Pregnant with Story

by Allen Arnold

It matters how a story is conceived.

Nothing is more important to

a novel than how it was created.

And who you were during its creation.

__________

Let’s start at the beginning

The time you first flirted with the idea.

Neither of you were looking for anything serious.

But your eyes met.

Sparks flew.

You fell in love and

got married to the idea.

The next thing you know...

you are pregnant with story.

This affects male

and female writers alike.

You love the story inside you.

Can’t wait for it to be born.

But man, is it messy.

Part inspiration.

Part isolation.

You write all night.

Eat too many Doritos.

Your clothes don’t fit.

Your brain goes fuzzy.

And all your friends are out playing

while you’re in this whole new chapter.

You are officially Pregnant with Story.

And what you do during these months

will forever determine the life of your novel.

______________

Am I saying that who you are – and what you do – during the creation of your novel is more important than anything else?

Yes. Absolutely.

Am I talking about you hitting a certain word count each day?

Not at all.

Is this about a killer concept, craft mastery, or better social media strategy?

No. There’s a place for those.

But they are never the foundation.

The main reason God has given you the gift of story

is for the two of you to spend time together.

The Creator showing the created how to create.

Can you fathom that? God wants to spend time creating with you. You have a unique passion for story because God knit that into your being. Why? I believe it is for your own heart and, secondarily, for the hearts of those who will read your stories.

If you get so busy writing that you miss that,

your story will be less than it could.

Because you can’t write a better story than you’re living.

But we try. During my 20 years in the publishing industry, I worked with hundreds of authors and most struggled to remember this during the creative process.

So let me ask you...

If your future readers could see the process of how you create, would they want to read your story once it is born?

When you find yourself pregnant with story, here are three ways to carry it well.

1.    While You’re Expecting...Stay Expectant

In Scripture, I love Mary’s reaction after realizing she is with child. That God has – in the most miraculous way – allowed her to participate in the birth of the Savior.

Her primary emotion is awe.

“I’m bursting with good news.

I’m dancing with the song of my Savior God...

His mercy flows in wave after wave

On those who are in awe before him.”

(The Message, Luke 1)

When you are giving birth to story – is your primary emotion one of awe?

Do you awake expectant about all God has in store for you each day? I try to begin each morning, before my feet hit the floor, asking, “Father, what do you have planned for us today?” It is a spirit of fellowship and expectancy...of walking with God in a constant state of awe.

This enables life to enter the pages you are writing.

But if you spend more time with your fictional characters than God, your words will lack life. If you are huffing and puffing on worry and stress during the creative process, your story will be born small and frail.

In actual pregnancies, experts have shown that when a mother-to-be is overly stressed about her birth, the pre-born baby can feel it. This impacts not just the pregnancy but also the child. How do you think stressful days of cranking out a manuscript will impact the life of your book?  Can words of life and creativity really make into your story when there’s no awe in the storyteller?

2.    Nourish Yourself...and Your Story

When pregnant with story, you must make sure you consume things that nourish both your soul and your story.

Philippians 4:8 (The Message) urges us to focus on things that are “noble, pure, true, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious – the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse.” Yet pop culture feeds us a steady diet of media void of any real life. It offers songs and story that celebrate hopelessness, death, violence, gratuitous sex, narcissism, and the use of God and Jesus’ name as slurs. It’s hard to create life if you are consuming this toxic mix of junk food.

3.    Setting Your Story Apart

Remember Hannah. She wanted a son more than anything else. So she made God a promise. If God would give her a son, she vowed:  “I will give him completely and unreservedly to you. I will set him apart for a life of holy discipline.” (The Message). And God did just that. His name was Samuel.

God made a barren womb a place of life. And God is the one who will bring your stories to life. I encourage you to follow Hannah’s example. Even before you have the idea – give your future story completely and unreservedly to God. Set it apart and allow God to do with it what he desires. It is the bold act of giving back to God what he so generously gave to you.

Yet many see the birth of story as their ticket to fame or validation. We wouldn’t put that burden on our child. And we shouldn’t put it on our novel. The reason to have a child – and a story – is to bring life into the world and to make it a better place. Not to enhance our stature or comfort.

____________

At last...the big day arrives.

You give birth.

What started as an idea is fully realized.

The press release, um, I mean birth announcement, goes out.

But by then, the story’s destiny is already set.

