More than Writers

  My children love visiting the Netherlands, and not just because of chocolate sprinkles on bread for breakfast. A few weeks ago, we decided to go on a very long bike ride (my kids’ big wish in life!) in the National Park near our cabin. It has a ‘white bike plan’, meaning you help yourself to one of the white bikes provided, use it and put it back. It was great, the park was stunning, and the bike lanes were smooth and...narrow. I loved it, but aged a year every five minutes, ‘pray without ceasing’ taking on a deeper meaning. Four wobbling kids on bikes they’re not used to (you pedal backwards to brake...) and other cyclists coming towards us. It was an adventure, and we thoroughly enjoyed it (especially afterwards!)and it all went well. I’m so glad we did it, as we now look back on some very special times. My husband just says, “Oh, it’ll be fine.” It often is, but it’s that shaky feeling that makes me want to hold back. Part of me enjoys this shaky feeling, my adventurous pa...

I like alliteration given this post and the last one, Creating Characters , start with C! Must remember to explore other letters. Q could be tricky but moving on…  Dialogue - do you like writing it for your characters or dread it?  I love writing dialogue for longer short stories. I say longer but compared to flash fiction, anything over 1000 words is long! I do use dialogue in my flash work but not as much obviously. In flash, I focus on one or two characters at most. Where I only have one, I use thoughts rather than make the character talk to themselves. To me, that seems more natural. Do your characters like to talk? Pixabay   The problem I have when writing dialogue at all is to resist the temptation to have a good old game of conversational ping-pong between characters. You, as the writer, are having a high old time of it inventing all this wonderful talk. You are sure a reader will enjoy it as much as you currently are. Er… to quote Gershwin, “it ain’t necessarily s...

Monarch butterflies - a species  that has declined by more than 90% in less than a decade. I’ve been wondering! During this weekend I met, via the wonders (as they are when all goes well) of Zoom, with a local group of Iona Community Associate members for a celebration of Creationtide. This is the period of 1st September until St Francis Day on 14th October when we are encouraged to give praise for the whole of creation and think about our relationship with it. After a very simple but moving service format we broke into small groups to discuss what we might be able to do to further the absolutely critical thinking about saving the planet. Most of us were 60 plus apart from two very imaginative and dedicated 25 - 30 year olds who, a little while ago, had led an information session on climate change/ climate chaos for the young people in their church - and been warned off by their pastor as ‘some of the members of their fellowship had other views’. I suppose that is bound to happen f...

I can't insert a photo today.  I'm on an old computer in a different place and its just not working  as it should. Life can be like that. Those moments when you wake up full of plans but then life rushes in and sweeps them all away and you find you are chasing behind your day, trying to catch the remnants as futilely as trying to catch an autumn leaf blowing in the wind. Just stop a moment. Stop the panicking, hustling, spinning and sighing. Stop and see Who is there with me In those moments? 'Master there are people pressing all around you,' said the astonished disciples one day when Jesus stopped short on his planned journey and asked who had touched him. He had recognised a touch so fleeting, of longing, of need, of faith.  A touch not even on his body - there were plenty of touches there for as Peter had said, crowds were pushing and shoving all around him. . . But this was different The faintest tug upon his robe, it's very lightness stealing into his heart lik...

Picture yourself in a crowded London street – or any city, for that matter. See the people around you, rushing here and there, invading your personal space. Hear the sounds – the traffic, the newspaper sellers at the station entrance, the hubbub of conversation. See the busyness of the shop windows, the constant moving of the traffic and the people. Sniff the pollution, the ‘peopley’ smell of passers-by hurrying to get to their destinations. As you walk, you’re constantly shifting and dodging left and right, stopping abruptly, hurrying forward, to avoid bumping into people. What an assault on the senses. Now stop. Stand completely still. Look up. Allow the sights, sounds and smells of the busy street to fall away. What do you see? What do you hear? What do you smell? See the space, the blue sky, the sunshine. Breathe deeply of the fresh, clean air. Allow the busyness of your day to fall away, and just focus on the space. Listen to the silence. How often do we do this? Not o...

