When I was in college, I was a creative writing major; at age 21, my ambition was to be a novelist. But I also had an ambition not to starve, so when I graduated I took the practical course. I became a journalist instead.

Over the years I’ve worked as a journalist, a publisher, a marketer, a copywriter, a consultant — a wonderful career, a career I was lucky to have — but I didn’t write fiction. I thought about it though. Looking back, there wasn’t a single day in those 40+ years when I didn’t have at least a fleeting thought about the fiction I was not writing.

In my mid 50s, I read an article in the Washington Post with the headline “50 Things I Want to Do Before I Die.” This article changed my life. It said, basically: You don’t want to go to your grave with regrets; so make a list of the 50 things; and when you’re in the neighborhood, do them and check them off the list.

I made the list and couldn’t come up with 50 things, couldn’t even come up with 30. I came to view that as the sign of a life at least fairly well lived. One big thing on the list was to travel to Europe, which Carol and I had not done and both wanted to do. Over the next few years, we went to Italy and France — great trips.

But the more I thought about the list, the more I realized there was really only one important thing on it: my dream to write a novel.

So I did it. Over the next three years, while working a day job (running our home-based publishing company), I wrote the draft of To Love Mercy.

For me, the big moment was when I wrote The End. Sure, I wanted to be published, and when the day arrived that To Love Mercy was accepted for publication, I was ecstatic. But the biggest deal — the achievement of my youthful ambition — was completing a real novel, or anyway a novel I felt was real.

I didn’t think about publishability much while I was writing it, because I thought it would be unpublishable. Its concerns seemed so obscure — blacks and whites, Christians and Jews, how children view the world, Chicago in 1948. Why would readers care? I couldn’t imagine. So I just wrote the story that seemed to want release from my heart.

Many who read To Love Mercy in draft asked whether it was a young-adult novel, since it has kids as protagonists. I answered no. In my mind, it was, if anything, an old-adult novel. Turns out I was mistaken. To Love Mercy starts with the White Sox and ends with the White Sox; the year it was published the White Sox led the league. Schools are dying to find books with boys as protagonists, to get boys interested in reading. Schools are interested in books that raise issues of race in a serious way. To Love Mercy has gone onto reading lists at several high schools and middle schools already, and more have shown interest. So much for my commercial instincts.

I think I wrote a better novel because I wasn’t thinking about the market, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hope for commercial success. Now To Love Mercy has won six awards, collected 23 five-star reviews on Amazon, and gone into a second printing. More importantly, it has attracted the attention of a fine literary agent, Michele Rubin of Writers House, who now represents me. I haven’t made a nickel from my fiction yet, but for the first time it seems possible.

Michele has encouraged me to write two sequels — the “Chicago Trilogy” — and I’m hard at work. What situation could be more commercial? Now I’m struggling to avoid thinking about the market, and just try to keep things as real as when I was writing To Love Mercy from the heart.

The sad reality for most fiction authors these days is that most of us will never be published, at least not by the Simon & Schusters of the world. Chances are we won’t even be published by a small independent press, as I was. Sure, because of advancements in technology, we now can be published by companies like iUniverse, but that amounts to glorified self-publishing. You get a physical book to show friends and family, but little more. In most cases, iUniverse can’t get your books into bookstores, and bookstores are still where most people buy fiction.

I am encouraging you to face these facts, but with a smile. If you feel a story inside you, why not just write it for the sake of writing it — for yourself? Lightning still may strike. If you write from the heart, it might even be likelier to strike. Even if it doesn’t, you’ll still have something good for your tombstone — ‘He (she) wrote a novel.’

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. The first (of four) sections of “To Walk Humbly,” second novel in the “Chicago Trilogy,” is all but finished. In case you’d like to read a bit of it, visit www.frankjoseph.com in a day or so.