Every season has a downside. Every season has an upside. Weathering them can turn us upside down.
Anyone who has been writing for longer than a year has already discovered that writing has its seasons. Seasons of plenty. Seasons of want. Fluctuations in the market. Keeping up with innovations. Keeping up with changes . . . like one space between sentences rather than the old-school two.
Seasons of Learning
Seasons of Doing
Seasons of Waiting
Seasons of Honor
Seasons of Neglect
Seasons of Inspiration
Seasons of Perspiration
Seasons of Questioning
Seasons of Peace
Seasons of Writing When It’s Hard
Seasons of Writing BECAUSE It’s Hard
Seasons of Sabbatical
Season of Rude Awakenings
Seasons of Wild Blessings
Seasons of Wild Word Counts
Seasons of One Great Sentence
Seasons of Research
Season of Collecting
Seasons of Searching for the Right Match
Seasons of Building Your Writing Career to look like what YOU want it to look like or what GOD wants it to look like
Some of the gravest mistakes writers make involve getting hung up on wishing they were in a different season.
Life—particularly the challenging parts and the time-consuming parts—form either the focus or the undercurrent of our stories. So embrace life. Don’t skip out on life because you want to write. Life is what you write about.
Write when you think you can’t. But allow yourself the grace of silence and inactivity.
Commit to the long haul.
Measure success with the heart of an artist, not a businessperson. But work like a businessperson, not a frustrated artist.
Avoid artistic and excellence shortcuts.
A bad day writing is better than a good day exfoliating . . . but only by a hair.
~
Cynthia Ruchti will be our KEYNOTE speaker at our Fall Conference 2023 in Tualatin, OR. We are so pleased that she will be joining us! She is also the author of more than 40 books—fiction and nonfiction, including the recent award-winning novel Facing the Dawn, nonfiction Spouse in the House: Rearranging Our Attitudes to Make Room for Each Other, and an upcoming novel soon to release—Love’s a Mystery in Embarrass, WI (Guideposts). Plus this is her tenth year writing devotionals for Mornings with Jesus.
She draws from 33 years of experience writing and producing a daily scripted radio broadcast that at its peak was aired on 48 stations across the country. Her books have garnered a number of significant industry honors, including Inspirational Book of the Year multiple times, reviewer, reader, and retailers’ awards, Christy finalist honors, Carol Awards, and others. She serves as the professional relations liaison for American Christian Fiction Writers (ACFW) and is a senior literary agent with Books & Such Literary Management, grateful and humbled to have been gifted with the honor of Agent of the Year in 2020 and 2022 by ACFW. She and her grade-school sweetheart husband live in the heart of Wisconsin, not far from their children and six (soon to be seven) grandchildren. Her tagline is “I can’t unravel. I’m hemmed in Hope.” You can reach her at www.cynthiaruchti.com or www.hemmedinhope.com/
