Advice To a Newbie Writer

This month the writers at Quills and Inkblotts are thinking back to their early days of writing, and sharing advice they would give themselves if they could.

I have to go back nearly five years, to Fall of 2011. That's when my husband listened to me falter, and shrug, and attempt to explain this writing "thing" which I didn't even fully understand. He was gracious to give me two full days alone to write (with three children under 7, that was an extravagant gift to me). I cranked out 10,000 words in those two days. When the weekend was over, I emerged from my cocoon smiling, exhausted, and excited about what I had created.

I've added hundreds of thousands of words to those first ones, in the form of four complete manuscripts (and one partially written one), two blogs, and pages and pages of journaling. 

If I could go back to that faltering, excited newbie writer, I would tell her three things.

1.  It's not ready yet. It's not even close.
Stop fantasizing about your adoring fans, and how much they are going to love your work. You think it's great. It's not. Don't waste a single second thinking about querying (silly me, you don't even know that word yet), contests, and publication. You're not there yet. 

This will be a long process for you. There will be starts and stops, and massive "life stuff" that suffocates the writing flame. Let it happen. The flame won't go out entirely. It will be a pilot light, fragile, blue, and flickering in cobwebby shadows in the basement of your mind. When the time is right, the flame will roar to life again. You will successfully knock the cobwebs away, and open the document. The story will change in ways your mind can't conceive right now. After all this time, you will have eyes to see how much you've learned about writing, about life, and about God. That has to happen. You can't rush it, so just keep pinging away on the keyboard for now, and know that it's not ready yet.

2. You are not alone.
I know you feel like the only person on earth who has had this crazy idea: I think I'll try to write a book. You walk past shelves at the library, lightly touching the cellophane-wrapped spines as you pass them, convinced those authors are mythical beasts. They don't exist in your world. Normal, suburban nobodies like you don't dream this dream. They don't devote copious isolated hours to this strange task which may never come to fruition. 

In a few short years (they will feel long to you, but they aren't), God will make you see that your greatest need as a writer is to have a reader. You will pray for that constantly for a while, feeling acutely lonely, and then He will direct you to ACFW. You will discover a whole world full of people exactly like you, the ones who dreamed this dream, devoted themselves to their creative labor, and came together online to encourage, critique, and remind one another that they are not alone. This will change everything for you. Remember to thank God for this when it happens.

3. Take the pressure off yourself. God is sovereign over this.
You will read Ephesians 4:1 "I, therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge to you walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called." And you will hope writing is what God has called you to do. You will wonder, what does it look like to walk in a manner worthy of it? A thousand words a day every day? A blog post every week? Post clicks, likes, and shares? Saving up for conference? The Almighty Book Deal?

This verse will weigh heavy on you as the years of striving pass with nothing much to show for your work. You will begin to doubt this is what God called you to do. "I'm trying!" your heart will cry out in shame that you were wrong, and in fear that you've wasted your time, your witness, your life.
 
Then one Spring day in early 2016 God will pry your eyes open and make you see the pride in all your striving. He'll show you how your heart was tangled up in self-righteous knots, and how your ambition, though it has always been sincerely to please him, was also bound up in your own glory, the work of your hands, the thing you would create. You hoped it would please him, but you also hoped it would please a publisher; that it would make you feel satisfied, productive, and accomplished.  

That's not your calling, my friend. Your calling is so much bigger than writing, so much longer-lasting. It is eternal.

Your calling is to live a life justified, in fellowship with Christ Jesus. It looks like patience. It looks like obedience. You don't need to strive. The striving is done. It was done by One more qualified and able than you.

But there is work. If your calling is to live in fellowship with Christ, then your work is that which builds up the body of Christ. This can be done through writing fiction; through creating characters who struggle with disunity, who learn, and who grow in their faith. It is right to use this writing gift to tell the story of a people who loved the Lord. It is a fitting labor.



