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

As writers, we can so easily get carried away with our own plot (and concentrating, rightly, on not getting involved in irrelevant side issues), that we can forget what would be happening to our characters in the real world. You might think it would be impossible . . .

Writing is a lonely occupation, but if we don’t get out, we won’t have anything much to write about.

OK, so we can’t all go on a holiday just so we can write better (sorry!). But if we want . . .

Instead of a writing tip this week, I have an exercise for you! In our April Monthly Members Programme we are looking at writing tight sentences – this is one of the exercises I am suggesting to our members, but you can do it too:

Buy or borrow a selection of . . .

Hello once again Christian writers – I hope you are all well. I’m afraid I succumbed to a rather nasty cough and cold so am a day later than usual with this writing tip – but am more or less back to normal now, and enjoying the new spring – another sunny day in London – love it! 🙂

Before getting to the writing tip, I’d like to say congratulations to Roy Jones, who responded to the recent Writing Challenge. Roy wrote a story on the theme of new beginnings for his granddaughter Amy, who was due to start a new life in Africa . . .

It’s all too easy to let words, sentences and scenes clutter up our stories. Too many words can clutter up our writing in the same way that things can clutter up our homes.

Here’s an important tip for anyone writing a novel, (not just Christians writing for young people!):

You need to introduce your theme, your main characters, and your setting at the beginning of your story, so we know where the story is heading . . .

Most of us lead busy lives. We have to balance work and/or voluntary activities with family, church and other responsibilities. We can have so much on our minds that when we sit down to write our minds are so full we are unable to concentrate.

Here are some suggestions for making the most of your writing time:

For those of you who missed it, the Write for a Reason Challenge was to write a short story (3-5,000 words) for a specific child of your choice, on the theme of new beginnings. The challenge wasn’t just to write the story, but to give it to your chosen child to read. Writers had about ten weeks to write their story, get the children to review it, and send both to me.

The idea was . . .

A couple of weeks ago we took our grandson to the circus. He laughed himself silly at the clown, watched the acts with total amazement and drank up the atmosphere of being in the ‘Big Top’ – it was a pleasure to watch his pleasure! Plus, as a writer . . .

3 more common mistakes writers make with dialogue:

Issue: Chat between characters is banal.
Remedy: Cut all the boring stuff! If you need to have two characters meeting for the first time, just say they were introduced, then get on with the real meat of the story. Too much