By Kathleen Y’Barbo Turner @KathleenYBarbo When my daughter was in kindergarten, her teacher asked the children to interview an adult about his or her job and come back to class the next day with a report on what they learned. Hannah grilled me about my job as a writer, and I answered her questions about how I constructed my stories. …
What is that to You?
By Sara Davison As writers, I believe we wrestle with many of the same issues: self-doubt, lack of confidence, times of being blocked creatively, discouragement. Most of us also have a tendency to compare ourselves to other writers, worrying more about what they are doing or achieving than focusing on our own lives and work. Peter struggled with this. When Jesus …
Standing Back-to-Back: New Writers Need Community
By Ashley Worrell Does your ignorance ever get the better of you? Mine gets me all the time. As a new writer I have made many decisions based on whether something sounds fun. This mentality has sometimes worked out well, sometimes not. This blog, for instance, sounded like a fun way to help me meet fellow writers, so I signed …
The Practice of Perseverance
By Lisa Kelley @LisaKelleyWrite Waiting to be published can be daunting as well as disappointing. I closed out 2022 empty. I had semi-finaled in a writing contest but didn’t progress. One judge suggested I shouldn’t have made it to the semi-finals. I had a manuscript rejected, and I’d finished my fifth novel only to discover, after one of those hard …
Use Those Negative Reviews
By B.D. Lawrence @BDLawrence3 We’ve all received less than positive reviews. For me, when I published my first book, An Angel and a One-Armed Man, I started seeing four and five-star reviews with the occasional three-star review. But then it happened. I received a two-star review. It wasn’t the star count that gave me the pit in my stomach, it …
Research Can Teach You a Hard (if Useful) Lesson
by Glynn Young I learned a very hard lesson while writing a historical novel. I learned how hard it can be, and it’s hard for both the research you do and for the research you have to ignore. I’m writing a novel that takes place in two historical periods – the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, and 50 years …
Is a Small Press Right for You?
by Linda Fulkerson @lindafulkerson) You’ve finished your novel, passed it around the Beta reader circuit, received feedback from contests, revised and self-edited ad nauseam, and completed the final read-through. Your story sings! Now what? It’s obviously time to submit. So, the better question is “Now where?” The path to publication forms a Y that leaves would-be authors two choices: traditional …
Plotter or “Pantser” – Is One Better than the Other?
By Lori Domingo @LoriDomingo22 If someone had asked me that question a year ago, I would have proudly declared, “I’m a pantser. I never write from a plot outline. It’s too confining.” I had managed to complete one manuscript without it, and was hard-pressed when I was required to write one for one of my MA classes. It was something …
Martha and Martha: A Lesson in Learning and Writing
By Kathleen Y’Barbo @KathleenYBarbo We all know about Martha from the Bible. Biblical Martha was the Martha Stewart of her day, bustling around showing Jesus her devotion to Him with hospitality without any help from her sister Mary. From this story, we learn that sitting at the feet of Jesus—literally for these biblical sisters and figuratively for us in modern …
Reflecting the Gospel Through Our Characters
by M.D. House @Real_HouseMD At first blush, this doesn’t seem like such a difficult task. But when we examine the recent success of The Chosen—and all of the painstaking work which has gone into not just the cinematography but the storytelling itself—we realize the steep challenge involved in securing the sweet promise of that goal. Such stories and their characters …