Faith & Culture Writers Conference 2015 – Page 2 – Faith & Culture Writers Community

February 8, 2015March 3, 2015

When writing, find your Nancy

By Jody Collins

When I began blogging almost 3 years ago I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Maybe you’ve felt the same way?

I was welcomed by a few new online friends into the High Calling network and encouraged to pursue my passion. In just three years, God has shown me a few things about the path I’ve chosen, this ‘writing for the world,’ and given me some perspective-makers to keep me focused:

1. Find Your Nancy

As you’re tapping and typing away at your laptop or desktop computer, there IS no audience, it’s just you and Jesus and your words. You send them out into the blogosphere and pray for a connection. You hope they’ll land somewhere, maybe touch a chord and speak to somebody. At least that was my prayer.

Lo and behold, one day I got a comment on a blog post. (Yay! It’s Okay to do a Happy Dance when someone leaves a comment.) Someone actually read what I wrote and told me about it!

It was an encouraging precious word from a woman named Nancy. And she showed up every week, to read whatever I’d written. In spite of my fears that my words were than less-than-profound, she’d remark on their depth or how encouraged she felt. Every week since then she has read and commented on my posts.

Now I have a very small crowd of ‘regulars’—fellow writers/bloggers and readers who encourage me as well. But I always remember Nancy—to write just for her—as if she was the only one listening. It personalizes my writing, which makes it more relatable. It also gives me hope.

2. Choose Your Words

Not everything is a blog post! Like the nurse logs in the Washington Coast rainforest, some things just serve as detritus for new growth. You know all those sticky notes and backs of envelopes? Those inspired scribbles from a Sunday morning sermon you wrote on the back of the bulletin? The scraps of paper you found just in time to scratch a revelation on? Yeah, you’re probably not going to write all that down…

Not everything gets into print—much of it is practice for the process, part of the pile—a paper detritus that is the growth medium for what you DO write. The Holy Spirit will quicken in you the words that need to see the light of day. Some of it will serve as markers, sitting in your notebook or under a paperweight, reminding you of how far you’ve come. Just keep writing. Persist, and then choose the honest, compelling words to share.

3. Build Relationships.

I am no professional marketing person to speak to what ‘platform’ is. I am a believer and a writer and simply offer my words back to God to use as He sees fit. Looking past all the social media skills and conferences and platform building, I think the core truth is this: Building your blog (or your writing audience) is all about relationships.

I am not concerned with numbers or stats, really. For me, it’s all about connecting. But how can you extend your reach? Widen your audience? By reading other peoples’ words, commenting when you can and having them click back and find you. That’s how others will find what you have to say. There are other voices that share your passion and vice versa. Maybe it’s Patheos, maybe it’s The High Calling, maybe it’s an online magazine—like Ruminate or Relief Journal or of course, where you are at now, the Faith & Culture Writers Connection!

There becomes an overlapping of the circles that you find yourself touching, an ever-expanding Venn diagram of comments and topics and people. I personally am interested in keeping my reach small so I can go deep, rather than being wide and therefore shallow. You’ll find what feels right for you. But wide or deep, it’s all just relationship connections.

As you write keep these three things in mind. Find your Nancy and write for her. Choose your words and persist. Build relationships. Do this consistently and you will see your writing and creativity move forward and impact people you never thought possible.
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Jody is the Volunteer Coordinator and Administrative Assistant for the Faith & Culture Writers Conference. She blogs at threewaylight.blogspot.com.

January 26, 2015January 30, 2015

Three Essentials for Writing Words that Matter

By Emily Freeman

I recently watched a four and a half minute video where author and pastor John Ortberg remembers his friend, Dallas Willard. One quick segment shows a clip from a conversation John and Dallas had only a few months before Dallas passed away.
John: “How do we help people – if somebody wants to think about, “How is my spiritual life going or how is my soul doing?” – how do we help people ask and answer that question?”

Dallas: “Well, very slowly. One at a time, we listen to them . . . I think the next thing is a question and not a statement: What’s bothering you? Start there.”

They talk some more and then John makes a joke.
John: “What’s bothering you? could be an interesting liturgical question – to start the church service asking, What’s bothering you? And the people could respond back, And also you.”

I laughed out loud when he said it and so did the audience. Then, as the clip ends, Dallas can be heard saying, “That would be absolutely revolutionary.”

I had to pause the video at that moment, three minutes and fifty-five seconds in, Dallas’ deep voice and thoughtful statement hanging there in the air over my desk. That would be absolutely revolutionary. I knew I agreed with Dallas but it took me a few minutes to figure out why.

I don’t remember being expressly taught not to be bothered, but somewhere along the way I learned it anyway. To ask myself or someone else what is bothersome seems like a self-focused, self-indulgent invitation to rant or complain. But what if we were willing to look deeper in? Instead of manufacturing peace by shooing away my frustration or smoothing out my ruffled feathers, I am learning the importance of getting quiet enough to honestly consider what bothers me – not just on the surface, but deep within my soul. Sometimes what I learn is ugly or uncomfortable. But there are other times I discover right next to my frustration lives a drop of passion I didn’t realize was there and a spark of hope I didn’t realize I needed.

