Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of my heart;
Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art.
Thou my best Thought, by day or by night,
Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.
Be Thou my Wisdom, and Thou my true Word;
I ever with Thee and Thou with me, Lord;
The words of an old Irish hymn but an inspiration to me today and hopefully every day in my writing.
The last few weeks have been inspiring in terms of workshops and fellowship with other writers. Firstly, there was the Association of Christian Writer's Day on the first Saturday of the month led by writers, Andrew Chamberlain and Amy Boucher-Pye. Andrew spoke all about 'Capturing your reader' with good beginnings and setting scenes. Thought provoking and inspiring. Amy spoke more about her personal journey which was very interesting but shocking to hear that her award winning book 'Finding myself in Britain', although award winning has only sold fourteen hundred copies to date!! The struggling author indeed, particularly the struggling Christian author, surviving in a very small pond.
There followed another workshop a week later as part of the Cheltenham Literature Festival with American author, Gareth Greenwell. He was talking about good description and helping us to use all our senses to engage our language, be it prose or poetry. Helpful as I struggle with description and scene setting.
Since then I have experienced a period of discouragement. Firstly, with a short story writing group I've been engaged with going in a new direction and feeling that it was time for me to move on and then in the simple task of ongoing promotion of my book, 'Alpha Male', hard to keep up sales and even harder to get people, who have enjoyed reading it, to review it, like pulling teeth!!
Then today at church we heard about listening to God and I felt the truth of the words of the old hymn I began this blog with 'Be thou my vision'. I then realised that it's not about us and our sales, or even feeling great or successful, it's about Him. His vision, His words 'our true words'. That's why we write as Christians and why I write. Thanks for the reminder, Lord.