Kristin Wolden Nitz

Stories are fluid things until they’re typeset.  That’s when most tinkering stops except for minor word tweaks and punctuation fixes.  The Monday before Thanksgiving I finished Calyn’s story again and sent it off to my agent.  My hope is that I’ll get a chance to finish it three or four more times with an editor who falls in love with it.  I have no control over that!  But I can look book on all my work through the prism of some words from Barbara Ueland’s 1938 classic If You Want to Write:

“I want to assure you with all earnestness, that no writing is a waste of time,—no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work.  With every sentence you write, you have learned something.  It has done you good.  It has stretched your understanding.  I know that.  Even if I knew for certain that I would never have anything published again, and would never make another cent from it, I would still keep on writing.”