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by A.C. Williams @ACW_Author

“God gave me this story.”

Have you ever started a pitch with that statement? It’s okay if you have. It’s not necessarily a bad place to begin, especially if you’re at a Christian writing conference. That tells the agent or publisher you’re speaking to a lot about who you are and what your purpose is as an author. What matters about this statement is the way you say it. 

During the years I worked in publishing, I heard this statement often. Aspiring writers would sit across the table from me, and they would start off by making sure I understood that God had called them to write the story they were about to pitch to me. 

I always appreciate knowing that, because I believe it’s a valid statement. I believe that God is fully capable of calling a person to write a specific story about a specific topic. I have never questioned that. The Lord has often led me to write specific books, articles, stories, or essays about topics I didn’t want to touch with a ten-foot pole. 

Guess what? This blog post is one of them.

I never want to discount Divine influence in storytelling, but there is something we really need to consider as storytellers who claim the name of Christ before we start slapping the “God told me so” label on all our projects. 

Writers, Don’t Make Your Story About You by @ACW_Author on @BRMCWC #Writing #Writinglife #BRMCWC Share on X

The Lord may have told you to write your story, absolutely, and in that case, you need to do it. But that doesn’t guarantee that your story is destined to be published. The Lord may have asked you to write the story for your own growth. Perhaps He asked you to write it so that you could explore your relationship with Him more deeply or maybe for you to unpack something that happened to you in your past. 

God’s direction to write a specific story doesn’t give you permission to demand publication from every publisher you meet. Yet, this is the attitude many authors had when they approached me as an acquisitions editor. The author would present a manuscript to me that didn’t match formatting expectations or submission guidelines, and they would express that God had personally told them to write it as though this fact excused their blatant disregard for industry-standard formatting. I would offer feedback in an attempt to be helpful, and they would often argue with me—claiming that they knew their genre better than I did or that because other successful authors had done it, they could do it too. 

I remember one time, an author sat down in front of me and started his pitch off with a question: “What is your publishing company going to do for me that I can’t do for myself?”

Another time, another author sat down across from me and stated: “If you want me to change my manuscript from how I’ve written it, I don’t want you to be my publisher.”

I wish I were joking or even exaggerating. 

No one is entitled to anything. Let’s just be clear about that. The fact that you’ve written a manuscript is wonderful, and it should be celebrated. But the mere fact that you have written a novel doesn’t entitle you to demand it be published. Frankly, it doesn’t even give you the right to demand people read it. 

You can try, of course, but in my experience the more you demand something out of a sense of entitlement, the less likely you are to receive it. 

As a wise man in our industry so eloquently put it: “God may have told you to write it, but He didn’t tell me to publish it.”

I hope that God has directed you to your manuscript. That is a beautiful thing, to know Him so well that He can guide you to your next story. Embrace it. But please don’t behave as though that gives you special permission to be considered as more deserving than someone else. 

When you speak to a publisher or agent, be humble. They have made time to speak to you, and it is wise to demonstrate to them that you value their time. Don’t dominate the conversation; be willing to listen to what they have to tell you. Don’t demand anything from them; you are not in a position to do that. 

God may have given you your story, but when you approach a pitch appointment with a sense of entitlement, you are making it about you. Yes, be confident. Yes, be professional. But don’t try to steal glory from God. He has never been a big fan of that.

A.C. Williams is a coffee-drinking, sushi-eating, story-telling nerd who loves cats, country living, and all things Japanese. Author of more than 20 books, she keeps her fiction readers laughing with wildly imaginative adventures about samurai superheroes, clumsy church secretaries, and goofy malfunctioning androids; her non-fiction readers just laugh at her and the hysterical life experiences she’s survived. If that’s your cup of tea (or coffee), join the fun at www.amycwilliams.com.