Stacy L Thowe

I attribute my success, foremost, to the God-given talent the Lord has blessed me with. A talent for writing stories that people can relate to. Stories that stay with the reader long after they read The End.

I also attribute my success to my inherent need to help people through this gift. I write books to help people find their ultimate purpose. I write to provide hope to those who have given up on life. I write for those people who are in the middle of a life-altering event and don’t see a way forward. Empathy ranks very high among my skills, so I have a deep, inherent connection to the people around me and the struggles they are experiencing.

Achiever is also one of my top attributes, and I work hard at whatever job God puts before me. I work when no one is watching and when they are watching. I always put one hundred percent effort into all of my work. I try not to let fear control me, and I put my work and myself out into the world with every opportunity presented to me. I have developed tough skin. You have to in this industry. Not everyone is going to love your work. You are going to experience rejection after rejection, but you have to be able to move past that and keep working, believing in your ultimate goal of writing to help others. 

The best career advice I received was to keep writing and to write daily. I was also told to write what you know. There has been some debate on this last aspect, but I have found that you really do have to write what you know. You must have a background in a subject or experience in order to write it well. No matter how hard you try, if you haven’t truly experienced something or been around a subject, you don’t know or really understand its depth and outcome.

I was also told to take feedback in a positive way. I still struggle with this, even today. When you are a writer, all of your work is so precious to you, and having someone in your writer’s group or someone reading your work comment negatively does not sit well. But after years of sitting and listening to feedback, often not agreeing with it at first, when you take that feedback back to your work desk and maul it around, you usually find that the reviewer is correct. They are just trying to make your work the best it can be, and if you take whatever feedback they have and incorporate it into your work, it usually makes it better. This was a hard road for me to go down, and I sometimes have to take a minute to relook and think about what they said, but 7 out of 10 times, they are right.

But the great thing is that this is your work. Sometimes they are not right, and as a writer, you have every right to protect your work. They may not share your vision for it, and that is okay. Ultimately, it is your decision, but don’t be afraid to receive that feedback. 

My best advice is to put your work out into the world. I have come across so many young writers in this industry who are very good but fear putting their work out there to be judged. I have always told them it is truly okay if you are just writing for yourself and don’t want others to read it, but if that is not the case and you want your work to have an influence in today’s world, you have to put it out there. Otherwise, why are you doing this? This is a question writers have to ask themselves. Am I writing for me, so I can put words on paper and enjoy them, or do I want to share this work with the world for whatever reason?

If your answer is I want to share it with the world then do it. Enter contests, attend conferences, and book fairs. I say, fine-tune your craft and get your work out there. 

The biggest opportunity is the worldwide web. There are so many avenues available today to present your writing. There are so many ways to publish your work. This area is changing by the day, and it is crazy to keep up with. Writers want to write. They aren’t usually blessed with the answers on how to best market their work. And writers don’t have the time to market. They want to be writing. This is probably the most challenging aspect of today’s literary world. More and more publishers are requiring authors to market and have platforms. It can be exhausting.

I, myself, have hired someone part time to help with my marketing, which in turn gives me more time to write. It doesn’t solve all my marketing problems, but it gives me more time to do what I love, write. 

My most important values are my faith and my honor. I want to be the kind of writer God wants me to be. I recently attended a conference and listened to a speaker discuss the cynicism in today’s literary works and motion pictures. We, as a culture, have taken hope and faith off the table. There are disastrous endings where no one wins. We find books and movies offering less and less hope to their readers and ticket buyers. I want to be the kind of writer who restores that hope. I want to let the reader know there is a plan for their life. We will face life-altering events, but we can get through them together with God’s wisdom. We can still reach our ultimate purpose if we don’t give up our hope.

This is why I write. I write to restore hope and faith in this world. The sun will rise on another glorious day if we only take the time to see it.