Find Your People: Why Community Changes Everything

Writing is solitary work.

A story gets built inside one person's imagination, transferred through one person's hands, shaped by one person's understanding of character and language and what makes a scene feel true. No one can do that part for you, and no one should try. The solitude is where the work actually happens.

But that solitude is sustainable only when it's held inside a larger community. The writers who last are almost never the ones who go it entirely alone.

I know this from experience, both kinds. I know what it feels like to be connected to a community of people who understand this work from the inside, and I know what it feels like when that connection frays or goes quiet. The difference is not subtle. It's part of what led to my period of silence and lack of new releases.

What ACFW Gave Me

I've been part of American Christian Fiction Writers almost since it began, and the organization has shaped my career in ways I'm still discovering.

The most obvious gift is access to editors, agents, craft education, and the broader ecosystem of Christian publishing. But what has mattered more, in the long run, is the relationships. The authors I've met through ACFW who have become genuine friends. The ones who understand without explanation what it means to be in the middle of a difficult manuscript, or to receive a disappointing editorial letter, or to watch a book release into the world and wonder whether it found the readers it was meant for.

There's a particular relief in being known by people who share the specific aspects of your experience. It doesn't require as much explanation. You can say certain things about the loneliness of a long project, about the doubt that lives alongside the work, about the strange grief of finishing a book, and be understood immediately, without having to first explain why those things are hard.

I never want to take that kind of community for granted.

Why Community Matters More Than You'd Think

Writing community doesn't have to be formal or large to be real. Some of the most sustaining connections I've had in this work have been a single author friend who checks in during a hard stretch, who celebrates a win, who tells you the truth about my work and encourages me.

The authors who have been that for me are among the people I value most in my professional life. And I try, imperfectly and consistently, to be that for others.

Creative isolation is a danger. And you often don't see it until it's already a problem.

You can go a long time producing work without meaningful community and not fully realize what's missing until you find it again. Until you're in a room full of people who understand the work you do and feel something loosen in your chest that you didn't know had been tight. That happened to me. It's part of why the long season away was as hard as it was, and part of why returning to community has been as restorative as returning to the writing itself.

If you're a writer reading this and you've been going it alone, find your people. It will change things in ways you can't fully anticipate from where you're standing. The work is yours alone to do. But you don't have to do it in isolation.

Have you found your community, or are you still looking? What has connection with other creative people meant to you? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

The Writing Life Nobody Talks About

There's a version of the writing life that looks very appealing from the outside.

The author at a sun-filled desk, hot tea steaming nearby, words flowing onto the page with quiet purpose. Book covers lined up on the wall and a copy of each published book on a shelf behind them. A calendar marked with signing events and speaking engagements and the occasional literary lunch. It's a tidy little picture. It's also only about 10% of the actual experience.

The rest of it is something else entirely. They're the parts that don't make it into the author bio or the back flap photo, but they're every bit as important.

I've been writing novels for over two decades now and have more than 25 published books, with well over a half-million copies in print. And I can tell you with complete honesty that the writing life has been one of the most rewarding, most frustrating, most humbling, most surprising experiences of my entire existence. Sometimes all four of those things in the same afternoon!

The Long Silences

What nobody tells you about publishing a book is how much waiting is involved.

You write the manuscript, which takes months, sometimes longer. Then you wait to hear back from your editor. Then you revise, and wait again. Then the book goes into production, and you wait some more. By the time the book is actually in a reader's hands, you have often been living with that story for the better part of two years. You know every scene, every character beat, every line of dialogue so well that you can barely read it anymore with any objectivity at all.

And then the book releases, and the world moves on to the next thing fairly quickly, and you are already supposed to be well into writing the next one.

There are also the longer silences. The seasons when the books stop coming because life demanded something else of you. I've written about my own long season away from fiction before, and the complicated feelings that came with it. What I'll add here is the silence doesn't mean the writer in you has gone anywhere. It's just waiting for the conditions to change. And eventually, they do.

The Doubt That Doesn't Announce Itself

If you talk to any author or watch interviews that dig a little deeper into the less public side of a writer's life, you'll hear us admit that doubt is a near-constant companion in this work.

This isn't the kind that makes for a good story at a conference panel. No, this is the quiet, persistent, everyday kind. The manuscript that felt promising three weeks ago now feels flat and unconvincing. The scene you revised four times still isn't right and you're not sure it ever will be. The book you poured yourself into sits on a shelf somewhere, and you have no way of knowing whether it reached the person who needed it or just took up space and is now collecting dust.

