Making a Difference through Your Writing: A Guest Post

We are delighted to share the following guest post from Johanna Craven, the Creative Director of non-profit publishing house Compassiviste Publishing.

We are partnering with Compassiviste, who has generously offered expanded prizes for the Tadpole Press 100-Word Writing Contest, including a manuscript assessment package and a publishing and marketing package to two of the winners of our November contest.

If you’re anything like me, being a writer can sometimes cause you to question the importance of what you do. As a fiction author, I often feel as though my work is flippant or unimportant. After all, I’m not solving any great societal problems by writing stories. I’m not curing cancer, or delivering world peace. What is the value of what I do?  

These thoughts resurface a lot, but I always try to catch myself, because when I stop to really examine them, I realize they are not true at all. After all, what would the world be without the creative arts? What would life be like if we never had the joy of losing ourselves in a book? Never had the joy of being transported to another time and place by words alone? Or losing ourselves in another world for a while?

Over the years, I’ve received a number of messages and emails from my readers thanking me for the escape my books offer them, or for helping them rediscover the joy of reading. I keep every single one of these messages—and go back to read them whenever that doubt starts to creep in again. 

But being able to offer readers an escape from the daily grind, while inherently valuable, is just skimming the surface of what writing can offer the world. Writing, like any art form, has an immense power to effect change. Compassiviste Publishing, one arm of charitable organization Compassiviste, is built around the idea that sharing our words and stories can have a powerful effect on the world around us.

As authors, when we put our words down on the page, we are sharing a piece of ourselves with our readers, and in doing so, we are helping them see the world from a new perspective. Our words—whether fiction or non-fiction—can inspire others, teach readers something new, open their eyes to issues they may have previously been unaware of, and make them think in unexpected ways. From parables to poetry, historical epics, sci-fi, autobiographies and everything in between, our words can make readers aware of new ideas, new places, new cultures, and new ways of looking at life. They encourage us to think, to learn, to discuss and yes, sometimes, to change for the better. 

Does this mean every time we sit down to write, we need to do so with the intention of changing the world? Of course not. But if you ever find those doubts about the significance of what you do as a writer resurfacing, take a moment to consider the inspiration, the knowledge, or perhaps—simply, but no less valuably—the entertainment you are offering your readers. Who knows where that might lead?   

Johanna Craven is the Creative Director of non-profit publishing house Compassiviste Publishing. They welcome fiction and non-fiction submissions from writers at all stages of their career, whose work covers important social, cultural and environmental topics. For more information, visit https://compassivistepublishing.com.