What does this have to do with writing words that matter? When it comes to uncovering my authentic voice as a writer, the first thing I have to know is what is bothering me. Once I’m able to honestly access my frustrations, I can begin to uncover the passion and hope that live close-by. This is how all four of my books were born.

Being frustrated doesn’t make me qualified or ready. But it does wake something up within me, something that compels me to move and want to get ready. The frustration rolls into a compulsion towards change, passion to communicate and to move into the chaos of the questions even if I don’t have all the answers. But being frustrated about an issue and compelled to do something about it won’t sustain the message for the long-term. For me, what really keeps me moving is the hope of something better. It’s important for these three things to work together – frustration, passion, and hope. Otherwise, my voice will be something I don’t intend.
Passion and hope without frustration feels inauthentic.
If I’m not bothered deeply enough, no one else will be either. Frustration is the spark that fuels the passion and the hope. Without it, my writing won’t have enough life to meet a strong enough felt need or to tell a compelling story.
Frustration and hope without passion leads to detachment.
If I’m frustrated and have hope for change but I’m not passionate about the issue, I won’t be able to engage it with enough heart to make a difference. Love is tucked deeply inside passion, and we don’t want your loveless art.
Frustration and passion without hope leads to cynicism.
In my experience, when I am frustrated and passionate without hope, I’m vulnerable to cynicism. If I don’t have hope for change, despair creeps in and my writing feels too dark and filled with angst. Without hope, I write afraid.

Frustration wakes me up. What frustrates you? Passion gets me moving. What compels you? Hope keeps me going. What do you most hope for? I’m thankful for Dallas Willard’s revolutionary question: What’s bothering you? As writers, may we be brave enough to answer it, passionate enough to engage it, and hopeful enough to influence change.

Emily is the author of A Million Little Ways, Grace for the Good Girls, and Graceful. She shares her words and photographs on her own website at www.ChattingAtTheSky.com. We are honored to welcome Emily as one of our featured speakers at the 2015 Faith & Culture Writers Conference.

December 21, 2014February 6, 2015

Overcoming Writers Block with the Rough Draft Mindset

By Kari Patterson

Hell hath no fury like a woman with writer’s block. Or so my husband says.

He has a right to say it, as he has endured my endless rants as I attempt to draft book chapters in the midst of life. Creativity is such a beast, yes? So untamable and infuriatingly elusive, yet intoxicating and life-giving once the muse mercifully makes her visit and you find words pouring out onto the page.

This process of writing, it can be absolute madness, especially when it “matters.” When the stakes are high, a contract is on the table, a deadline is looming, expectations soar and we find ourselves desperately hunting down that elusive creativity with such intensity we’re crazed. The more desperate we are for inspiration, the less likely we are to find it. The muse is shy.

There is, however, a gentle way to coax her out of hiding. It is a simple: the Rough Draft mindset.

This year’s Faith & Culture Writers Conference is Rough Draft: From Blank to Beautiful. I love this. It reminds me of the freedom-filled approach to writing and life that relaxes the pencil-grip and lets creativity come alive.

In her brilliant book, Writing on Both Sides of the Brain, Henriette Anne Klauser explains our trouble with writing stems from the fact that we are taught to write and edit simultaneously, rather than letting ourselves loose with words without worry for conventions, then going back later to edit and rework. She tells a fabulous story about a little boy who wants to write a story about a mouse and a motorcycle. The problem is, he doesn’t know how to spell motorcycle, so he writes a story about a mouse and a bike, but somehow when he’s done it wasn’t quite the same story he had in his heart.

Haven’t we all been there? We had something sacred inside that we so wanted to share, but we knew our limitations and feared failure, so we smash the story into something more manageable and lose the sacredness of it altogether. The boy was afraid of seeing his teacher’s red marks slashed across his paper, so he produced a lesser work, and wasn’t true to what was in his heart.

How much better would have been a rough draft about a mouse and a motorcycle!

Klauser also explained that the brilliant Russian pianist Franzk Liszt produced not only Tarantella, Don Juan Fantasy, and Liebestraum, but also more than 700 works, most of which were “uneven in quality, superficially composed or down-right dull.” The point? Even the greatest writers and composers spend the majority of their time writing less-than-stellar material. Can we allow ourselves to try something and do it imperfectly?

This is the Rough Draft mindset. It is the only way to go from blank to beautiful.

Here’s the thing: What’s true of writing is also true of life. An expectation comes such as, let’s say, Christmas. The most wonderful time of the year. The time when your kids’ dreams should all come true. Then company comes and the cameras are clicking and that blasted Facebook feed is just chock-full of everyone else’s perfect life and the pressure to “compose” the perfect holiday can choke the joy and inspiration straight out. We do well to remember, every day is only a rough draft.

The most sacred holiday moments are those when you just live. Not when you’re striving to craft the perfect moment. Not when everything’s orchestrated and choreographed. When my son and I were curled up on the couch last Friday night, just sitting in silence staring at the tree-lights, savoring the last few hours of him 7-years-old, I thought to myself, This is the highlight of my year.

