UNCERTAINTIES

by W.L. Elliott

I’ve wanted to write the story of my life for years now, but every time I try there is a great big monster that rears its ugly head and stops me from crossing the drawbridge between wanting and doing.

The troll under the bridge has many names, and even more faces, but it is, in reality, only my own uncertainty and fear. Of all the trials I have yet faced in my writing, this is the hardest to face and the only one that seems impossible to overcome.

In any undertaking, especially a worthy one, there is going to be opposition. In the case of those wishing to write good, clean, wholesome literature we are going to be faced with a number of challenges. Scratch isn’t going to let us get by that easily. There will always be publishers who won’t consider anything worthy that doesn’t have gratuitous sensuality, readers and critics who believe that anything innocent is naïve and unlearned, therefore of little value, and other authors willing to do anything at all to sell their product.

But these causes of discouragement are exactly the things that should give us the impetus that we need to forge onward! I need to write my book, and you need to write yours, to give the readers of the world a good, wholesome, and intelligent fare for their love of reading.

“For behold, out of the books which have been written, and which shall be written, shall this people be judged, for by them shall their works be known unto men.” (3 Nephi 27:25)

God said it, we believe it. That settles it.