I’m convinced that writing for God is one of the scariest and most challenging things in the world to do.
Why? Because when you invite God into your writing process, suddenly, you aren’t the only one calling the shots anymore. You aren’t the only author any longer. There is a much greater Author there with you, and he’s just as interested as you are in your character’s arc and personality type, that plot twist that’s going to shock readers, and what your story’s theme is.
To quote Plot Versus Character: “…where there was once only one power…now there are two.”
Writing has always felt like a tug between two powers to me, between structure versus spontaneity, rules versus intuition and art. It’s been between what should work and what does work, what I want the story to be and what it actually is. And it’s especially apparent between what God wants to do with my writing and what I want to do with it.
Thankfully…I always lose the last battle. But even if you’re losing to God, that often doesn’t make losing any easier. As I’ve reflected back on my writing journey for the past year, three main points stuck out at me. This is a tad late for at 2018 closing post, but these thoughts took a little while to untangle 😛
1. Grace makes things possible, but possible doesn’t mean easy.
So many hours in the past year I spent praying about my writing (and the 1909031 things in my life). I felt like I was waiting for something to happen as, every morning before I began to type, I’d pause with my thumb hovering over the “play” button for my Spotify list, and I’d pray. For help. Usually pretty general, something along the lines of “Lord, help me to write this story as you want me to write it. And the plot. Please…help me plot this book.”
Honestly, it felt like nothing happened. Every morning. Most consistently since August. Day by day, nothing seemed to change. I spent an hour writing, sometimes flew through it like I had wings and was having a crazy fun time, but sometimes not. Day by day a 50k outline built itself, a draft twice the length came into existence, then slipped apart as I re-worked said 50k outline.
It happened. Sometimes I’d sit and scroll through all my Scrivener files and flip through the large notebook I’d somehow filled up, and wonder how it came to be.
Grace. Somehow, when I didn’t feel it or notice it, God blessed my efforts and created this with me.
“But then why wasn’t it easier?” I found myself thinking.
Then I realized maybe I hadn’t been praying for grace to write this book, even if that’s what I’d gotten. Maybe I’d been praying for it to be easy.
But what is easy? What should be easy? The strain of working forward through that draft had taught me patience and perseverance, landed me with a hope that even if the uphill climb to anything, be that a college degree or a finished novel, wouldn’t be easy, it would be possible. With grace, there is no insurmountable task (or novel).
2. You are a terrible writer. But again, there is grace.
Sometimes the more I write, the more I’m convinced of the bland quality of whatever it is I’m creating. As I talked about on my Instagram story about For Felicity, writing that short story was exhilarating. I felt like I wasn’t the one doing it, yet somehow I was. So when I switched to another short story that ended up as a disaster, I couldn’t help but being frustrated. Where had my ability to write gone?
Or maybe it was never really there. Maybe it was grace. There’s talent and skill, and it certainly wouldn’t work to just think you can write a masterpiece without putting significant effort into acquiring the skill to do so. But to write something truly good…cannot only the One is who Goodness itself do that by His will? I realized that there is nothing we can do to make our novels into powerful stories; only God can do that. Only God can take our little creations and put a divine spark in them, and use them as channels of grace to speak to others’ souls. No matter how inadequate we feel we are for the tasks, in the end, it is not about how good we are. Just about how willing we are.
“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” – 2 Corinthians 12:9
3. We need faith in our stories (and God)
If there’s one thing the Second Half of the Second Act in stories has taught me, it’s that it’s easy to say we believe something but to not truly believe it. Sometimes it can be done consciously. Sometimes unconsciously, in which we don’t realize we have no faith in what we’re saying until something reveals that we don’t.
The story I’ve been writing has been a lot like that. I wrote the very first draft a year and a half ago, and found I had a very hard time relating to the protagonist, something that is really important for me when I write stories. So I shoved the story away. At Realm Makers, it came back. And though I had no clue how it was going to relate to my life or why I was really choosing to write it, I began to re-outline it again. I loved the story, but part of me didn’t really believe I would ever love it enough. It was a “practice” story, while I waited for inspiration to come for another series I’d been working on.
I kept that thought in my mind as I went on to write the first draft, and later begin to edit (*cough* rewrite 😉 ). What did I even have in common with this character? She’s outspoken. Reckless. Cynical to an extreme. Yet ridiculously generous and brave and uninhibited.
And blind. No eyesight.
The more I wrote that story, the more I felt like I was blind. I didn’t know the purpose of the novel I was writing. I didn’t see how it was supposed to bring anything to my life, other than to teach me perseverance. I felt exactly like my character as her actions screamed: I just want to see again!!!
There certainly wasn’t an instance like Luke 18:41 where I said what I wanted and immediately found an answer. There was just a slow, dawning realization that I didn’t believe this story or the process of writing it was going to get any easier or more enjoyable. That it was going to be a walk in the dark until I eventually moved on to another idea.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how dangerous a sort of expectation like this can be. Determination is good, yes, but when all we expect is just enough grace to write the story? We believe God will give us enough, but do we believe that he will give us more than enough?
When I read The Story of With last year, one part that really stuck with me was the difference between expectation and anticipation. I had lots of expectations for this story and what God was going to do with it. When none were met, my hope got bogged down more and more, despite how it was clear through prayer that I could keep writing it. I didn’t see what he was trying to do with it.
But is that a reason to not expect that he will do anything with it? That the God who defeated death cannot transform any novel or writing process into something that makes our souls sing?
He sees. He knows. He knows when we’re blind and begging to see, and sometimes that we only want to see certain things. But just because nothing changes, that should never be a reason to begin to only expect dryness. There is always cause for hope—perhaps even we are not blind, that there are things to see if only we look a little harder.
He invites to have faith. To have faith that our hopeless stories and seasons of writing can become something better again. That perhaps there are already hints of spring in the dead winter of creativity and understanding. That the dark clouds should never distract us from what they conceal: the light, the dawn.
As I finally realized who and what I was really writing about in my novel, I saw I hadn’t been looking hard enough for those hints of spring and light; they’d been beneath everything the entire time as God used my story and the stories of those around me to shape the one I was writing.
That was a bit of a long post today, but I’ve had these thoughts on my heart for a while and felt I should share them with you <3 Thank you so much for reading!
(Originally published January 26, 2019, on audreycaylin.com)