Unfortunately, that kind of doubt doesn't resolve cleanly. It's just part of the landscape. You learn to write alongside it rather than waiting for it to go away, because to be honest? It never really goes away. You just get better at not letting it in the driver's seat.

The Joy That's Harder to Explain

Now, just to make sure I'm not all Debbie-downer today, I'll wrap up with the good stuff, even if it's something non-writers might struggle to understand.

There is something that happens when a story finally comes together. When a scene clicks into place, when a character does something that surprises you, when you read back a paragraph and think, yes, that's exactly right! It's a bit challenging to describe that to someone who hasn't experienced it, though. I see it something like discovery and realization. Like you've managed to catch something true and hold it still long enough to put it on the page.

That feeling is why the doubt doesn't win. It's why the long silences eventually end. It's why, after the waiting and the uncertainty and the seasons when the words wouldn't come, I sat back down and started writing again.

Oh, and every now and then, I also get letters. Not often anymore, but often enough. A reader who found something in one of my stories that met them in the middle of something hard. A note from someone who says a particular character helped them understand something about themselves that no one else had articulated. Those letters remind me that the work isn't just for me. That the long hours and the quiet doubt and the waiting are part of something that matters beyond the shelf life of any single book.

The writing life is harder than it looks. But despite all the craziness? I wouldn't trade a single bit of it.

What's something about your own work or creative life that looks different from the outside than it feels on the inside? I'd love to hear what's behind the curtain for you in the comments.

When the Story Stalls: What I Do When the Words Won't Come

There's a particular kind of quiet that settles over a writing session gone wrong.

It's not the peaceful quiet of early morning before the house wakes up or the silence of the late night after everyone is tucked in bed. The kind where ideas surface easily and the words seem to know where they're going.

No, this. This is the other kind. The kind where I've been staring at the same paragraph for twenty minutes and the cursor hasn't moved, and I'm starting to wonder if maybe I should go reorganize a kitchen cabinet instead.

Every writer knows that quiet. Nobody talks about it enough.

I've lived through several versions of it over the years. The short kind, where a scene simply isn't cooperating and a good night's sleep resets everything. The longer kind, where weeks pass and the manuscript sits untouched and the guilt about the manuscript sitting untouched somehow makes it harder to open. And the longest kind. The season I've written about recently here, when life demanded everything I had and the creative well went completely dry for a stretch of years.

They're not all the same problem, and they don't all have the same solution.

When the Scene Is the Problem

Sometimes the stall is right in the manuscript I'm writing. One scene, one chapter, one conversation between characters that refuses to come together. When that's what's happening, I've learned that pushing harder rarely helps. Staring at a stuck scene with increasing frustration is a bit like pressing harder on a key that won't turn. Eventually something gives, but it's usually not the lock.

For stuck scenes, I've learned to step back and ask whether the scene is stuck because I'm writing it wrong or because it shouldn't exist at all. Those are two very different problems. A scene written from the wrong point of view, or entered at the wrong moment, or carrying too much expository weight will resist you. But sometimes a scene stalls because some part of you already knows it doesn't belong in the story. It's just taking a while for your conscious mind to catch up.

I've deleted entire chapters that I worked on for days once I finally admitted that's what was happening. It's never a comfortable moment. But the story always moves more freely afterward. And don't worry. Those deleted chapters are never permanently deleted. I've almost always found use for them somewhere else, in some other story or book. Nothing written is ever wasted. It's simply repurposed.

When the Writer Is the Problem

Other times the stall has nothing to do with the manuscript itself. Life is loud, or heavy, or simply full in a way that leaves nothing left over for fiction. The creative part of my brain requires a certain amount of margin to function, and when that margin disappears, when every hour is spoken for and every emotional reserve is already committed somewhere else, the words stop coming. The story isn't broken. I'm just temporarily running on empty.

That's a harder stall to work through, because the solution isn't craft-related. You can't outline your way out of depletion. Sometimes the most honest thing a writer can do is set the manuscript down without guilt and tend to whatever is actually demanding attention. The story will still be there.

I've had to learn that lesson more than once. And no matter how often it happens, it doesn't come naturally to me.

What Actually Helps

When I'm stuck and the cause isn't immediately obvious, a few things have helped me find my way back.

Reading almost always helps. Not reading about writing, though. Just reading fiction I love (the kind that reminds me why stories matter) rekindles something in me that a stuck manuscript can temporarily extinguish. There's something about immersing in someone else's well-crafted world that loosens whatever has tightened up in my own.

