Warm sunlight welcomed her on the other side of the tiny door.
She looked back at the huge tree she just crawled out from. It was growing beside a cliff, with a stream meandering nearby.
The surrounding forest was bright and welcoming, but she didn’t see any path. She ventured in anyway, making sure to remember her way back.
It was getting dark enough for her to consider going back when she saw the warm orange light of a fire. She came closer. A group of people sat in a circle, some of them with pieces of paper they were reading from.
One of the men met her gaze and got up.
“Welcome, we’re a group of Christian sci-fi and fantasy writers, and we’re here to help each other write better.” He extended his hand and showed her to one of the logs around the fire. “Larry was just about to read a scene from the book he’s working on, then we’ll all talk about how it could be better.”
She sat and listened, and shared her thoughts, and the next evening came back with her own scene. She continued visiting over the next few months, but the group grew thinner and less and less people shared their writing. Soon she felt that just sharing the scenes and getting feedback on such a small part was not quite enough for her either. She did get better at writing, but she needed something more, different.
By her constant visits, she created a tiny, barely visible path to her tree, but there was another, wider, leading out of the bonfire clearing. After the last discussion that evening, she followed the path. It was way shorter than she expected, and led to a meadow crammed with market stalls.
She made her way through the chattering crowd between the stalls. Some of the stalls were filled with books, but most only had one or two. She skimmed through some of the books that looked interesting.
She met some writers from the bonfire group, listened in on the discussions in the crowd. Few writers asked others to beta-read their novels.
She came back to her tree/writing haven with a stack of manuscripts and got to reading, scribbling notes of whatever she noticed could use some improvement.
She kept going to both of the groups and kept working on her stories.
The bonfire group started gathering writers to take part in an anthology, and the Story Crafter anxiously decided to take part. She was pretty sure she was the least experienced of them, but they promised to check and edit each other’s stories. It couldn’t end up too bad, could it?
So, she wrote it. Took her a few months, but she did meet the deadline. The group talked through the marketing efforts each of them would do and she designed and prepared whatever she could.
Finally, she stood before a huge building outside of the forest, with her manuscript clutched in her hands. The building wasn’t exactly pretty, in spite of the efforts to make it so. But it didn’t matter much. They had what she needed.
Inside, by a lifeless, white desk, she filled out the paperwork.
“That should do it.” She sighed, giving the pile of papers to one of the workers.
She returned to her tree and with another sigh picked up a pile of posters she wanted to place around the forest and the marketplace. She was exhausted.
After dark she returned, still with a handful of posters, but she decided to ignore them and rolled into a ball on her bed.
It took her almost a month to get to tinker with writing again. She was really excited that she finally finished and published something, but she hadn’t expected it to be quite so tiring. And she still wanted to improve her writing, but most of the advice she was getting in the groups she met, didn’t apply to her. The only one that made sense was to just keep writing. So she spent more and more time in her writing haven, and she did improve some. Just not as much as she wanted. And she wasn’t writing as much as she knew she could either.
One day at the marketplace she heard one of the writers talking to a small group.
“A lot of people here talk a lot about the books they want to write, but they don’t actually write all that much. I’m looking for writers who do want to write, so we can get each other going.”
That sounded good, so she joined the small group following the writer into the woods. They reached a small cabin. The writer who invited them in started the fire and asked what they were working on.
Soon it became Story Crafter’s favourite place to visit - with tea and cookies and cosy armchairs. And the writer that ‘forced’ them to write at least three paragraphs. And all the snippets she could read that other writers shared.
And she wrote more than before - often jumping from one story to another, but writing was even more enjoyable than before.
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