“Has your book been successful?”

It’s a question I get asked regularly these days when I tell strangers that I am a writer? And I’m never quite sure how to respond. I could say, “No. It has sold less than 2,000 copies,” and that would be a true (although a bit of a conversation stopping) response. Numbers never lie, right?

I guess it all depends on my notion of success. If it’s based on book contracts and royalties and bestseller lists, by all measures, my writing career so far is an utter failure. But if it’s based on whether I learned to write stories, with dialogue and themes and a cogent plotline and characters… if it’s based on taking risks, working hard, telling a story as truthfully and carefully and beautifully as I know how… if it’s based on the relationships that have grown out of that story, if it’s based on the responses of readers who have been blessed by the story… well, then, yes, it has been a success.

Flannery O’Connor, my current muse, wrote to a writer friend of hers, “You do not write the best you can for the sake of the art but for the sake of returning your talent increased to the invisible God to use or not use as he sees fit” (The Habit of Being, 419). She also wrote, “When you write a novel, if you have been honest about it and if your conscience is clear, then it seems to me that you have to leave the rest in God’s hands. When the book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry about this is to take over God’s business” (The Habit of Being, 143).

What’s true of writing is true of any other good endeavor. Fill in the blank… “When you are a parent and your child goes to college, if you have been honest about it and your conscience is clear, then it seems to me that you have to leave the rest in God’s hands…” “When you teach a class…” “When you design a building…” “When you clean a kitchen…” “When you…”

I want to measure success by the honesty of my labor and the clearness of my conscience and the desire to trust that the labor has been handed over as an offering. What happens next–whether it be considered success or failure–that’s up to God.