Waiting and Preparation for a Writing Adventure by Elaine Langford

 

First day of December but it’s the second day of Advent^; a time of waiting and preparation for Christmas, the coming of Jesus as a baby. Last year for December I wrote about how Advent can be both a pressure and pain, especially if you feel unprepared for the practical and emotional impacts of this time of year.

For me, this Advent feels more positive after a year of working through various personal issues. In some ways it feels that 2025 was a year of waiting. While we know when our Christmastide Advent waiting will come to fruition, I had moments in the last year when it felt like my year of waiting to write would never end. I had hopes that my birthday pilgrimage would be the gate to the end place. Despite a flurry of inspiration, I was still unable to use that to restart my writing journey.

In fact, I was writing throughout 2025. In addition to my More Than Writers (MTW) posts, I managed three posts on my Faith Bites blog (hurrah!) this year. Though one was a list of my MTW blogs to show I was active. I also wrote regularly when attending a monthly Association of Christian Writers (ACW) writing group, Cambridge Christian Writers (CCW).

CCW is an ACW online area group that I joined when I moved to Cambridge in December 2020. It was much easier for us all to continue to meet online, even when life opened up again. Indeed, even when I moved to South East London and there wasn’t a local group here, it was great to be invited to remain as part of the group. You can see some of our output from those meetings on the Cambridge Christian Writers blog. 

My lethargy for change caused me a dilemma when I attended the ACW Gathering in Egham this year. When asked to link with others in our area in an afternoon session, I was at a loss whether to join the one for South East, London, Kent or Norfolk. Although I live in a South East London borough, it is considered part of Kent and I attend a group in Cambridge. I joined the London table and was given some great ideas on a course to consider in the new year. As I may be moving in 2026, I decided I may as well stick with the consistency of the online Cambridge group for now.

Similarly, when we were asked to link up with a genre group of interest, I wasn’t sure whether to join the poetry group, Trellis run by Sarah Sansbury, that I attend irregularly;  Allison Symes’ Flash Fiction group I aspire to join but never seem to manage, or the Devotional Writers group that meets at a time I can never make. I decided to join with the poets as it was good to meet people in the flesh that I vaguely knew online.

  

To warm up to my next phase of a new start into writing, I’m aiming to use Advent as a prompt to exercise my writing muscles. In previous years, I’ve followed daily word prompts on a Facebook group called ‘Advent where I am’. These were originally used for photo prompts but they now accept some use them for other purposes. There are often two lists to follow, see above for this year's lists. Some of the results of these from previous years are on my Poetry blog, Poetry Puddles, along with ones written for Lent using their word prompts for that ‘waiting time’ too.

What are your plans for writing in Advent? What do you use to keep yourself inspired? Do you link up with any of the ACW groups? If any of the ACW groups I’ve mentioned are of interest, or you want to find your local group, they are all listed on the ACW website Groups page.

May you find blessing in this time of waiting and preparation.

^Advent means ‘coming’

Elaine Langford is a writer in waiting based in South East London. She posts occasionally on her blog, Faith Bites (when life bites, faith bites back) and hopes to add ones to her Poetry Puddles blog soon.