Writing tips Whether or Not It Has An Audience Creative work is also worthy whether or not it has an audience. Much of the work you do will be more for your personal development than for anyone else’s needs.…
Writing tips The Greatness Myth Writers like to hold up the myth of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road as a paradigm of possibility: He wrote it in three weeks! It was perfect! It’s a great…
Writing tips Bach’s Secret Weapon from “Adorning the Dark” by Andrew Peterson I remember lying on my bed in high school with two cabinet speakers on either side of my head, listening to Pink…
Writing tips Not a Moment, But a Way of Life The Bible’s idea of carpe diem, “seize the day,” or “redeeming the time” is sharply different from the direction to which most people take the ideal—toward the selfish, the short…
Writing tips When Beginning a New Book When it is time to begin a book, when the blank pages are waiting and the fountain pens have been…
Writing tips Why Memoirs Fail Most memoirs fail because of voice. It’s not distinct enough to sound alive and compelling. Or there are staunch limits to emotional tone, so it emits a single register. Being…
Writing tips Rewrite Time When the rewrite time comes, you put your gamer on. You jam the gamer down on your head and set…
Writing tips Your Creative Calling When you respond to your creative calling, you are doing something that is necessary for the world. It may be necessary in big ways-say a series of newspaper articles that…
Writing tips Using Fiction to Explore Spiritual Reality by Steve McCutchan www.smccutchan.com THE BIG PICTURE Have you ever hit your thumb with a hammer? If so, you experienced a critical factor that contributes to many of the…
Writing tips Revision Is Not Editing Not to blame our English teachers—I was one—but most of our rotten assumptions about revision originated early, with a teacher’s red pen. Remember your first ventures onto the page? Chances…
Writing tips Seek First God’s Kingdom from “Adorning the Dark” by Andrew Peterson I recently had a good, long phone conversation with a singer-songwriter about that grand old subject, Getting Started in the Music…
Writing tips Written in Blood The following meditation is from a talk on the occasion of the presentation of the Whiting Writers' awards: I WISH THAT I had told my writing students to give…
Writing tips To make the most of our time on earth If, as people commonly say today, our brief lives are simply “the dash between the two dates on our gravestones,” what hope is there of investing that brief dash with…
Writing tips The Jury of Twelve While I wandered my way through my favorite sections of my favorite bookstore one evening, a voice over the public-address…
Writing tips When the Muse Shows Up I have noticed over the years that when the Muse finally shows up, I am usually wandering around. Wandering…
Writing tips All Writers Are Accountable To Three Things If I had to point to one piece of advice upon which my writing philosophy is built, it would be the fervent words children’s author Jane Yolen uttered at Calvin…
Writing tips The Gift of Great Literature – by Sarah Arthur Many of us, when charting the timeline of our lives, can point to a moment when a story or poem happened. It happened the way an accident or a record-breaking…
Marketing tips, Publishing tips, Writing tips The Sharing of the Crowd Harnessing the sharing of the crowd will often take you further than you think, and it is almost always the best place to start. We have barely begun to explore…
Writing tips Taking One’s Time One of my writing heroes is James Taylor, though our arts are different. He can carry a tune, for one thing. “Sometimes a song will be finished for a deadline…
Writing tips When we are angry When we are angry about the things that make God angry, that is a righteous, not a self-centered, anger. Moses was angry about all of the right things: slavery, injustice,…