This I know today, after five years of writing: I am at rest.
I still don't have it all figured out. I still have made very little of myself in the writing world. Truthfully, I am not worthy of this writing work. I confess that to you, Dear Reader, and to God. Yet the work continues, and will continue until God takes from me this dream, and sets my heart on another. Until that day, this work of my hands, this thimble of foam, I offer trembling to Christ, to do with what he will--to keep it hidden, or to give it wings--whatever would be to the benefit to his beloved people, the Church. I can rest in that.

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Writing for a Sovereign God

By Robin

I have a journal in which I write almost exclusively about writing.

This is the story (told partly in retrospect) of my life, my work, my heart, over four and a half years of writing. It tells the story of why I started. It tells of my victories, frustrations, insecurities, triumphs, and doubts as I've walked this writing path. It tells of my great love for God and for the craft of writing fiction.

It's interesting to thumb through the pages I've filled so far (a hundred or so) and see the same theme pop up about every other month. I cruise along for weeks, writing, making progress, pleased with my work, and then--screech--the same niggling questions slam on the breaks.

What am I, that the Lord should be mindful of me?

What is my mouth, that it should speak?

My hands, that they should write?

My words, that they should be heard?

I have to spend a day, or two, or a week, working them out for myself before I can take my foot off the break and ease into traffic again. You would think, after all this time, after all the pencil-scrawled words poured out attempting to answer these questions, I'd have figured it out by now. I haven't.

I still find myself wondering if I'm not actually His most unfit servant. I am beset by pride every day, at every turn. I am wrong about so much. I don't have some special access to God that isn't available to every other believer in His creation. I didn't actually hear or sense His specific words to me: "Here is a story from Me to you. Go forth. Do well."

Some days my countenance is brought so low, I'm so convinced my writing is terrible, and nothing will come of this, and I was crazy to ever think it would, the only thing that keeps me from giving up is the sight of all the empty pages in my journal yet to be filled. I can't bear to think that my writing story is over yet.

It was begun in 2011, during a season of personal and professional chaos, before I fully understood what I was doing, where I was going with it, or why I was doing it. But it was begun. In the canvas of my life, a thread was knotted behind the scenes, the first stitch was laid, then the second, then the third.

Not by me. I am nothing on my own. Like the Psalmist who also asked, "What is man, that you are mindful of him?" (Psalm 8:4) I know from whom my life, my breath, my worth, and my work comes.

The sovereign God who brought the universe into existence, the Author of history, the Redeemer of mankind, the Beginning and the End--that same God--took the time in 1979 to breathe into being a new life, one chosen before the foundation of the world, predestined to love and worship Him. (Ephesians 1:3-5)

And that I do, just as He ordained.

It's when I think I've got to have all the questions answered that the magnitude of His sovereignty becomes paralyzing. How do I know if I'm supposed to be doing this? If I'm the one to be doing this? If my labor will ever yield fruit in this life?

Because it may not. 

That's not up to me, no matter how hard I work, no matter how many revisions I sweat and cry over, no matter how much I try with my own power to make it good enough.

It's. Not. About. Me.

How wonderful, the thought. How freeing! 

The future is not mine to know or manipulate. My destiny, on earth or in heaven, is not in my hands, thank God. How I would screw it up if it was.

He's the One who chose me.

He's the One who made my mouth to speak.

He's the One who strengthens my hands.

He's the One who gives me words.

God will do what God will do. I am simply to follow the thread.  

My dear writer friends, the cry of my heart is that you too would cling tightly to the thread that was begun in the canvas of your life, even if you don't yet understand what to do with it. Even if you can't see how there will ever be fruit from it. Even when doubt and insecurity slams on the breaks. Work diligently, knowing the thread was laid by a sovereign God, and He knows what He's doing.

When there's a Giant Crack in your Windshield and Bird Poo on your Car. - By Deanna Fugett

Have you ever felt like such a massive hypocrite you want to box your own feet in cement and throw yourself into a lake?

Yeah, me too.

