantities. Every week my phone notifies me of hundreds of new books to browse in the Kindle store; and that is just in the electronic library. Humanity has been writing since practically the beginning of time, and people keep producing new stories at a viral rate.

We writers are tempted to view the other authors as the competition. Like generals, we scour the Kindle store to see how we can maneuver our own small army of books and gain more ground. Fairytale retellings are the in-thing now? I must write one so I have a chance of survival! J.K. Rowling wrote another novel? Great, now no one will buy my books!

Those are first-person pronouns because I am guilty. When I saw other authors writing books and publishing them, I felt threatened. After all, that only increases the number of books for readers to choose and lowers the probability that they will pick mine. The war for authorship was raging, and I was losing.

Recently, though, I realized that I was wrong.

I can only write a book a year- possibly two when I graduate from college- but readers collect hundreds annually to grow their minds and imaginations. I usually write in speculative genres, but readers want things like historical fiction and thrillers so that they can make sense of our crazy world. I cannot write a decent love story to save my life, but readers search the romance section to find out what true love is. They need it, and I can’t give it.

The truth is, fellow writers, that the war is against lies, not other writers. Face it- there’s a lot of trash on the market right now, and I just can’t provide enough truth to combat the cultural lies. Couples want to know what to do about an unwanted pregnancy; how can I tell them loudly enough that there’s a third person involved? People want to know if marriage is really no more than two people who love each other; how can I reach them with news of the picture of Christ and the Church?

Thus, we truth-writers are all warriors in the same fight, and we are all in the same army. Especially if we are Christians, every other book by a new or indie author has everything to do with our ministries. A successful book is a victory for us all, and a book that no one reads is a wound to us all. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. No lone writer can fight the war alone. Not even Tolkien, the supreme commander of all fantasy writers could do that, so he had the Inklings. Thanks to that little band of writers, we have masterpieces like The Lord of the Rings and The Space Trilogy.

However, writers have a platform. I say it time and again until people are sick of hearing it: people who won’t listen to a sermon will listen to a story. This is why it makes me sick to hear people say that writing isn’t a real job or that English isn’t a real degree. Legislatures changed the laws on slavery, but it was the writers who first convinced people that those slaves were human beings. Money isn’t the idea here. Writers have more to live for; we are the among the ranks of those who change the world.

Now I’m asking all of us writers to unite. We need more Inklings clubs, more writing circles, more collaborative blogs. We need more indie authors and traditional publishers, teen writers as well as sixty-somethings. We need truth tellers, Christians, and brave warriors, who are authors.

Let’s stop fighting each other about who wrote the best fantasy book of 2016. Let’s start fighting the lies that dragons don’t exist and can’t be beaten.

Sincerely,

Hannah A. Krynicki