The only way to discover the deep well of inspiration is to live. Not live looking for a tweet or a title or a clever catchy phrase, live looking for life. For beauty. And not only for the sake of writing it, but the sake of living it.

The ever-present danger we writers face is to skip straight to the telling without the living.

So this Christmas, let’s embrace the Rough Draft Mindset It is the way to overcome writer’s block and the way to overcome life block. Let’s relax our way into our imperfect holiday, because Christ is our perfection, once and for all. Let’s write and give and and live and love, scribbling beautiful fragments from the depths of our souls.

Merry Christmas.

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Kari is one of those people who has been to every single Faith & Culture Writers Conference since the first one in 2011. She loved it and got involved. She’s been our communication coordinator, an emcee, and now she’s on our advisory board. This year she’s co-leading a workshop at our pre-conference mini-retreat. Kari is a writer and speaker who loves seeing sacred in the mundane, and writes about it at karipatterson.com

December 16, 2014January 9, 2015

Rough Draft – Our conference theme, our lives.

By Cornelia Becker Seigneur

I love the quote by Maxwell Perkins that goes like this: “Just get it down on paper, then we will see what to do with it.” Perkins, as the editor of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, knew what he was talking about.

I just wish I would live by those words, as I should.

The blank page. Why does it haunt us?

Just begin.

The perfectionist in us perhaps, or the fear of being criticized or the fear of the painful memories we channel when we begin to write. But, the quote by Perkins reminds us to just begin, just get it on paper, onto the computer, into that journal.

That’s why we are really excited to announce the theme of the 2015 Faith & Culture Writers Conference:

Rough Draft: From Blank to Beautiful.

We want to gather friends of words and story and The Word together to give them permission to create. To not be afraid of the blank page. To know that it’s okay to know that our work is in progress. Because aren’t we all rough drafts, creations of God whom He’s working on?

Every year as we think through, pray over, and dream about the theme for the Faith & Culture Writers Conference, we come up with five words that represent our vision for the year. This year, to go along with the Rough Draft theme, we wanted to have those five words reflect the nature of the creative process. Those five words this year are:

Decide, Dare, Prepare, Persist, Release.

Follow these 5 words, and you will find your creativity expand and your writing career moving forward.

Decide. We need to decide we are writers, dreamers, artists, activists, authors, entrepreneurs, believers. It starts with a yes. An, “I can do this, I will do this, I start today.” It is a simple yes, packed in deep dreams and beliefs and that you-know-you-are-called vision. Don’t wait for someone else to give you permission, to tell you you are good enough. You do not need their permission. God has already given you permission. He has shaped you and molded you and made you into a creative being. He is a creative God. His first words, “In the beginning, God created.” Decide. Begin.

Dare. To write that first word. That first story. That first blog post. That first article. That first book proposal. That hundredth book proposal. Let’s face it, It takes courage to get our words and story out there. It takes guts. People may not like our work, they may not appreciate our story, they may think we are not good enough. That’s okay. Do it anyway. It’s your calling.

Prepare. Yes, you do need to decide that you are a writer with something to contribute, and you then need to dare to get your art out there, to have courage. But then, you need to find a way, get some advice, seek out the expertise of others, learn how to write moving blog posts. As a writers’ conference, we want to help you prepare for that launch of your words, your art, your story, your creativity.

Persist. Okay, you’ve decided to begin, you’ve said yes to the dare, and you’ve begun to prepare for what that means. Perhaps, it’s twice a week blog posts, meeting with a friend, seeking out an editor, attending a writers conference. But, then truth be told, it takes persistence. It takes sticking with it! There really are no one–book wonders or one-blog-post-goes-viral-and-you-are-famous wonders, or one-anything-wonders. Most of those authors who “make it” have been writing for years. When no one was noticing. Until one day, they got noticed.

Release. It’s time. You’ve decided to get your words out there, you’ve dared to be creative, you’ve prepared and you’ve stuck with it. Now, let it go. That’s it. Let people read it, and keep getting it out there, and leave the results to God. If one or a million or just you are changed by your words, your story, your art, it was worth it.

Cornelia is a freelance journalist and the mother of five children and finds her pen often turning to the chaos and craziness and beauty in her family life. She is the Founding Director for the Faith & Culture Writer’s Conference, and blogs at www.corneliaseigneur.com.

July 1, 2014January 9, 2015

2015 Faith & Culture Writers Conference dates and location announced!

The date and location of the 2015 Faith & Culture Writers Conference have been announced!

On Friday-Saturday, April 10-11, 2015 we will hold our Fourth Annual Faith & Culture Writers Conference at Warner Pacific College in Portland, Oregon.

Warner Pacific College reached out to our founding conference director, Cornelia Becker Seigneur, who met with Warner’s Writer in Residence Tony Kriz and FCWC executive admin Bethany Jackson along with key Warner folks to discuss details. We are excited to partner with this wonderful college. One thing that Luke Goble from Warner said is that Warner wants to be more involved in terms of the planning and presence of the event on their campus. I love this! More details to follow. 2015 Faith & Culture Writers Conference Date and Location announced!