Category: Free Writing Tips for Christians Who Write for Children and Young Adults

Hello again Christian writer friends! Here’s another creative writing tip for you:

Think carefully before you start your story with the weather. Whether the weather be cold, or whether the weather be hot*, you might want to keep it

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writers Month – yes, that means writing a novel in a month! In November of each year, fiction writers who have been thinking about writing, sit down and write, starting on 1st, right through to 30th.

Are you up for that? You set yourself a target . . .

Readers need some description, to be able to truly engage with the characters and their actions, but if there is too much flowery prose, readers can lose interest in the plot. Action can become stilted as the flow of the story slows down. If, on the other hand . . .

Being a published author is the aim of many writers, but you don’t have to go down that route. You can have your book printed yourself, print your story off and have it spiral-bound, make it into an ebook, put it on audio, have it serialised in your church magazine, give your children the story printed out on A4 sheets of paper (don’t forget to number them!), or . . .

The first draft of our novel is there to be improved.

When you are going over it, looking for ways to add pace, interest and atmosphere, here’s a tip: look for stronger, more descriptive words . . .

Stories are usually narrated either in the first person (I, me, we, us) or the third person (he, she, it, they). Neither is right or wrong; they are just different.

Here is an example

Children love secrets, and a secret or a mystery can make a great plot, or add to one. Even if your main plot has nothing to do with a secret, it can add . . .

If we are going to write engaging and relevant Christian stories for children and teens, we need to be able to express deep emotions in the characters we create.

Some of us are afraid . . .

Freewriting is a technique where for a set period of time you sit down and just write. Continuously. No pausing, no editing. It’s a great way to write the first draft of your novel, but ten to twenty minutes freewriting every day on a different topic is a great way to get into the swing of writing . . .

I’ve recently been (slowly!) putting together 50 of the top tips from this blog into a little ebook. I thought it might be helpful to have some of the most useful in one place, to easily refer to? What I’ve done is pick out the ones I think would be the most helpful, edit them, improve them and in some places put two or three together. It’s been a nice little project . . .