Getting away from the desk helps too. Some of my best breakthroughs on a stubborn scene have happened in the car, or on a walk, or in that half-awake space just before sleep. That's why I keep a notepad and pen by my bed, in the car, and in various places around the house. I also learned how to quickly access my voice recording on my phone for when inspiration strikes. The brain keeps working on the problem even when you stop forcing it to produce. Giving it room to do that quietly is sometimes all it needs.

And occasionally, what helps most is simply lowering the stakes for a session. Instead of sitting down to write the scene, I'll write around it.

• Journal from a character's perspective.
• Draft a scene that will probably never appear in the book but helps me understand something about where they are emotionally.
• Take the pressure of the actual manuscript off for an hour and let myself write badly and freely.

All of this helps me remember that words still come when I'm not gripping them so tightly. The story always comes back. That's the thing I keep having to remind myself in the middle of a stall. It always comes back.

When you're stuck on something hard, whether it be a project, a decision, or a difficult conversation, what gets you unstuck? Is it pushing through, stepping away, or something else entirely? I'd love to hear your approach in the comments.

The Characters Who Won't Let You Go

There's a character sitting in the back of my mind right now who has been there for years.

She showed up long before I knew her full name, long before I understood what she wanted or what fears she had. She arrived as a feeling more than a person. A particular kind of quiet. A way of standing at the edge of a room and watching everything without quite belonging to any of it.

I didn't know what to do with her at first. Life had me shackled at the time to the demands of what was right in front of me. I didn't have the luxury of discovering who she was. So, I waited.

Writers talk a lot about the craft of building characters. About using personality profiles, backstory worksheets, goals exploration, motivation charts, and potential conflicts. Those tools have their place. But the characters who end up mattering most rarely arrive fully assembled. They show up in bits and pieces. A gesture. A voice. The wound that hasn't been named yet. And then they wait, sometimes patiently and sometimes not, for the story that finally fits them.

That's the part of writing nobody warns you about. I can't remember when I didn't have stories running through my head all the time. It's why I frequently embellished the truth when I reported what happened to others. Little did I know then the tiny seeds growing would lead to me one day creating characters for stories in real life. There was only one problem. Characters don't always stay where you put them.

When They Start Talking Back

Some of the most memorable people I've written have surprised me somewhere in the middle of a manuscript. I'll be moving a scene along, following the outline, doing what a responsible author does. Then, all of a sudden, a character will say or do something I didn't plan, and everything shifts. A piece of their past surfaces that I hadn't consciously invented. A reaction that reveals something deeper than I knew was there.

I used to find that unsettling. After all, these were supposed to be fictional characters. Made up. Not real. How in the world could something happen that I didn't expect? Wasn't I the writer? The creator? After spending time with other writers, I realized it was completely normal. Now I find it one of the most exciting parts of the process.

It's a sign that the character has become real enough to push back. That they're no longer just a role I've assigned but a person I'm discovering. When that happens, I've learned to stop and pay attention, even if it means setting the outline aside for a bit to follow where they're leading. Sometimes, that means stitching an unplanned scene together with the rest of the story.

The two central characters in my current work-in-progress did exactly that.

I thought I understood them when I started. I knew where they'd come from, what had gone wrong between them, what this story would ultimately ask of them. But as the manuscript has taken shape, both of them have revealed things about themselves that changed how I see the entire story. One of them, in particular, carries a specific kind of grief I hadn't fully accounted for. Once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it, and I had to go back and layer it in from the beginning.

That's the thing about characters that jump off the page. They don't let you off easy.

The Ones Who Stay

I've also noticed that the characters who take the longest to write are often the ones who linger longest after the book is finished.

There's something about sitting with a character through their whole arc that creates a special kind of bond. From the broken place where they start to the hard-won place where they land. By the time a manuscript is done, I know these people in the same way you know someone you've watched get past a struggle. You've seen what they're like at their worst. You've been there for the quiet moment when getting beyond the pain finally begins.

Readers sometimes ask if I miss my characters when a book is finished. Honestly? Yes. Some of them more than others. The ones who gave me the most trouble on the page are often the ones I think about afterward. As if working through their story somehow worked through something in me, too.

Maybe that's why I keep writing.

Have you ever had a character from a book who stayed with you long after the story ended? Who were they, and what was it about them that wouldn't let you go? Tell me in the comments.