Friends,
There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles in after you’ve been at this writing life long enough. The rejections stack up. The “almosts” start to feel heavier than the maybes. And somewhere in the middle of it all, it’s easy to start measuring your worth by whether an agent said yes, whether a publisher took the book, whether the world is currently clapping.
That’s why this conversation with Laurel Saville landed so hard for me.
I compiled her Q&A for Writing Day Workshops this month, and her closing sentence has been echoing in my chest ever since:
“Remember that it is writing, not publishing, that makes you a writer.”
Laurel has walked the long road. Twenty years of hurdles before her memoir found a home. An editor who later called one of her novels the biggest mistake of her career. Magazines that folded. Publicists who vanished at launch. And still, she keeps showing up to the page.
What I love most is how she talks about the actual work. She compares writing to gardening: most of the job is getting down in the dirt and pulling weeds so the real plants can grow. Cliches. Shortcuts. Purple prose. All the things that try to choke out the fragile, true thing that first sparked in your imagination. Her “ritual,” she says, is simply to work like a word farmer.
She doesn’t romanticize inspiration. She doesn’t pretend the business side is easy. She just keeps returning to the one thing that still belongs to us no matter what the industry does: the writing itself.
If you’ve been feeling like you’re only as good as your last yes (or your last silence), I hope you’ll read her full answers. There’s gold in here about knowing when a book is “good enough,” about creating characters who feel alive, about protecting your creative energy while still doing the necessary business, and about how connection (not perfection) is what keeps her excited after all these years.
You can read the whole feature here: https://www.writingdayworkshops.com/blog/laurel-saville-remember-that-it-is-writing-not-publishing-that-makes-you-a-writer
I’d love to know in the comments: Which part of Laurel’s advice do you need most right now? And where are you still tempted to let publishing define whether you’re “really” a writer?
I’m right here in the dirt with you,
Brandy
P.S. The work you’re doing on the page today counts. Even if no one else sees it yet. Especially then.