Feeling Alone in Your Journey as a Writer?

” … ’til your heart finds a home / I won’t let you feel alone /I’m with you  …” (“I’m with You” ) 

Do you sometimes feel alone in your writing journey? The journey to publication can be a lonely road. We can’t seem to find anyone who understands that call on our lives.

The StoryWriting Studio wants to come alongside writers, to create a network of aspiring and experienced writers, who desire to share their dreams, their discoveries, and even their failures.

As Anita, Kathryn, and Karen begin this journey with the StoryWriting Studio, we hope you will join us. So, watch for more stories here at the StoryWriting Studio and connect with us.

YouTube/martinone9 (“I’m with You” sung by Nichole Nordeman and Amy Grant)

Tell us your story! Do you sometimes feel alone in your writing journey?

Nutrition Insights for Writers

As Christian writers, we all ask ourselves, “What do I hope to accomplish?” The answer is always some version of leading readers into a more meaningful relationship with Jesus Christ. A principle assumption is that we have to have it before we can give it away.

This blog site is a beautiful place where we can share inspiration with each other and find encouragement. In this spirit, I want to help you gain and/or maintain the physical health needed to sustain a writing ministry.

A little over a year ago I wouldn’t have understood the need for such writing. But exactly one year ago today I discovered the lump in my breast that would send me into chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation. Those treatments may have saved my life, but they halted my ability to write for a while. Now I realize the importance of staying healthy, so I can share what God has put in my heart.

I know some writers who have other, major health issues, too. I now realize, after a lot of reading and study, that it really is no wonder my body couldn’t fight off the cancer. And it is no wonder others suffer some of their debilitating diseases. We aren’t treating our bodies the way God intended.

It is easy to just eat what we can grab in our crazy, busy lives. But when we take a look at the intricate molecular structure of our bodies, we see a finely tuned marvel. We’re like Ferraris. Expensive, deluxe models.

Psalm 139 expresses David’s amazement at God’s creativity and also His love and purpose for each of us. God not only designed us to look the way we do on the outside, but to run efficiently on the inside. Just as you would never put cheap or degraded fuel in a Ferrari, you shouldn’t put it in your body, either.

Jesus said we are to love others as we love ourselves. It is an act of love to write. But I don’t believe we can offer others the best if we aren’t taking care of ourselves. If our brains are foggy, our attention spans are short, or our arms or hands don’t work properly as a result of drug treatments for illness, or if our feet swell while we sit at the computer, we can’t write as efficiently or as often as we should.

Good nutrition doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t have to taste like cardboard, either. I want to help you understand the way God designed your body to be fueled, and help you find creative, tasty ways to feed it.

“Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8 TNIV).

Photo/KathyGraves

What nutrition advice can you offer our StoryWriters? [Leave your comments below.]

The Beauty of Writing

“It is cancer.”

It’s a good thing I was lying on the table in the ultra-sound room; otherwise I might have fainted. The lump I’d felt wasn’t a fibroid like others before. Shock enabled me to agree to the biopsy and call my husband. By the time I got to the parking lot, two hours from the moment I had left my car there, my world had caved in.

Somehow I drove home, where Bo was waiting for me. I fell into his lap in a chair and we cried. When I could talk, I said,”I’m so sad and afraid. Not afraid of dying, but afraid of what I’ll have to go through.”

I was afraid of the losses I faced. I knew I’d lose my hair during chemo, I didn’t know if I’d lose one breast, maybe both. (It turned out, I didn’t lose either one–the surgeon did a lumpectomy.) Breast cancer robs a woman of everything that makes her feel beautiful. The irony was that I write about beauty.

God led me on a journey in search of beauty that began in my childhood when I felt like the ugliest person on the planet. Ultimately I found it when I found my identity in Christ. But along the way, He provided people who built me up emotionally and experts who became my friends and taught me physical beauty techniques. By the time of my cancer diagnosis, I was a confident woman who loved helping other women discover their own inner and outer beauty.

And then I faced losing it all.

In the midst of the worst suffering I could imagine, when I felt like a bald, skinny alien – and not the pretty actress kind – I found a new, different kind of beauty. The beauty that comes from suffering. I didn’t realize it at the time because I was too busy fighting the effects of my treatment, and frankly, battling daily spiritual attacks.

As the trauma from chemo and surgery eased, just before radiation started, another bombshell landed. One of our dearest friends suddenly died. As I grieved with my friend, his widow, I began to write to her. Six weeks later, their nineteen year old son suddenly died. I wrote some more. As I wrote, the Lord spoke to me, too. He began healing me spiritually and emotionally. He also gave me a new purpose for writing–to help others in their suffering.

I’m well now, back to holding personal style sessions and writing about the inner beauty that only comes from God. But out of a determination to prevent a cancer recurrence, I began to study. What I found revolutionized my views of nutrition and fitness. This information is an extension of the beauty theme, and I’m passionate about sharing it, too.

The Bible has a lot to say about beauty. After all, God created it. I hope my posts here will help you discover your real beauty and motivate you to express it in beautiful words.

Photo/KathyrnGraves

How do you define “real beauty”?