It was formed into either an offering or a means to something other while the story was developing inside you and being created.

It all depends on understanding why God has given you the gift of story – and what your story is – as you create.

Invite him into the process.

Give him your story as an offering before it is born.

Because it matters how a story is conceived. 

Allen Arnold loves the epic adventure God has set before him. From the mountains of Colorado, he leads Content & Resources for Ransomed Heart Ministries (led by John Eldredge). Before that, he spent 20 years in Christian Publishing - overseeing  the development of more than 500 novels as founder and Publisher of Thomas Nelson Fiction. He was awarded the ACFW Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012. But that doesn't really describe the man. Allen savors time with his family, craves the beach, drinks salsa by the glass, is hooked on the TV series "Once Upon a Time" and is passionate about helping storytellers write from an awakened heart. 

Read More

Lost in Story by Lindi Peterson

Lindi Peterson can't help but think her love of reading led to her passion to write. She’s always had stories running around in her brain. That's probably why she wasn't very good at math. The fictional characters living up there pushed the numbers out of the way. She was recently the recipient of a Holt Medallion Merit Award for her novel, Her Best Catch, and her novel Summer’s Song was released May of 2012. The first book of her Richness in Faith trilogy will be released in May of 2013.

 

Lindi lives in a small town Northwest of Atlanta, Georgia with her husband, 2 cats, 1 dog and 2 birds. (The cats rule, by the way!) When God reeled her in and showed her true love, her stories really came to life. For when we know we are loved well, we know we can love well. Her tag line, Happy Endings Are Just The Beginning, guarantees the reader a happily ever after.

Lost in Story

Lindi here. A big thank you to Novel Rocket for having me. This is great place to hang out.

I love to read fiction. Becoming lost in stories that are set many years ago, many years ahead, or in the here and now, it doesn’t matter. I love to read different genres and a lot of time periods. I think I like to read across the board because I love story.

When I meet a couple for the first time, I usually try and figure out how to get them to tell me how they met. What made them fall in love? What these real life couples tell me is, you guessed it, their story. Granted, some are more interesting than others, but every couple has a story.

If you can’t tell by now, I write romance. I’m in love with the idea of love. Love warms the heart, love can heal. Love will change your life.

As I write my romance novels, yes, the love is there. But there’s always another story being told as well. Maybe a story of grace. Maybe healing. There are so many stories out there waiting to be written down for others to devour, we’ll never run out of tales to spin.

In every story there is a place where the reader pulls it all together. That special place where the author has linked one, two or maybe more threads together and the reader ‘gets it.’ I love that part when I’m reading a novel.

I also love it when I’m writing a novel.  Story is intricate. I know when I sit down to start a new manuscript, the paths aren’t worn, let alone crossing. But it happens eventually. The character’s voices come to life. They start walking the paths called the pages, and you begin to see them make their way down the road you are creating.

Then when they’ve gone hither and yon, backtracking, running ahead of where they need to be, maybe even finding themselves in some poison ivy, at the end of the pages, when the paths are well worn, their tracks are clear. They’ve overlapped in just the right way, intersected at the perfect place, and the reader sighs with delight at the journey you’ve taken them on.

Discovering story, whether I’m reading or writing, is one of my greatest pleasures in life. I love story in music, too.

I’d love to hear what your favorite story is right now. Reading or writing. Or maybe even a special song you can’t run out of your head, because the lyrics are speaking to you.

No matter how busy life becomes, don’t forget to rest in a story now and then. I know you’ll be glad you did.

Rich In Love

Bell Bridge Books--Book 1 Richness in Faith Series

John 3:16 "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life."

When Ann Thomas is summoned to Florida for the reading of the will of the father she never knew, her life is forever changed. She learns she has a half-sister, she has the chance to inherit millions, and her name is really Angelina. Brett Hamilton, CPA, is assigned to help Ann spend a lot of money in a short period of time. As soon as his ‘assignment’ with her is over, he’s headed to Peru to be a missionary, something he’s felt called to do his whole life. Ann still lives with the pain of having a mother who chose world missions over her. Can Ann risk giving her love to someone who might give it back, or should she ignore her growing feelings towards Brett to keep her heart safe?

Read More

The Storyteller's Granddaughter

Kimberly Brock’s writing has appeared in anthologies and magazines. After studying literature and theater, she earned a degree in education. She lives north of Atlanta where she is a wife and mother of three. Visit her website at kimberlybrockbooks.com for more information and to find her blog. You can also find her Author page on Facebook at Kimberly Brock, or tweet her @kimberlydbrock. She is currently at work on her next novel.

