When God Calls a Writer (Deanne Welsh) Book Review

2018 Reading Challenge

6. When God Calls a Writer by Deanne Welsh

Synopsis:
Is God calling you to write? Do you have a burning desire to write books and use words to inspire people and change the world?
When God Calls A Writer is a book about knowing that your desire to write is both a gift and a calling from God.
In When God Calls A Writer Deanne Welsh weaves the story of Moses with the story of a writer. Do you wonder if God is calling you to write, but you feel unqualified? What are the signs that God is calling you? Do you struggle to hear God's voice and guidance about your writing career? Are you eager for a powerful transformation in your faith and your writing?
Learn simple and strategic ways to allow God to connect with God, hear Him and allow Him to direct your writing journey.
Author Deanne Welsh shares her own story of insecurity and self-doubt and what it took for her to walk, first with doubt and then with confidence, into God's call for her to write. She gives you practical steps for listening to God and hearing His guidance, as well as the most important questions to ask as you begin your ministry-career of ideas, words, and stories.
By the end of this book you will have practical strategies to keep you focused, the specific questions to catapult your writing career forward, and the traits to develop and pay attention to for unstoppable writing success.
Your "yes" changes everything.

My Review:
I was interested in this book because I believe writing is one of my God-given talents.

This is a book aimed at Christian writers who believe that they are called to write. It gives encouragement if you don't believe you're suited for the job. The whole idea is to look to God to get through insecurities and any obstacles that stand in the way. With belief and faith in God, anything is possible. The book offers advice, tips, and exercises to find that faith in God and writing with Him will enable you to accomplish your call to write. It is short, but can be invaluable by writing with God, instead of without Him.

Happy Reading and Keep on Writing!

~Meg~

Photo Credit:
https://medium.com/@deannewelsh/free-book-when-god-calls-a-writer-446fb8a9b589

Writing Update

Writing Plans for July: Camp NaNoWriMo

I recently signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo for July. If anyone is unfamiliar, it is a mini version of NaNoWriMo, held in November.

With NaNoWriMo, you are required to write 50,000 words. It doesn't mean that you'll necessarily reach that, like when I failed short to do so this past November.

In Camp NaNoWriMo, you can set your own writing goal, whether that be reaching a certain number of words or writing for a certain amount of time every day in July. I believe the Camp version is done a couple of times throughout the year in preparation for NaNoWriMo in November.

As of right now, my goal is to reach 25,000 words during the month of July. I am planning on working on a fiction novel, loosely titled The Widow in the Bookstore. I usually don't like to name something I write until I'm done. You know, I have never finished writing an actual novel before. I'm my worst critic and I usually scrap them because I never think it's good enough. I plan on changing that in July as that is my other goal: to finish writing a novel without stopping to edit it before it's done being written.

I will give daily updates here so you can follow along.

~Meg~

Writing Tuesday: Too Much Said Going On

Writing Tuesday

Too Much Said:
From a writer's standpoint, I think we tend to use the word "said" too often and that also goes to everyone in general. I've probably been guilty of using said more often than not. For some of us, it might be hard to come up with other words for "said" and when I came across this, I thought it would be a good aide.

Credit:
The Writer's Circle

I linked this to their Facebook page as that is where I saw this. For more information about The Writer's Circle Magazine, check out their website here.

Happy Reading and Keep on Writing!

Meg

Writing Tuesday: 40 Rules for Writing Good

Writing Tuesday

40 Rules for Writing Good

1. Each pronoun should agree with their antecedent.
2. Between you and I, case is important.
3. A writer must be sure to avoid using sexist pronouns in his writing.
4. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
5. Don't be a person whom people realize confuses who and whom.
6. Never use no double negatives.
7. Never use a preposition to end a sentence with. That is something up with which your readers will not put.
8. When writing, participles must not be dangled.
9. Be careful to never, under any circumstances, split infinitives.
10. Hopefully, you won't float your adverbs.
11. A writer must not shift your point of view.
12. Lay down and die before using a transitive verb without an object.
13. Join clauses good, like a conjunction should.
14. The passive voice should be avoided.
15. About sentence fragments.
16. Don't verb nouns.
17. In letters themes reports and ad use commas to separate items in a series.
18. Don't use commas, that aren't necessary.
19. "Don't overuse 'quotation marks.'"
20. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (if the truth be told) superfluous.
21. Contractions won't, don't and can't help your writing voice.
22. Don't write run-on sentences they are hard to read.
23. Don't forget to use end punctuation
24. Its important to use apostrophe's in the right places.
25. Don't abbrev.
26. Don't overuse exclamation marks!!!
27. Resist Unnecessary Capitalization.
28. Avoid mispellings.
29. Check to see if you any words out.
30. One word sentences? Eliminate.
31. Avoid annoying, affected, and awkward alliterations, always.
32. Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
33. The bottom line is to bag trendy locutions that sound flaky.
34. By observing the distinctions between adjectives and adverbs, you will treat your readers real good.
35. Parallel structure will help you in writing more effective sentences and to express yourself more gracefully.
36. In my own personal opinion at this point of time, I think that authors, when they are writing, should not get into the habit of making use of too many unnecessary words that they don't really need.
37. Foreign words and phrases are the reader's bete noire and are not apropos.
38. Who needs rhetorical questions?
39. Always go in search for the correct idiom.
40. Do not cast statements in the negative form.

