The Prayer of an Author

By Lauryn Trimmer

Dear God,

Thank you for making me able to write

Words that grow into stories.

Even though whether or not they are good stories remains questionable,

(The answer being almost positively no,)

Thank you for my efforts anyway.

Bless my family while they attempt to tolerate

The unexplained shouts of anger coming from my room

As my villain grows too villainous for my hero’s health.

Heal my parents when I wake them up in the wee hours of dawn

With whooping hollers of triumph

As I figure out how to resolve the main conflict of my novel.

Save the life of our old printer

Until I finish printing the rest of chapter sixty-four.

Bless me with Your peace and help me to remember that my story is fictional, and

I shouldn’t call my brother by my villain’s name,

Even though they look alike.

And above all, please forgive me.

I just made the villain kill one of the best characters in the entire book.

I am sad…

But I still love the feeling of absolute power in the pencil that I hold!

Mwahahahaha!

… Anyway,

Please give me the strength to write about good, not evil,

Unless I present the evil as unacceptable.

Even when I really want to strangle my villain to death because he just killed one of my favorite characters,

Show me where to draw the line.

(Also, please give me a ruler to trace, because if I’m going to be drawing lines…

You might as well know,

I’m not an artist.)

Thank you that I know ahead of time that my hero is going to win,

And please bless the people at the big publishing house.

Give them good health for today,

But tomorrow, please make them faint when they read my latest manuscript

Because they will know that it will be on the NY Times bestseller list

Within a week.

(I guess it would be okay if they didn’t faint,

But fainting sounds so much more dramatic,

And it would make a great cliffhanger

At the end of a chapter in my autobiography.)

And last but not least, thank you for my eraser,

Which has seen some great use,

Especially during the writing of this poem.

Amen.

Lauryn Trimmer lives in California with her parents and two brothers. When Lauryn was three, she began writing her own stories, most of them starring Snow White and Larry the cucumber. Now she enjoys writing poetry and working on her two novels. Her favorite genre is fantasy, but she writes contemporary Christian stories too. When she isn’t writing, Lauryn enjoys singing, playing basketball, and archery. In the future, Lauryn hopes to become a published novelist and an actress.