My education in story really began with my grandfather, Papa.

He was a storyteller, a hayfield evangelist who spent a lot of time on a tractor, full of homegrown anecdotes, which my family and the community at large, heard a million times over. He was known for these stories, which he cultivated for years, and if you were lucky enough to run into him at Shoney’s or at the Kroger or even if you happened to be an unsuspecting telemarketer, you had plenty of chances to learn one version or another by heart. He would launch into these allegories at any given moment and although we often rolled our eyes or checked our watches, it was a striking revelation and a blessing to me when, at his memorial service, I heard bits of his well-worn phrases floating through the crowd.

He had a voice. He had something to say about how he saw the world. Maybe he was right, maybe he was wrong, prejudiced or naïve or fanciful or judgmental. But he knew a secret about story and I learned it by watching the power in his parables. Few days have passed in all the years since his death when his words don’t come back to me, either in my own thoughts or from the recollections of others, even from those who never met him, but still somehow inherited the words. They were a foundation for how to think about the world and our place in it, the basis for all our stories, I think. If there’s anything that influences my life and shapes my writing, guiding the themes I choose to explore, this is it, what we all remember; his masterpiece, in a way. This is what he would say:

Have you ever wondered where your breath comes from? You can’t bargain for it, you can’t survive without it, and even when you don’t need that breath anymore, there’ll still be breaths left to take and somebody else left to take them. Now what do you think about that?

And I have been thinking about that, for about forty years.

Our breath is a wonder. We have no inkling of where it comes from. It is unfathomable. Beyond us. A continuous miracle. As a writer, I value that kind of vast wonder at the world. To tell the stories I’ve been given, I know it’s necessary to leave my mind open to possibility. How wide can I cast my net? How high can I fly? How low can I fall? How dark and strange can the way become and what feats of daring will it take to find my way home?

Breath is terrifyingly out of our control. As much as we rely on it for survival, we can’t bend it to our will or do without it. Story is like that. We need it to make sense of our lives. And to remind us that sometimes life doesn’t make sense. We need it to reveal truth. And to teach us that sometimes truth is not so easily defined. You can’t bargain with your breath, just as you can’t rush whatever it is that you are learning from the experience of discovering a story. It requires courage to continue and faith that the next breath or word will come, and the next and the next, until it’s done.

Because one day, it will be done. Our stories will be told one way or another. They’ll stand on their own and we’ll realize how lucky we’ve been to have done the hard work, and that we really need to get started on the next one. Because more than anything, a story teaches us that we have something to offer of our experience to this world and that the reach of our stories will inevitably extend beyond our own lives. We tell them for ourselves, but also for those who will take hold of them for future understanding, strength, joy and comfort. 

From my Papa’s stories, I learned about the world, about loss and resentment and forgiveness and redemption. But above all, I learned the lessons of breath: wonder, faith and perpetuity. I learn these every time his voice comes to me, clear and certain, with a bit of humor or wisdom or an enduring hope. I am convinced that when I cease to need these breaths, I’ll leave something behind stronger than a ghost or a regret, because I’m the granddaughter of a storyteller. And this is the story I will tell, what I believe I know:

A breath holds eternity. And this is where a story exists, where a storyteller must live, in the space in between.

Now, what do you think of that?

Can the river heal her?

Roslyn Byrne is twenty-four years old, broken in body, heart and soul. Her career as a professional ballet dancer ended with a car wreck and a miscarriage, leaving her lost and grieving. She needs a new path, but she doesn't have the least idea how or where to start. With some shoving from her very Southern mama, she immures herself for the summer on

Manny's Island, Georgia, one of the Sea Isles, to recover.

There Roslyn finds a ten-year-old girl, Damascus, who brings alligators, pumpkins and hoodoo into her sorry life.

Roslyn rents a house from Damascus's family, the Trezevants, a strange bunch. One of the cousins, Nonnie, who works in the family's market, sees things Roslyn is pretty sure she shouldn't, and knows things regular people don't. Between the Trezevant secrets and Damascus's blatant snooping and meddling, Roslyn finds herself caught in a mysterious stew of the past and present, the music of the river, the dead and the dying who haunt the riverbank, and a passion for living her new life.

Read More