Keep in mind that a few of these have grammatical errors to prove the point.

Credit: Writing Good

Happy Reading and Keep on Writing!

♥Meg♥

Young Writers/Authors Advice

It's late on Tuesday when I'm writing this. This will be the start of my writing posts on Tuesdays. And I promise it won't always be late. I'm still working on a title; I'm giving myself to the first Tuesday in July to figure that out.

It's going to be featuring writing advice, prompts, short stories, etc. I've decided to go with advice for young authors because I was young myself when I knew I wanted to be a writer. I'm in my 20s, so I guess I'm still relatively young (not for the intended audience of this post though) in the writing world.

I came across this just from scrolling around on Facebook. Aaron Shepard is a children's author and offers free resources on his website for anyone interested in writing, from librarians and teachers to children's authors, parents, kids, etc.

Most of these ten tips are spot on. I'm going to focus on just one of them.

Ask for criticism. This might not be the easiest thing to do, but it's important. Getting constructive criticism is crucial for anyone in any profession, field, etc. It's the only way we are going to learn to become better. The one thing to know about getting criticism is to not take it to heart. You should really try to have an open mind and listen to what a critic has to say. This is true, especially when it comes to writing. You're writing for an audience, so it's important that they essentially read what they want to read and not just how you want to write something.


If there are any young authors or writers out there, I hope you enjoyed. And don't ever stop writing.

Happy Reading and Keep on Writing!

♥Meg♥

Journaling

 

Today's topic for the A to Z Challenge is: Journaling.

 

Journaling is great for several reasons, for writers and non-writers alike.

1. Getting your thoughts and feelings out. It's not good to hold feelings inside and it's not the best idea to just explode to those around you (you can say the wrong thing and hurt peoples' feelings). It's best to get those thoughts and feelings out in a healthy way and one of the best ways to do that is by writing them down. Writing allows you to express yourself and can be good therapy for getting things off your chest.
2. Getting over writer's block. If you ever have a mental block or can't think of an idea for a story, etc, it's still important to write every day and journaling can be a catalyst to getting back to writing that story.
3. Warm up to writing. I don't know about you, but it can take me a little while to get started with writing each day, so I like to do some easy writing journaling to get my brain working and produce better writing.
4. Prompts. This kind of goes hand in hand with the one before. I have always been able to be given any topic/prompt and just write and write about whatever I was given after a few minutes. I like to do some journal prompts to get the blood flowing and I use it to exercise my brain before actually writing a story. It's also a good way to get ideas flowing if you're stuck and don't know what to write.

 

I kept this short and obviously, there are probably more reasons why journaling is a good practice.

 

Happy Reading and Keep on Writing!

Meg



Fear of Rejection

Hi there. Today I'm going to be writing about the fear of rejection.

Fear of rejection is a common thing that all writers deal with when first starting out. And bouncing back from rejection after rejection is a big obstacle that writers face as well.

Rejection happens. Get over it! No, I'm just kidding. But it does in fact happen and we shouldn't let it control our life. If someone is scared of getting rejected, then what is the point of writing in the first place? It's important to think about why you wanted to become a writer in the first place. All of your reasons should be able to outweigh the fear of rejection. It's also crucial to remember that you can't please everyone. It's something that's impossible. Just because one publisher doesn't like your book/story, doesn't mean that the next one won't. It's when we stop trying that's the problem. As a writer, we have to put ourselves out there, fight for our book(s) to get published. There's a chance that you can get 50 rejections, but that 51st publisher might be the one that likes your idea, likes your book, likes your story, sees something special in you.

I think the fear of rejection ties in with not being good enough. There's always going to be someone out there who is better than you and being good enough is impossible. But how do you know you can't be great at something until you try it? If you want to be a writer, just do it. Keep writing and writing and don't ever give up, even if you do end up getting rejected by publishers a thousand times. Put yourself out there because that's when you will succeed. It may take awhile or you could become an overnight success, but in any case, you'll be doing what you dream of doing. Getting published and getting your name out there in the case of writing is hard work. Nothing in life is ever easy, but if we stop trying, we won't get anywhere. There could be another writer who comes out with a book with what you were thinking about, but never put in into words. So my advice is that if you have an idea or ideas about a story, get it down on paper and get it out there. Granted, given with feedback and constant editing, you will have to keep writing the same story over and over, but that's how you get better, how you get published, and how you stop getting rejected. It's how you win in getting over that fear of rejection in the first place.

Happy Reading and Keep on Writing!

Meg