More than Writers

It is easy to confuse our opening situation with our premise. A premise is the compass that guides us from start to resolution An opening situation is a teaser we might dangle: person / problem / now what? A premise, on the other hand, tells our whole story in 1-2 sentences: person with problem / tries to fix / outcome. Our premise is also different from our story message—the important truth we want our reader to take away from our story. The most elegant premise that I was taught is that of The Godfather : A younger son is reluctant to join the family business, but is persuaded to do so. In the movie, Michael wants to be a lawyer with a WASP wife, but his Sicilian honour-shame values and family loyalty force him to take over as his father’s successor. Not knowing our opening situation, message and premise before beginning writing is like jumping in the car and driving away, without knowing why, or where we are going. These elements are often really hard to work o...

How can we marry God’s call on us to write with our fears and life’s practicalities? Our hearts long to respond. Pleasing God will please ourselves. Above all, we want to serve, whether by writing a cracking story with a message, like Jesus told, or offering guidance through reflections, meditations and poetry. Doubt Yet sitting down to write often doesn’t make it anywhere near the top of our To Do List. Doubt overcomes us. We respond to His call with, “Surely not me, God?” How can we do this knowing that, one day, we will be accountable? One day, we will stand before Him and try to explain what we did with our ten talents. Or our one.   What will we say then? Speculative My own challenge through the years has been that writing is speculative. Mum would wax lyrical about, “going out to business”, by which she meant becoming a shorthand-typist. “You’ll always have money in your pocket,” she would say. Writing seemed a self-indulgent luxury, a whimsical way of spendin...

What does it mean to be a Christian writer? I mean, should you be able to tell from my writing that I am a Christian? Does it matter?   Are some genres more important than others in terms of writing from a Christian perspective and anyway, what does ‘writing from a Christian perspective’ actually mean? Personally, I think whatever one’s genre this question is valid but I doubt that any individual’s definition would be necessarily the same as my own and I would love to hear your own opinions. For me as a writer for children, I believe I have a responsibility to my young readers. Children are very impressionable and I am careful not to preach or lay any of my strong views on their vulnerable shoulders. My aim is to fill young heads with delight, wonder, challenge their imagination, encourage them to step into adventures that will take them through an assortment of emotions but always leave them with a feeling of fulfilment and hope. I have a responsibil...

Robert and Freda Caplan are entertaining guests at their country retreat. A chance remark by one of the guests ignites a series of devastating revelations, revealing a hitherto undiscovered tangle of clandestine relationships and dark secrets, the disclosures of which have tragic consequences. The play ends with time slipping back to the beginning of the evening and the chance remark not being made, the secrets remaining hidden and the ‘dangerous corner’ avoided. —Wikipedia. This is the outline of a play by J. B. Priestley, premiered in 1932. The idea of a ‘dangerous corner’ has many applications. It’s even a familiar experience in our personal and national lives. Over the past few years, while my pleasantly routine and predictable life has rolled on each day, I’ve occasionally had the thought that this road cannot go one indefinitely. At some point it will come to an end, or there will be a sharp turn. When will that be? And what will it be like? Well, in February we un...