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Yes, Your Writing Really Is a Gift for Others
When you think of Christmas shopping, visions of toys, jewelry, clothes, and candy probably dance in your head. That’s if you’re a normal human being. If you’re a little weird and a lot nerdy, you get starry-eyed over Lord of the Rings mugs, graphic T-shirts with famous literary quotes, and stacks of books as tall as skyscrapers. I’m guessing that everyone reading this falls into the latter category. Am I right?
Taking Dominion with Your Stories Involves More Than Fighting Culture Wars
The Bible’s language can sound harsh to modern ears. When God commands Adam and Eve to “take dominion” in Genesis 1:28, the images that phrase conjures up may make a few readers cringe. How does aggressive behavior align with the New Testament’s exhortations to be humble and meek? The instruction raises even more questions for us as writers. If God wants humans to rule over the whole Earth, shouldn’t that encompass fiction? And what tactics are we supposed to use when claiming the territory for His kingdom?
Bearing God’s Image as a Storyteller Involves More Than Exploring Christian Themes
“Bearing” the image of God ought to be an active verb, because it’s a mad dash with no finish line. To steal from C. S. Lewis, it continually guides us “farther up and farther in.” God has bestowed this gift and responsibility on all of mankind, but not everyone intentionally pursues it. Even Christians are confused. We assume image-bearing means that God physically resembles us, or that we share His attribute of creativity, so we don’t need to invest much effort. We can just “be ourselves,” throw in a few Scripture quotations, and call what we’ve created good.
2 Skills You Can Learn from Writing in a Different Genre
Everyone has favorite genres that they fill shelf after shelf and hour after hour with. One of mine is contemporary fantasy. Yours might be romance and historical fiction. But, outside of binging and overspending on those, you probably read more eclectically. You don’t mind picking up a mystery or fairy-tale retelling when the blurb draws you in. After all, you’ve heard over and over again that diversifying your reading material increases your creativity and understanding of story craft. Reading outside your comfort zone, however, is not nearly as challenging as writing outside your comfort zone.
Comparison Isn’t Your Biggest Problem (and Other Ways Envy Makes Writing Miserable)
The most helpful writing advice I learned this year came from the letters of a demon. C. S. Lewis published The Screwtape Letters serially in a newspaper called The Guardian, and he realized that the human race harbors an oversized sense of entitlement. Because others have more than we do, we think we deserve the same amount. In idle moments, we wake our phones and thumb through twenty social media posts per second. We read glowing reviews for a debut novel that the author pounded out in two months. We see friends gushing about their book deals, finished drafts, and beta-readers-turned-fans. They’ve achieved their goals while we haven’t. We try to celebrate with them. We extend perfunctory congratulations, but inwardly we can’t resist asking, Why not me?
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