The Novel Buds

There we were, at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, near the end of the 2005 St. Davids Christian Writers’ Conference. I think it was Michele Huey who was the first to be brave enough to say, “I want to write a novel.”

Then Virelle Kidder said, “Me too.” And finally, I said, “I’ve got this coming of age novel rolling around in the back of my head…”

We’d all had success in different aspects of nonfiction books and magazines, but fiction… fiction was a different critter.

Virelle said she had a friend, Christa Parrish, in Upstate New York who was writing a novel too, and thus Novel Buds was born. And it’s going strong after five years.

Between the four of us, we’ve birthed close to a dozen books during that time–some published, some not. Some fiction, some not. We’ve prayed each other through life’s crises, and celebrated victories, large and small. Every Sunday night, we check in under our nicknames–Cookie for Virelle, Sweetie for Michele, Ace for Christa, and Joy for me–and share what we’ve done to advance our writing ministry in the past week and what we hope to do in the coming week.

Some weeks, we pass a lot of files back and forth. Some weeks, we don’t, because we’re busy marketing or speaking or updating our Web sites. We’re supportive, but we also don’t give each other a pass.

When I was in the early stages of my novel Fifteen, I had the male protagonist starting doing some work at his wife’s church without telling anyone who he was (so as to set up the big confrontation when the wife found out). I thought it worked fine. The Buds didn’t… and as a result, I ended up with my favorite secondary character, the husband’s longtime mentor who vouches for him to the pastor. And that’s only one instance where their constructive, specific criticism has made me a better writer. I hope I’ve helped them as well.

If you aren’t part of a real-world or online writing group, get going! Your writing… and your life… will never be the same.