Just Write

Aspiring authors sometimes put enormous pressure on themselves because they're trying to write The Book. Every sentence has to be brilliant. Every chapter has to work. Every idea has to survive.

But creativity cannot be a slave to perfection. Or maybe another way to look at it is that creativity demands honesty and heart and sometimes (often) those things aren’t perfect. They’re messy. They’re raw. That’s why they work. Because they land with people who have raw, messy, and imperfect lives who want to feel seen.

Dolly Parton somehow knew this intuitively, and she blessed us all by acting on that knowledge with an unwavering belief in herself and the stories she knew she needed to tell.

She wrote a lot. Legend tells us that she wrote “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” in the same day. Which is breathtaking to consider now. But she was able to do that because she just kept writing.

She wrote more than 3,000 songs over the course of her career. Thousands of attempts to turn an idea, or a spark, or a thought into something another person might feel. Thousands of bridges from her heart to the hearts of millions of people all over the world.

There's an important lesson there for anyone trying to write a book. And it’s simple: just write. Write the hard stuff. Write the happy stuff. As long as you write it from the heart. And don’t stop writing.

There's another lesson Dolly taught us about not running away from our roots, even when they’re humble or hard. Rather, we should write from it. Dolly Parton didn't succeed despite her beginnings. She turned those beginnings into the emotional vocabulary of her work.

She wrote about family. Poverty. Ambition. Heartbreak. Faith. Pride. Sacrifice. Love. The mountains of East Tennessee. The people who raised her. The things she had and the things she didn't. She didn't try to make those experiences sound bigger or more sophisticated so they might appeal to a wider audience. She was simply honest. Her honesty is what people connect with and adore.

The more personal her stories became, the more universal they became. You didn't need to grow up in a two-room cabin in Tennessee to understand “Coat of Many Colors.” You only need to know what it feels like to love something others don’t quite appreciate. You didn't need to live Dolly's life to recognize heartbreak, longing, determination, or hope.

That's an important lesson for writers. Sometimes authors sand away the very details that make their stories different because they're trying to make a book appeal to everyone. But readers rarely fall in love with "everyone's" story.

They fall in love with a story so truthful, specific, and human that somehow, they find their own story inside it. Dolly understood that instinctively. She didn't leave her beginnings behind. She turned them into stories and invited the rest of the world home. That's one of the great paradoxes of writing.

Authors sometimes believe they need to make their stories broader to reach more people. Often the opposite is true. The more human, specific, and authentic the story becomes, the more likely someone else is to recognize something of themselves inside it.

And then there's perhaps the biggest lesson of all: The work isn't finished when you've written it. Writing is an act of creation. Publishing is an act of connection.

There's inspiration everywhere if writers are willing to look for it. Not only from novelists or publishing experts, but from songwriters, filmmakers, teachers, entrepreneurs, children, and anyone else who understands how stories move between human beings.

That's one of the things we believe deeply at First Flight Books. Writers should never stop learning from storytellers. Different medium. Different audience. Different stage. Same fundamental challenge: Take something that exists inside you and write it so you can allow another person feel it.

Then pick up the pen and do it again.