Barbara Brown Taylor on the Essentials

When Barbara Brown Taylor spoke at the Wild Goose Arts Festival in North Carolina last July, she identified several essential ingredients of the writing life. Although she is a best-selling writer of Christian nonfiction, I believe her recommendations apply even more to writers of Christian fiction. You’ll find a video of her presentation on YouTube under the title, “Best Practices for New Writers,” but here’s the gist of it. Taylor says every writer needs these things to write most effectively:

A Habit. “For me, a habit means first of all an established place for writing so that when I walk through the door, I start salivating,” she said. It usually means you have a particular time for writing, though some of us can write anytime in odd snatches of time, which means we need to be ready to take advantages of those “found” moments. Your writing habit also involves a medium that you find easiest and most familiar for writing, whether it be a notepad, a computer, or something else. It involves a focus on what you need to write in your daily writing experience—a certain number of words, for example.

A Community. This is an accountability partner (or a small group of partners) who meets with you online or face-to-face to discuss the work you’re doing, give you honest feedback, and share what they write today as well. These are seldom open groups because you need confidentiality to share honest critiques of one another’s work. A Sufi woman is part of Taylor’s accountability community, and she will often question Christian clichés that appear in her work. Her husband is another. He is brutally honest about what Taylor writes on a particular day, and might say, “That’s interesting, but not compelling.”

An Audience. Visualize the person you’re writing for. How do they react as they read what you’ve written today? Taylor says, “For a long time, I wrote for people initiated into Christian language and liturgical life. When I started writing a book titled, Leaving Church, I had a different audience in mind: non-church people or churched people who were frightened to enter churches for various reasons. I started changing my language with that book. So your audience changes, but having a clear focus on the type of people you want to read your book helps to assure that you will.”

A Wound. “Part of my practice is knowing what I’m struggling with,” Taylor says. “What problems come up in my life often enough that I could be in community with other people about them? Someone with a spiritual wound asks questions like, ‘Where is God? Does God play favorites?’ and so on. A shared wound keeps me engaged in a book, and I hope it will keep my reader engaged as well.”

A Voice. This is a very particular choice for the writer.  “What is my point of view going to be?” Taylor asks. “Scholarly? Intimate? Inspirational?” How she positions herself depends largely on what audience she’s writing for. For example, one critic says that the poet Mary Oliver writes primarily from her scars and not from her raw wounds, which affects her style as well as her point of view. What level of education does your audience have? At what stage of life do they find themselves? All of these questions determine the voice you will choose for your work in progress.

A Lineage. Every time she sits down to write, Taylor calls to mind other writers who made her want to become a writer. “I call them the Council of Elders,” she says. “Who made me want to write, and continues to make me want to write well?”

A Guiding Spirit. Secular writers might call this their Muse, but we call it the Holy Spirit. “I believe it’s always important to invite the Holy Spirit into my writing,” Taylor says. This may take the form of a simple prayer: “Help me!” Or it may be a fairly detailed conversation that confesses the writer's need of the Spirit for each day's work. However a writer expresses it, she depends upon a Power beyond her own abilities. Elizabeth Gilbert sometimes says to the Spirit, “If I’m not writing well today, that’s not entirely my fault. I showed up. Now get in here and help me.” Taylor says she expects the Spirit to inspire her work and, when she encounters a block, she believes the Spirit may be warning her that she’s headed in the wrong direction.

Joe Allison writes both fiction and nonfiction, and has been a member of the Indiana chapter of American Christian Fiction Writers since 2010. He lives in Anderson, IN, with his wife Maribeth and daughter Heather.

When to Let Your Child Go

My first book was going to be a work of perfection. I'd spent more than two years researching, writing, and rewriting it. That was the dawn of the personal computer age, so I did much of the work on index cards, handwritten notebooks, and typewritten pages that I cut apart, rearranged, and taped back together. (Can I get a witness?)

I was laboring over the typescript with correction fluid and transparent tape one day when I realized my late wife Judy was standing behind me. She peered over my shoulder and said, “Don’t you think it’s time to let this child go out and play in the street?”

She was right, of course. While it’s important to give readers our best work, if we insist on revising and polishing it to the nth degree, we'll never give it to them. As a panelist on the TV show “Shark Tank” recently said, “Perfection is the enemy of profitability.”

So how long have you been working on your work-in-progress? Check the computer’s date stamp on your earliest version of the manuscript (something I couldn’t do in the day of correction fluid and tape). Make your best guess about how much of the work you've completed. Now take a deep breath and honestly answer this question:

At the rate you’re going, when will you be ready to show your manuscript to an agent or publisher?

The answer may make you wince, but let me ask another: How many other books do you hope to write? Multiply that by the number of years you're taking to finish this one. That means you'll achieve your writing goals by what year? Hmmm.

Admittedly, it's difficult to know when your "child" is ready to go out and play in the street, but here are a few tests that might help you decide:

1. What do your critique partners say? Are they recommending major changes? Then your book probably isn't ready to release. Are they recommending minor tweaks? Then it's probably time to wrap it up. (This test assumes that you have objective, knowledgeable crit partners, of course.)

2. How do agents and editors respond to your pitch? Can they grasp the essence of your story? Are they able to discuss it intelligently with you? This indicates that the idea is well-formed in your mind, so you are likely to have well-focused manuscript.

3. Do you feel the book tells your story effectively? Notice I didn't say "flawlessly" because your editor will help you repair any flaws. But if the manuscript tells your story convincingly and with sufficient detail to convey your message, kiss it and send it into the big, wide world.

By the way, I heeded Judy’s comment. I stopped coddling my “baby” and sent it off to the publisher, who published it. The book is far from perfect, but it’s still in print 35 years later. If I had kept pursuing the elusive dream of perfection, I suspect it would still be that—just a dream.

Joe Allison writes both fiction and nonfiction, and has been a member of the Indiana chapter of American Christian Fiction Writers since 2010. He lives in Anderson, IN, with his wife Maribeth and daughter Heather.