Faith & Mindset

By Steve Dunn Hanson   

In high school my most dreaded assignment was to write a composition. Give me a book, like Orwell’s 1984 back then, and you could just about say goodbye to me until I had finished it. But writing . . . ? Hand me a math problem or a science project or, preferably, a basketball or a MAD magazine. Just don’t ask me to write, or, even worse, give a talk.

Maybe my handwriting had something to do with this aversion. The lowest grade I ever received in school was in penmanship in the fourth grade. Mine was the poorest in the class. The teacher told us that she would give a book, The Magic Bus, to the student who improved the most in penmanship. It was no contest. I was so bad nobody could possibly improve as much as I could. I got the book, but bettering my handwriting never got close to the top of my I-want-to-do-this list again. Thank goodness for typewriters and computers!

So, when did my attitude about writing and speaking change, and why? Well, weird things sometimes happen when you grow up. For me, I began to discover that I had something meaningful to say. And if I was going to effectively share with others what I was observing and experiencing and thinking, I had to do something about my subpar communication skills.

While each of us has our own unique path to where we are today in the use of our creative talents, all of us are faced with the same ongoing and defining question: Why am I doing this? Is it for money, or for recognition, or to be famous? Is it to make others happy, or to help others overcome challenges, or to share knowledge, or to provide entertainment? Will it give me an outlet for something in me that needs to get out, or fulfill my desire to achieve, or give me a satisfaction-high by watching something new and even beautiful flow from me? Or is it my duty to create?

Any or all the above might be our answer. But whatever our reasons for creating, we need to count on snags along the way. My foray into getting my first book published illustrates this rather dramatically. And, I might add, that this initial rollercoaster experience of mine has been replicated, in one form or another, a myriad of times throughout my creative journey. Here’s how it went.

Some 40 years ago I had two articles published in the Ensign magazine within a year or two of each other. That confidence builder got me thinking about writing a book. And I knew just the book I wanted to write. As a young man, I had an extraordinary Church mission to Australia. It had everything. Gobs of spiritual highlights. Dangers. Depressions. Really funny incidents. And even why-am-I-out-here gut-punchers. I could literally go 3,000 miles from one end of my mission to the other and be on islands or in the tropics or deserts or snowy mountains. I labored in small outback towns that were 100 years behind anything I had ever experienced as well as in a dazzling metropolis that boasted world-class beauty. All of this plus out-of-this-world fauna like kangaroos, emus, koalas, echidnas, and platypuses. I was in an exotic zoo with no cages.

In sum, my mission was an adventure I never dreamed possible, and I was certain the world would be waiting with bated breath to read about it! But after my initial enthusiasm, I was struck with a balloon-popping realization. Who would ever want to buy a book about the mission of a nobody like Steve Dunn Hanson? And with that came a critical question. “Why do I want to write this book? Really!”

Significant soul searching resulted and some course-guiding answers came. I decided my primary objective in writing was to help young missionaries find out who they were so their missions could be the life changing experience for them that mine was for me. Now all I had to do was write the book so it would appeal to a publisher and entice young men and women to read it. That shouldn’t be too hard. After all, the Ensign published two of my articles. Dream on!

I titled the book The Mission. It was a fictionalized account of some of my mission experiences with a focus on the changes taking place in the life of my protagonist, Elder Pete Hewitt. I wrote it as a series of letters that brought the reader into Pete’s mission and mind in a unique and intimate way. I submitted my manuscript to a major Latter-day Saint publisher and within two or three weeks I received a phone call from the managing editor saying they wanted to publish it. Well, I thought, what was so hard about this?

Then reality hit.

Someone on the publisher’s board of directors didn’t like the book—too realistic they said. Remember this was over 30 years ago, and Latter-day Saint fiction tended to be more vanilla then. I soon received a “with regrets” letter from the managing editor. They would not be publishing it. I picked myself up off the floor (I stayed there for quite a while!) and submitted my work to other Latter-day Saint publishers. My rejection letters piled up until I received an acceptance from a very small publisher. That was an almost euphoric experience, but I was learning to restrain my hope. A publishing date was set, and then . . . reality hit. Again.

The company didn’t have the funds to publish it for a while, they said apologetically. I could wait for when they did (no date was given), or, if I wanted to do this now, they would help me self-publish it and would distribute it for me at a special price. I would, of course, foot the bill. I had run out of options, and since I had the funds, that’s what I did.

Amazon didn’t exist back then, and there wasn’t a plethora of publishing, marketing, editing, formatting, or distributing services to get a self-published book up and going. My would-be publisher, however, was good to their word and successfully guided me through the process. A learning experience, and an expensive one. I printed 7,000 hardback copies, and Deseret Book and other Latter-day Saint bookstores carried them. It was all working. At one point, Deseret Book even told me The Mission was their top-selling book for the week.

And then . . . (Stop me if you’ve heard this before).

While all copies of my book were ultimately sold, my publisher/distributor declared bankruptcy somewhere along the way, and I was sans thousands of dollars in royalty compensation. But fortunately, that was not the end of the story.

Over the years, I have had countless people tell me how that book changed their mission. Changed their lives. And even today, decades later, I have had grandfathers approach me to tell me how my book affected them deeply when they were struggling with their missions. And I’ve thought, it didn’t just affect these now-grandfathers, but through them their children and grandchildren as well. My book was a success in the most meaningful way it could be. It accomplished what I wrote it to do.

My answer to the “Why” question back then was the right answer and put me on a convoluted but exceptionally rewarding path. The ride was amazing . . . especially looking back. But, then again, maybe I have just described life.

How we respond to the “Why” question, of course, is affected by how we answer another question: Where does my talent come from? Am I the source of my creative genius and solely responsible for how successfully it is manifested and received? Or is my talent a gift from God that He has given me stewardship over, and my magnifying it requires an abundance of His grace?

While I, for one, find it disturbingly easy to drink in accolades and internalize praise, that is literally a dead-end street. I wrote a little poem about that.

When I think
that it is me,
I find my glint
is hard to see.

As I lose myself in Him,
His Beam bursts forth
where e’er I Am.

When we perceive that we are the sole or primary source of our talents, we will likely focus on ourselves. A dim light indeed. If we recognize the gift-nature of our abilities, we will strive to know what the Lord wants us to do with the talents He has given us. On an admittedly bumpy and inconsistent road, we will also grow and learn to become an extension of Jesus Christ; an instrument in bringing about His purposes. We are then entitled to have the Spirit work through us, and what proceeds can be far beyond what we are innately capable of producing.

How we answer the “Why” and “Where” questions will affect the content, quality, and impact of our creativity. But those responses beg another question that is even more important. Are they congruous with who we really want to be eternally? If not, perhaps we should consider reprioritizing some of our objectives.

Steve Dunn Hanson has a BS in economics and an MA in political behavior. He has served in many community and Church capacities, including as a jail chaplain, stake president, and member of a temple presidency. He lives with Joyce, his wife of 57 years, in northeast Washington and is the author of several books, including The Course of Fate, a fiction trilogy currently available on Amazon.