Writer Jan by Janice L. Dick

Writer Jan

            I’ve loved books as far back as I have memories, loved them for their feel and their smell, but mostly for the allure of a promised story. To me, stories are life. We all have our stories, some funny, some sweet, some sad. It is through story that we know ourselves, where we’ve come from, why we are who we are, what events have shaped our choices along the way.

            In spite of these long-held beliefs, I did not aspire to be a writer from a young age. Being a mild middle child, I didn’t know I could be a writer. No such high dreams for me. I continued my appreciation for books by reading as much as possible, moving from the Little Golden Books of my childhood to Nancy Drew and Pippi Longstocking and horse stories as a junior reader, to Russian authors like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in high school.            

            It wasn’t until 1989 that writing a fictional story became even a remote possibility in my mind. A well-known writer of the time had been invited to our local library and I attended. Even then, God knew when I needed a nudge in the right direction. After that meeting, a group of attendees decided to form a writing group, which functioned for over fifteen years.

            Also at that time, a fellow writer gifted me with a writing course she had not completed, and I was able to learn and practice many kinds of writing, with critiques to prompt me. I wrote articles for the local newspaper, news and inspirational pieces for our denominational magazine, and one day decided the time had come to begin a novel.

            I had heard stories of my ancestors in Russia since I was a child, and added to these, had amassed information on my husband’s family. Armed with this wealth of resources I started to write, stopped to research, wrote more, then started to create lists and charts to keep it all straight. Writing a novel, I discovered, was like creating a king-sized quilt in a closet-sized room. The whole of it could not be seen all at once, but the pieces had to blend into a pleasing and connected whole.

            At first I didn’t know if I could fill a whole book, but the story had a life of its own and took three volumes to tell. I fell in love with the characters and felt I had lived among them in that far-off place. I felt God speak to me in that creative space: tell these stories so the world will know that I Am.

            I made a surprising discovery on the way to publication: each novel is harder to write than the one before. Perhaps the earlier ones were written in the innocence of not knowing the rules, of following my instincts. but I continue to persevere, and the stories continue to satisfy my need to create and to follow the path that Christ set before me from the beginning.