Making Your Readers Care About Your Characters

Who would steal the pennies from a dead man’s eyes? The movie A Christmas Carol begins with Ebenezer Scrooge, (fabulous name!), removing the pennies from the eyes of his dead business partner, Marley. “A penny is a penny,” he says, by way of justification. Right off, we know what kind of person we are dealing […]

A Great Exercise for Rookie Writers

Writing an episode from your Christian testimony is an exercise that will teach you a lot about story. If you’re a fiction writer, you will get great benefit from writing the true story of something Jesus did for you. If you are a non-fiction writer, writing that story will help you work on conveying information […]

How Can Writers Love the Lost?

Before His Ascension, Jesus told His Disciples to make disciples of all nations. He also said we would receive power from the Holy Spirit to witness for Him in Jerusalem and all Judea, in Samaria and to the ends of the earth, i.e. to anyone and everyone, including to our enemies. The Jews and Samaritans […]

What the Gospel Writers Knew About ‘Show Don’t Tell’

You wouldn’t think the Gospels could teach us much about subtlety and hidden meaning in our creative writing, would you? They each tell the story of Jesus’ ministry in an apparently straightforward way, laying out what happened from their own clear perspectives. Yet, I found out just how subtle, and therefore how rich and extra-satisfying […]