My husband recently participated in a home brewing contest. While there, I did something I’d never done before – poured beer for hundreds of people. Observing the brewers, their families, and their interactions, I realized they had a lot in common with the writing community. Namely creativity, camaraderie, affability, and their support and encouragement of one another.
Throughout the day, I observed many parallels that translate easily from beer to books.
Last month, I had the privilege of serving as a judge for a national writing contest for teens. I was randomly assigned to the poetry category, which left me somewhat anxious. Other than pages of song lyrics I composed in high school, I’ve not written poetry. I’ve read some, but not a lot.
I asked for prayers and the guidance of the Holy Spirit as I read entries and did my very best at evaluating the poems entrusted to me. Writing, and poetry in particular, can be very personal. And subjective.
The selection of poems impressed me, mainly because of the heartfelt emotions the students bared. And while some poems were a bit clumsy or poorly written, many demonstrated great skill.
What struck me most about the poems, however, was not their level of quality, but the hopelessness that marked many of the entries. Continue reading
The Catholic Writers Guild (CWG) is hosting Catholic Writers Conference Live (CWCL) July 31 – August 2, 2018 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in conjunction with the Catholic Marketing Network (CMN) Tradeshow. The CWCL, celebrating its 10th anniversary, provides writers, artists, editors, and illustrators opportunities for networking; workshops on writing, publishing, and marketing; pitch sessions; critique sessions; and more. Continue reading
I’ve been in a funk lately.
A combination of things have been wearing on me. Financial issues. Big decisions. Discouragement in just about every area, from mothering to marriage to writing to my spiritual life. My mother is in the care of hospice, hundreds of miles from my home. Nothing earth shattering. Just life. Or mid-life, as the case may be.
Not surprisingly, I process feelings through writing. Typically with a pen and a lined journal, in cursive. The journals stashed in our attic are teeming with emotions. Most of the near-daily entries spanning ages 12 through 26 will meet a fiery fate at some point in the future.
I let the journaling habit slide for years, as if the bliss of marriage would negate my need to work through my disappointments, anger, fear, or joy with a ball point pen.
Then, when the rosy glow of newlywed life wore off, as it inevitably does, I resumed writing in fits and starts over the last decade or so as the urge struck me. The result is a rather unbalanced look at my life from the inside, chronicling only my most extreme highs and lows and leaving wordless the even keel that marks most of my days. Continue reading
As writers, some days we struggle to find ten minutes in a day to dedicate to our writing. We scrape together small snippets of time each day, adding words to our work-in-progress. Those words add up. Our small things, brought together, can make something great.
The writers of the Facebook group 10 Minute Novelists believe that this is true. Started by Katharine Grubb, who wrote the book, Write A Novel in Ten Minutes A Day, the Facebook group offers tips, encouragement, and community for time-crunched writers world wide.
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Back in 2006, I did a pretty small thing: I decided to take my writing career seriously. Now the problem I had, besides a lack of confidence, was that I didn’t have any time to do this. My time was consistently taken up by the other small things in my life: my five children, who were, at the time between the ages of six months and eight years old.
I decided that whatever effort I could put toward my dreams of writing would be worth it, even the smallest. So I set my timer and did my best to write ten minutes a day. If I was lucky, I could get several ten minute increments of writing in between laundry, meals, homeschooling and other domestic duties. Because I am a mother, I understood then and I understand now that true growth doesn’t come in leaps and bounds. Growth comes in the tiniest of disciplines. My children grow because I feed them daily. They learn how to read, how to be a decent human being, and how to become who they were destined to be by slow, steady growth. Continue reading
10MinuteNovelists.com
Life Lessons Gleaned from Novel Writing (May 25, 2017)
“What I discovered, however, after completing those fifty thousand words and several books’ worth more, is that those skills and habits translate well into other areas of life. The lessons I’ve learned can be applied to a variety of tasks, projects, and seemingly unattainable aspirations. Put simply, writing novels taught me how to accomplish big goals over long periods of time.”
A couple of weeks ago, I endured a particularly grueling trip to the grocery store with my two youngest children. It started with the purchase of King Julian yogurt tubes instead of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle yogurt tubes and escalated to a shouting match over who would press the button to close the rear door of the minivan. An attempt was made at choking. An arm was bitten hard enough to leave a bruise. There was much wailing and whining as I slammed shut the vehicle to head for home. All I could think to do was crank up the car stereo. I didn’t care what song was on, only that it would drown out the pandemonium in my car. It happened to be Dustin Lynch’s “That’s Where It’s At.”
The song’s okay. I don’t have much feeling for it one way or another. But I started to pity Dustin Lynch. Someone slaved over that song. Every chord, each lyric, was the product of someone’s creativity. There were writers, performers, producers, and others. The grand sum of countless hours of creativity and work was, for me, finding its fulfillment in suffocating the noise of my children in meltdown mode. Continue reading