Evaluating a Story Idea
By Megan DiMaria

How do you evaluate a story idea for your novel? How do you determine if it will fly?

As a rule of thumb, if a topic fires your passion, it’s a good idea to pursue a story based on that topic. However, if the topic is only important to you or only familiar to you or only true to you, it doesn’t necessarily make it universal enough to interest readers.

So, how do you know if your [...]

Terri Blackstock is a New York Times best-seller, with over six million copies sold worldwide. She has had over twenty-five years of success as a novelist. Terri spent the first twelve years of her life traveling in an Air Force family. She lived in nine states and attended the first four years of school in The Netherlands. Because she was a perpetual “new kid,” her imagination became her closest friend. That, she believes, was the biggest factor in her becoming a [...]

Want To Do More With Your Writing? Learn to Say No
By Edie Melson

I don’t mean no to writing opportunities—say no to some other things in your life. We all only have so much time in a day. And if you’re like me, it’s filled to overflowing. So that means changing some priorities.

Sounds easy, but to anyone who’s tried, it can be tough to carve out time for writing.

Here are some tips I’ve used to help me realign my life.

Decide where [...]

The winners of January’s blogging contest have been announced – and February’s contest is under way. Look below for details

First, January’s writing/blogging contest, “One Hundred Percent,” was meant to benefit  Wellspring International, an arm of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries. This ministry supports ministries who seek to save women and children affected by sex slavery, human trafficking, bride burning, AIDS/HIV, elderly, healthcare, Iraq refugees and other projects.

And the winners:

Platinum and Gold members:

1st Place: When Walls Talk by Paula Titus [...]

The following article was submitted by a FaithWriters member. Are you interested in seeing your writing here on the FaithWriters blog? Check out this link for more information.

God’s Three Greens for the Writer
By Colin Swann

God’s Green Room is a writer’s reality and reassessment area.

The reality is that just one in a million writers will be the author of a classic and probably as few as a handful will write a best seller. One may succeed and go on [...]

To Plot or Not?
By Lynda Lee Schab

There are as many ways to write a novel as there are wannabe novelists. Well, maybe not quite as many. But still, when you consider all the different ways there are to plot a novel or not plot a novel, it adds up to lots.

Here are a few ways. See if one of them is you:

Die Hard Plotter. This is the writer who spends months – yes, MONTHS – researching, plotting, charting, mapping, brainstorming, [...]

Dictionaries are often a writer’s best friend – whether they be paper or virtual. Not sure what a word means? Its spelling? Proper usage? They’re the go-to resource.

And if you’re writing an historical piece – or even a period one – you may need to know when a word came into usage. THEN, where do you go?

One place to turn is the Oxford English Dictionary, considered the most comprehensive and accurate dictionary of the English language. This tome, [...]

Creating: Every Scene Is A _____
By Randy Ingermanson

Sometimes I worry that my critique group hates me. Every month when we get together, each writer brings one scene to be critiqued.

Sometimes the writing is terrific. Sometimes it isn’t.

But whether the writing is good or bad, one of the most common problems I see every month is with the scene itself.

All too often, things just happen, but nothing really changes. So the scene may be well-written, but it isn’t important to the [...]

Was one of your New Year’s resolutions to do more writing? Well, FaithWriters is a great place to stretch your writing muscles, and we’ve got several opportunities and contests going on that you’re sure to find one or more that interests you. Check out the links for more information.

The One Hundred Percent Blogging Contest: Write a 600 word or less realistic fiction or nonfiction story promoting WellSpring International,  an outreach of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries. Deadline is January 31 at [...]

Whether you are published or not, I’m sure you’ve at least thought about how you would autograph your published work. Would you include your middle name? Would you make the letters loopy or pointy? What else would you write, if anything?

It’s very unlikely, though, that your autograph would become as well-known as that of the man who was born 276 years ago today.

Yes, John Hancock, merchant, statesman, and patriot of the American Revolution was born on [...]