My Journey in Writing.

I started writing about five years ago - October of 2006. The writing was terrible, there was absolutely no plot (I was also much younger at the time), and it was absolutely despicable. However, I kept at it, writing in the mystery-ish genre.

Then I went into the realm of fantasy writing. This is where my writing started "going places." The first attempt was laughable, it was in all caps, no paragraphs. But it was practice, some good things were in it, and some of the lines were downright hilarious (though they seemed dead serious at the time). This could be said (at least, the first two things) of virtually all my writing, and I'm sure all of yours, too - little things we can salvage here and there.

I wrote, and wrote, and wrote in fantasy. The second attempt was also pretty bad (with more cheesy lines, all caps, no paragraphs, virtually no plot), but my skills slowly improved, and the writing turned out better as I went along to other attempts in this genre (and, with the same places, characters, world). I even made it to 70,000 words one time (my longest attempt on anything, followed by 55,000 or so).

Thus, despite upwards of a hundred thousand words being pumped into these ideas, nothing came to fruition (of which I am not saddened, really). I wrote here and there on stuff throughout this first leg of my journey in the vast field of fiction writing, and nothing ever worked. Even to this day, nothing has "worked", and I have, unfortunately, never finished a novel.

However, one thing has changed. In May of 2008, my life began to change. God got a hold of me. As a result, my writing naturally changed. Before, it had been a pathetic, basically secular attempt, maybe with a tiny bit of Christianity sprinkled in somewhere in the book or series. But as my whole life changed, my writing changed with it. Looking back, I noticed that the content seemed a bit different around that time period. Things just seemed...different. And, praise God, they were different in a good way.

Writing is a powerful, powerful tool. Much good and ill has been wrought through the pen (as the saying goes, the pen is mightier than the sword), or, in our case, the keyboard. Scripture tells us to do everything "to the glory of God" (1 Corinthians 10:31), and that, whatever we do, we should do all "in the Name of the Lord Jesus" (Colossians 3:17).

We can spread the Gospel through writing. We can teach doctrine, we can exhort practical theology. We can do so much with our keyboards (fiction and non-fiction), and we should do all of it to the glory of God. So, writers...

...Let's do it.

Thank you for reading. May God bless you and yours, and may He help those children of His who have the gift of writing use it all for Him.
In Christ,
Joel Garner ><>.
2 Chronicles 7:14; Romans 5:8.

So, what about you? What's your writing journey been like?