When Limitations Threaten Your Writing: Trusting God's Call to Keep Going

From Edie: Heidi Gray McGill shares how writers can trust God's calling, overcome limitations, and keep writing with faith and purpose even when life's challenges make it difficult.

When Limitations Threaten Your Writing: Trusting God's Call to Keep Going

by Heidi Gray McGill @HeidiGrayMcGill

I had already lost over 80 percent of my peripheral vision to retinitis pigmentosa before I ever typed the first word of my debut novel.

Most people do not know that. It is not something I lead with, because my vision loss does not define me any more than it has stopped me. But it shapes everything about how I work. In those early days of writing, I learned how long I could stare at a screen before my eyes gave out and forced me to stop. I built my writing life around that limitation of time and made peace with it.

That window has grown smaller. I am at less than 10 percent peripheral vision now, and the challenges have changed along with it. My cursor is a quarter-inch wide with a half-inch trailing tail, and I still lose it. Pop-ups appear and disappear without my seeing them, and I hunt for the reason nothing is happening or what is causing the beeping I cannot locate on screen. There are days I sit down to write and wonder how much longer I can do this.

And then I remember how far God has already brought me.

The Lie Disability Tells

Disability has a voice, and it is not an encouraging one. It whispers that the limitations are permanent, that the gap between what you could do and what you can do now is only going to widen, and that at some point the honest thing to do is stop pretending otherwise.

Every writer faces a version of this voice. It does not always come through a medical diagnosis. It comes through age, exhaustion, life circumstances, and the slow accumulation of hard seasons that make the page feel less accessible than it once did. Whatever the source, the message is the same. Your limitation defines your ceiling. Scripture says otherwise.

I know that voice. I have sat with it on the hard days when the cursor disappears for the fourth time and the void swallows a passage I spent an hour crafting, saving it somewhere…hopefully…just not anywhere I can find. It is persuasive because it borrows from actual evidence. The limitations are real. 

What the voice gets wrong is the conclusion. A limitation is not a verdict.

What Writing Through the Limitation Taught Me

In Vision of My Heart, book six and the final book in my Discerning God's Best series, I wrote a blind character named Serafina. Getting her right required everything I had. I could not describe what she could not see. I had to feel, hear, taste, and move through her world without sight, making her experience vivid and real for a reader who has never been in her shoes.

What mattered most to me was showing Serafina in a positive light. Her blindness does not define her. It is part of who she is, not the sum of who she is. The same was true for Jimmy, the neurodivergent character in book five, Keeper of My Heart. In both cases, my goal was to do disability justice, to write characters readers could root for and admire, not characters readers pitied.

I could not have written either of them without my own experience of limitation. What I thought was liability became the very thing that gave those characters their authenticity and their dignity. God did not waste a single hard year of it.

What This Means for You

You do not have to be blind to understand what it feels like when your body, your circumstances, or your history seems to work against your calling. Most writers carry something into the work that feels like a disadvantage. A learning difference, a chronic illness, limited time, a late start, or a past that complicates the present.

God does not ask you to write around those things. He asks you to write through them.

The strategies matter. Larger cursors, screen readers, dictation software, adjusted writing hours, whatever tools make the work possible for you are worth finding and using without apology. Accommodation is not defeat. It is stewardship of the calling.

But the deeper work is the belief that the limitation is not the last word. If God called you to write, He knew what you were carrying when He did it. He has not changed His mind. The calling and the limitation arrived together, which means He factored in everything you think disqualifies you before He ever placed the story in your hands.

The View From Here

I started writing in 2020 with already diminished vision and no guarantee that it would not continue to narrow. It has. And I am still here, still writing, still watching God use these stories to reach readers I will never meet.

If He has brought me to this point, He will see me through the rest. Your disability does not dictate your success. Your obedience does.

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When Limitations Threaten Your Writing: Trusting God's Call to Keep Going from @HeidiGrayMcGill on @EdieMelson (Click to Tweet)

Heidi Gray McGill is a Selah Award finalist and five-time NEST Award-winning author of Christian historical and contemporary fiction. Her Discerning God's Best series has earned over 3,500 five-star reviews on Amazon, where readers describe her work as "faith-filled fiction with flawed but lovable characters." She began her writing journey in March 2020, after retirement, proving that God's calling has no expiration date.

A sought-after encourager in the writing community, Heidi speaks and writes on the craft of storytelling, writing with biblical conviction, and reaching readers across generational and cultural divides. She is both independently and traditionally published, and she writes despite progressive vision loss, which has only sharpened her perspective on what it means to walk by faith and not by sight.

Connect with Heidi and receive a free prequel to her bestselling series at HeidiGrayMcGill.com.

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