Why I’m a Writer

Author Anita Agers Brooks

I opened the document and the breath whooshed out of my lungs. After a few stunned moments I spoke to the empty room, “Surely something’s wrong with the test. Dad isn’t my biological father?”

At forty-six years old, this wasn’t the message I’d expected when I said to God, “Here am I. Send me. What message do you have for your servant today?”

But, as I grieved, questioned, and searched over the weeks to come, a marvelous new thought swirled in and out of my mind. God mixed my DNA precisely to create the biology that made me adore words and their meanings. He blended in a love for details like the hues in a rainbow, craggy crevices, the aroma of orange blossom, songbird melodies, and the flavor of hazelnut cream. I was uniquely designed to write.

The final pieces of evidence are the layers of dramatic events filtered throughout my life. Finding out my dad isn’t my biological father is only one in a series of intriguing stories that feed my imagination and spur my compassion to reach others.

I am a writer because reading is my obsession, but I’m compelled to write. I am a writer because life has taught me valuable lessons I want to share with others. I am a writer because I love stories, and I never want to stop telling them. I am a writer because God takes the ashes of my traumatic experiences and turns them into crowns of story. He turns my negatives into something beautiful.

Finally, I am a writer because it breathes life into my soul. It gives me a reason to get out of bed each morning. It gives me a purpose. It speaks to a secret place in my spirit and says, “This is why you were knitted in your mother’s womb. This is what you were born to do. This is your high calling. You were made to write.”

What about you? What gets you out of bed? What stories inspire energy and consume your thoughts? Are you doing what you were born to do?

Anita Agers-Brooks is a Business Expert, Certified Personality Trainer, Communications Specialist, speaker, and writer. She lives in Missouri with her husband.

Contact her via http://www.freshstartfreshfaith.org or anita.freshfaith@gmail.com
She blogs Monday-Friday at www.freshstartfreshfaith.wordpress.c0m

My Writing Dreams

For the first few posts of The StoryWriting Studio, we want to share some of our writing journeys with you.

My writing journey begins. My journey to publication started back in the early 1980s, while we were attending seminary. When my friend, Coralie, told me about a writing for publication workshop that she planned to attend, I found myself envious of the opportunity that had been given her. Since we were living at or below the poverty level with our husbands as seminary students, the only way either of us could have an opportunity like that was for it be a gift or scholarship. 

Friend’s encouragement needed. Coralie had heard about the writers’ workshop, applied for a scholarship, and received notice of her acceptance, before I knew anything about the workshop. So, when she told me about it, I knew I couldn’t possibly attend. When she realized my interest, she promised to tell me all about it and give me copies of anything of interest to me. So, after her conference, my interest began to grow, as Coralie walked me through each session of the workshop.

 First article accepted. When my husband Dan took a job on staff at the seminary, I took advantage of the free classes available to staff members and their spouses.  So, I enrolled in “Writing for Publication” with Dr. Lucien Coleman. My very first article accepted for publication was an assignment that I wrote for this class (an article in Living with Children magazine, now LifeWay’s ParentLife magazine). Then, came several rejections, so I just stop sending submissions.

Long journey from the shelf through school. Since my children were young, and I didn’t know what direction to go from there, all my writings stayed on the shelf for a LONG time! Then, after my kids left the nest, I decided to go back to school to study writing and pursue my dreams again. Five years later, I was teaching freshman composition at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR). [Some people jokingly refer to UALR as "The University of Absolutely the Last Resort," since many of younger students would prefer not to commute to college. But as a nontraditional student, I knew the value of an education! And I was grateful that we had such an excellent university just a few miles from my home.]

Dream of writing for publication. After I had taught a few years at UALR, I sensed that God wouldn’t allow me to let go of my dream to write for publication. So, due to some family crises and spiritual direction, I eventually walked away from the academic world to pursue writing for publication again. And after several years on that journey, I’m finally seeing some fruit from my efforts.

StoryWriting Studio authors share their stories. This week, my freelance efforts led me to join with two of my writing friends, Anita Agers Brooks and Kathryn Graves, to create The StoryWriting Studio. We want to share our writing stories and resources with other aspiring and experienced writers, and we hope other writers will join on this journey.

On Friday (2/24), one of my StoryWriting partners, Anita Agers Brooks, will tell her story, “Why I’m a Writer.” Then, our StoryWriting partner, Kathryn Graves, will tell her story on Monday (2/27). So, stay tuned … we’d love to hear your writing stories, and we look forward to your comments! 

Photo/TaraRoss

What is your story? We hope to hear from you soon!

The Three Amigos at the Ghost Ranch

Karen Jordan, Anita Agers Brooks, Kathryn Graves at the CLASS Ghost Ranch Christian Writer’s Conference where the seed for the Story Writing Studio took root.

Three sisters joined together to create the StoryWriting Studio

The Three Sisters of the StoryWriting Studio

A threefold cord is not quickly broken. Ecclesiastes 4:12

Three sisters of the StoryWriting Studio

• Anita Agers Brook: FreshFaith at Work

• Kathryn Graves: Explore the Bible with Kathryn

• Karen Jordan: Telling the Stories That Matter Most