by Edie Melson @EdieMelson
Maybe you thought the summer heat would light a fire to your writing, but it didn’t happen. Now it’s the end of September, and you still haven’t found the match. In fact, you’re giving serious consideration to calling it quits. Maybe writing is for someone else and not you.
by Eva Marie Everson @EvaMarieEverson
My daily devotions come from a book titled A Guide to Prayer for Ministers and Other Servants, compiled and edited by Rueben P. Job and Norman Shawchuck. Within its pages are weekly divisions of scripture verses, reflections from those who have come before us or walk beside us, invocations and benedictions, guides for prayers and reflection, and hymns to sing (although I usually just speak them as I would a poem). Often quoted within the leather-bound pages is Henri J. M. Nouwen (1932-1996), a Dutch Catholic priest, professor, writer, and theologian.
Social media, focus groups, beta readers, and online reviews create plenty of reader feedback. Those words provide fodder for marketing.
C.S. Lewis gave a talk to university students called, “The Inner Ring.” He said, “I believe that in all man’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.”
The next six weeks in our country will be full of words. Promises. Taunts. Pledges. Boasts. Truth. Untruth. Mockery. Threats. Loyalty. Division. Hope. Despair. Fear. Faith. Unity. Encouragement. And, did I mention, Hope?
I read Carol Kent’s revised and updated edition of Speak Up with Confidence from cover to cover. Her passion to speak words of eternal value and bathe every step of the process in prayer spoke to my heart. I hope it speaks to yours, too.
Thumbing through social media crushes my writing soul. These days, an innocent joke among friends leads to accusations of social injustice, racism, or politics. It makes writing a difficult thing. We now have to pour more critically over our work and that makes getting the message out, hard. Given light to highly publicized social injustices, innocent lines of dialogue are now taken as offensive and for Christian writers, the use of God or religion in anything is increasingly difficult. We can hardly allow characters to work through conflict and issues without strong social scrutiny or being tagged insensitive.
Almost daily I get emails from bloggers who have run into seemingly insurmountable formatting problems. Truthfully there’s not much more frustrating that to finish writing a great blog post and then spend hours trying to get it formatted like you want.