Being a Christian is hard, there’s no doubt about it. Some days we have good days, where it’s like golden sunshine and rainbows blasting out of the top of your head. And other days, somehow a slimy, depressing monster of horror is slithering and creeping around your home, only to discover the monster is you. And sometimes that horrible monster will shape shift and some sunshine will shoot out of her head and she will tell someone sweetly “God is love. I will pray for you. The world is fully of sparkly happy people. Be like them,” only to turn around, full monsterness emerging from the darkness, as she screams bloody murder at your children. What a Hypocrite.

Just the other day my children and I were noticing how the crack in my windshield has gotten so big. It now spreads from one side of the windshield on the driver’s side, about halfway through to the other side.

“How in the world did that get so big?” we asked.

It started months ago. A small little chink in my windshield by some random big rig truck passing by. You know, the ones that shoot rocks out under their tires. Yeah.

My husband saw the tiny little imperfection and looked at me, “That’s right in your line of vision isn’t it? Maybe we’ll get the windshield replaced.”

I laughed, “No way, it’s so tiny, that’s not a big deal at all.” It was true. I barely noticed it.

That tiny chink grew a small one-inch crack trailing from it. Still, no biggie. Whatever. It happens.

Then one day, on a frigid morning, I put the window wipers on (with my super heavy duty antifreeze window wiper fluid that instantly melts ice – if you don’t’ have this-- you need to get it. It’s freaking awesome) and as the wipers went back and forth across the glass I actually saw the crack grow.

Wipe. Grow. AH! Wipe. Grow some more. AHHHHH!

I stopped the wipers. It was shocking how the crack grew longer before I could get the wipers turned off.  It did it twice, in inch long spurts. This crack, that had been so tiny, was tiny no more. It happened so fast. So suddenly.

Sometimes that’s like our own sin. We start off with something small. Insignificant (to us, not God). Maybe it’s just a little lie, maybe just a half-truth, maybe we flirted with that guy at the gas station only to look down and notice the wedding ring on our finger, maybe it was just a catty thought toward another female. I don’t know, but we thought it was nothing. God wouldn’t notice such a small sin, would he? But after a while those ‘small’ sins aren’t so small anymore. Now they’ve morphed and grown into monster-sized sins. Soon, our own sins have cracked into a massive blockage in our vision, in our lives. We feel like we can never go back, never be the same.

BUT…

Nothing is impossible with God. No matter how BIG we’ve let our sins grow, no matter how far-reaching, how much they’ve blocked our view of the world around us, no matter how deep or how wide the sin has stretched, God can and will help you stop it, if only you ask.

This got me thinking about the neighbors and their tree of never-ending bird poo. The poor guys. There’s a dad and two sons who live there. They all have nice cars and they all take pride in their nice cars. The huge hunkering tree out front was the perfect nesting spot for hundreds of birds who liked to land there for rest. And each and every day, these guys cars were covered in bird poo.

I don’t think I’ve ever lived next to people who hand wash their cars as much as I’ve seen these guys do. They’ve only lived there for a couple years and at least FIVE times they attempted to chop down this tree. All unsuccessful, until the fifth time. They were finally able to chop all the branches off. The tree still stands, about 30 feet up, but all the branches on the top are missing.

It makes me sad they cut such a beautiful tree, but on the other hand, I understand all their frustration over the last two years. Constantly getting rid of the bird poo.

Now just humor me for a moment and think of our hearts like cars, and the poo like sin. If we let our cars get exposed to the birds, is easy to get covered in poo. If we constantly let our hearts get exposed to sin, it’s easy to see how we can get covered in it.

No matter if our windshields are cracked to pieces and our car is covered in poo, there is a Great Mechanic waiting and willing to fix all our problems. To change our windshields, to mend them and replace them with an unblemished ones, to wash clean the poo, the crud, the sin from our hearts.  He loves us. We are never too filthy or broken. He wants to cleanse us and make us new.

We just need to ask.