In July I wrote about my frustration with media negativity and nothing has changed. My antidote is to keep writing the good stuff. So here's another true story from ordinary (very ordinary) everyday life: I've made several Jewish Tallits from Annie Modesitt's pattern in The New Prayer Shawl Companion  but wanted to create a design that linked Christian symbolism to ancient Hebraic tradition. Numbers and planning are not a strength. That's why the English translation of Hitomi Shida's Japanese Knitting Stitch Bible was such a find! No longer were those exotic patterns locked in hieroglyphics. A quick trawl provided the border. Off I went, greedily translating chart into stitches, then motored happily up the striped section to the tricky bit. Calculating the tree of life alongside the trinity ridge panels pushed my brain beyond limits, but I hung in. Then the ghastly eureka moment ..... Plan A was horribly flawed! Why? Because both border and tree of life on...

The day before yesterday, 22 September, was the fictional birthday of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings . Yesterday was the feast day of St Padre Pio. Two of my favourite personalities, Tolkien and Padre Pio, are brought to mind at the same season. They shared a similar very strong Christian faith. Tolkien, of course, could never stop writing, and when illness prevented him from holding a pen he said he felt like a hen without a beak. St Pio, by contrast, wrote little, apart from letters. In a homily about him yesterday, the preacher said that he asked a friar who had known St Pio if it was true that the latter never preached at the Eucharist. Slightly affronted, the friar replied: ‘his whole life was a sermon’. How wonderful if that could be said of us, especially those of us who attempt to write on Christian subjects. It is probably little known that Tolkien wrote on spiritual subjects, but only in his private letters, unlike his friend C. S. Lewis, whose religious wor...

  Faith, Hope and Charity: Hope by Rebecca Seaton ‘For you, O Lord, are my hope, my trust, O Lord, from my youth.’ (Psalm 71:5) Just like faith, God’s hope is what we know, so we can demonstrate what this looks like by writing characters who have hope. Hope, like faith, is often most powerful in the darkest times. There are many Bible stories where characters display a seemingly ridiculous hope. The story of Elijah and the ravens shows God’s words bringing hope. Not long after this (1 Kings 17:7-24), Elijah is able to bring hope to the widow at Zarephath: hope is infectious. Good examples of this in fantasy are Tolkien’s hobbits and J K Rowling’s Harry Potter and his closest friends. When it comes to the final battle in a story, many characters have lost hope and drifted away. Those that still stand on their hope are the more powerful for this. If we have hope in the darkest of nights, it is truly a bright light. This is often what gets your characters past a trauma, enable...

When I was three, my aunty taught me to read. We’d lie side by side on the carpet, my little finger tracing the letters as I sounded them out: J-a-m. Jam! When I was twenty-one, I sat in a hospital clinic chair. I needed to learn to read again. Not letters on a page, but words on lips, in preparation for losing my hearing a few weeks later. Two different types of reading. For years, I have read using both the ‘on the page’ and the ‘on the lips’ methods: not simultaneously, though if I can learn to look in two directions at once, I’d be up for the challenge. Stephen King said, on the importance of reading for writers: I imagine that many of us in ACW have overflowing bookcases, and so encouraging us in the importance of reading books would be rather like teaching my grandmother to suck eggs. To re-jig the above quote slightly, and I hope not irreverently; ‘If you want to be a Christian writer, you must read God.’ Whether or not our writing is overtly Christian in content, if w...

"By having the eyes of your heart flooded with light,  so that you can know and understand the hope to  which He has called you, and how rich  is His glorious inheritance in the saints (His set-apart ones).                                                                       Ephesians 1:18 (AMPC) For those of you who have been following my struggles I can now announce my blog with the storyline containing forty keys to the Kingdom is now written.   Most of the matching scriptures are in place along with links to relevant worship songs. I can’t believe I started in July and how difficult it has been. Writing the first two series was inspiring, sensing a download each day from the Lord.   This time, was more a labour of love!   Without any clues...