Christian Freelance Writers Network
Musings on the business, craft, and joy of faith-filled writing
What is the most important thing in your life? What are the commitments you’ve made that you can’t back out of? Figure out where your time is going and then figure out how to tweak your life to make all of your commitments work together. Priorities set the rhythm of your life. . . Once you know what you care most about, you can make a plan that keeps your commitments safe while protecting time for your writing.
J.J. Hanna
This maverick Episcopal priest has been a favorite author of mine for many years. In a section on the love of language, Robert Farrar Capon wrote:
This is the era of talks, of reports, of analyses that are unbearable because the talkers and the writers are insufferably bad lovers. And, to throw a stone at my own trade, it is the era of sermons—words about the Word!—that have no taste at all, because the preachers do not see that words themselves are lovely.
An Offering of Uncles, 1967
The mind has plenty of ways of preventing you from writing, and paralysing self-consciousness is a good one. The only thing to do is ignore it, and remember what Vincent van Gogh said in one of his letters about the painter’s fear of the blank canvas—the canvas, he said, is far more afraid of the painter.
— Philip Pullman, Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
Stephen King
The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day. . . you will never be stuck. Always stop while you are going good and don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.
Ernest Hemingway
The most original authors are not so because they advance what is new, but because they put what they have to say as if it had never been said before.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
C.S. Lewis
Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things—childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves—that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers.
Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991
Those who have been writing for a while may feel like the honeymoon is over, particularly when dealing with multiple rewrites or struggling to meet a deadline. Just as we are to guard our hearts against losing our first love for the Lord in our spiritual journey, the same principle may apply to our first love for writing… The best advice may be: “Do the things you did at first” (Revelation 2:5).
Melony Teague, As the Ink Flows, p. 56
A good book has no ending.
– Robert Frost
There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.
– Frank Herbert
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
– Italo Calvino
Art is never finished, only abandoned.
– Leonardo da Vinci
How do you know when it’s time to let go of your manuscript or project? Do you feel pressured to tie things up or are you able to trust the conclusion to your audience? Please share your thoughts below.
Ignore all lists of writing tips. Including this one. And including this tip. Or at least take them with a big pinch of salt. I have never met two writers who work exactly the same way: One of the hardest, but ultimately most rewarding, things about writing is that you have to work out for yourself who and what you are as a writer, and how you yourself work best. When you’re starting out, it’s very easy to see a piece of advice by [insert your favourite author here] and think, If s/he writes like this, I must do it that way too. That can be unhelpful, and instead I think that every time you hear a writing tip, you have to decide whether it means something to you, resonates with you, or whether it sounds like the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard. It’s your book, you need to learn to write it your way. Now please ignore this advice.
Marcus Sedgwick, at the 2016 Cheltenham Literature Festival
