By Elizabeth Musser Dear Lord, As 2020 opens like a blank manuscript before me, please hear my heart. May the words I write this year be well-chosen and crafted to the best of my ability. Oh, I know the first draft won’t be a thing of beauty. But please renew my desire, my zeal, to spend the time thinking about, …
What We Experience Affects What We Write
By Kimberley Woodhouse Write what you know. We’ve all heard it. But is that always the best advice? It worked for the character Anne in her vignettes of Avonlea, and it worked for Jo of Little Women, right? But what about all the adventurous and exciting stories they wrote and longed to write? Just like those fictional characters, our inquisitive, …
Those Important First Pages
by Jamie Chavez Sometimes you set out to do a thing for one reason only to find it was so much more than you ever imagined. More than you could have actually planned. In this case, I learned just how much value can be wrung out of focusing on the first chapter and how it relates to the rest of …
When God Has Something Else in Mind
God has blessed me with a large, close family. Between my mom and dad’s brothers and sisters, I have a total of seventeen aunts and uncles. And that’s not including their husbands and wives. The number of cousins I have, that include second cousins who are actually my age, would take a while to count. If I see one of …
How to Win at Writers’ Conferences
By Deb Haggerty What is your goal when you go to a writers’ conference or convention? Is it to sell your latest book? Is it to learn more about your craft? Preparing yourself for the occasion is important. When teaching networking, my mantra was “Always keep in mind those to whom you can refer others.” You never know when someone …
My Friend Writer’s Block
By Suzanne Bratcher WRITER’S BLOCK: Anything that stops our writing. My high school English teacher would hate that definition. I can almost hear her snap, “What do you mean by anything? For that matter, what do you mean by writing?” To appease her, let’s try a simile. Writer’s block is like a horse that stops dead in the road and …
Happy New Year!
By Shirley E. Gould It’s 2020! Happy New Year to you, my writing friends. With 2019 behind us, we are facing a clean slate. That should make us happy. We have another opportunity to succeed in relationships, in our spiritual journey and in our writing endeavors. To succeed, we must prepare. I’m a planner. I make diet and exercise changes …
A New Year, A New Attitude
By Cindy Patterson Today is the last day of the year. But not only is it the last day of the year, it’s the last day of this decade. As I’ve been thinking about what I wanted to post about, my mind has taken me in all different directions. That could be because 2020 and the beginning of a new …
A Blurred Starting Line
By Shirley E. Gould According to the calendar, today is the first day of winter. With the variety of weather conditions across America you could have three feet of snow on the ground or be basking in the warm sunshine along the coast. We, in middle Tennessee, had an endless summer with a serious drought, basically two weeks of fall …
The Joy and Surprise of Writing With
By Chandra Lynn Smith A couple of years ago at the ACFW conference I was privileged to take Allen Arnold’s continuing session. It was a most amazing blessing! (That’s my exclamation point use for the day.) During our opening session he had a stack of spiral-bound notebooks. He walked around the room and gave a notebook to each of us. …