The One Person Who Changes Everything You Create

Every writer has an ideal reader living somewhere in the back of their mind. And every content creator has an ideal viewer.

Not the entire audience. Not the demographic profile or the market category. One specific person. The individual toward whom you're instinctively aiming, whose response you're imagining when you make a thousand small decisions about what to include, what to cut, what to convey plainly and what to leave for the individual to discover on their own.

Mine has shifted over the years, but she has always shared a few qualities. She's honest with herself, even when it's uncomfortable. She carries her faith seriously but not rigidly. She has been through something hard and is still standing, a little worn but not defeated. She reads because she needs more than distraction. She needs to feel less alone in the specific texture of her experience.

I write for her.

Knowing the individual who will receive what you create doesn't narrow the content. It focuses it. In writing, the most universal books are almost always the ones written with deep specificity toward a particular kind of reader, because specificity is what creates the feeling of being truly seen. A reader who feels seen becomes a reader who stays.

If you create anything — writing, art, music, content of any kind — knowing your one reader, your one viewer, your one listener, changes everything about the choices you make. It moves you from performing for a crowd to speaking directly to that one, individual person who needs what you have to offer.

That is where real connection begins.

Who do you create for? Is there one person, real or imagined, whose response matters most to you? I'd love to hear about them in the comments.

Why Stories Reach Places Sermons Can't

Why did Jesus use parables and tell stories?

He could have delivered doctrine. He could have outlined theology with precision and clarity and left no room for misunderstanding. Instead he told stories about lost coins and prodigal sons and farmers scattering seed. He wrapped truth in narrative and handed it to people who wouldn't have received it any other way.

That wasn't an accident. It was strategy. And it's the oldest and most effective one we have.

Stories reach places that direct instruction cannot. They slip past the defenses we carry. The skepticism, the self-protection, the quiet resistance we bring when we feel like anything is trying to change us. We let a story in because we think we're just being entertained. By the time we realize it's doing something more, it's already done it.

I've seen this happen in readers. A woman who picked up one of my novels during a painful season and found, in a fictional character's struggle, the language for something she hadn't been able to name in her own life. A reader who said a particular scene spoke to him in a way that years of sermons hadn't touched.

I don't say that to diminish sermons. Preaching is also a key way to convey those hard-hitting truths. But story does something different. It creates an experience rather than delivering a message, and experience changes people in ways that information alone rarely does.

That's why I write fiction. Contrary to what some might think, fiction isn't a replacement for truth. It's stories pointing readers toward it, leading them through it, and wrapped in it.

The story is the sermon the heart is often most willing to hear.

When has a story (a book, a film, a song) reached you in a place that nothing else could? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

What Fairy Tales Know About Real Life

I don't know about you, but I think fairy tales often get underestimated.

They're filed away as children's entertainment. Charming, simple, suitable for bedtime. Every now and then, they get dug out to appease the request of a child or to dazzle a group of children in a reading circle at the library.

But personally, I see fairy tales enduring because they're built on something true. Not literally true, obviously. But they map onto real experience and land somewhere deeper. Somewhere our hearts simply recognize. It's why the same core stories keep resurfacing in new forms across generations and cultures.

And it's why I decided to try my hand at retelling a few of them. Magic of the Swan is the first.

What Fairy Tales Carry That Other Stories Don't

Fairy tales deal in archetypes, which means they deal in the most compressed and universal version of human experience.

• The curse that distorts reality and makes the true thing appear false.
• The quest that requires more than the hero initially has to give.
• The love that is tested by the willingness to see clearly when everything conspires against clarity.
• The transformation that costs something real before it gives something back.

These are not just plot devices. They're descriptions of actual human experience, rendered in a form that makes them visible and survivable and meaningful. The person reading a fairy tale about a curse isn't just reading about a magical enchantment. They're reading about every situation in their own life where the true thing has been obscured by something false, where they've had to fight to see clearly through distortion. The story gives that experience a shape, and giving something a shape makes it possible to hold.

That's what good stories do, and fairy tales have been doing it longer than almost any other narrative form we have.

What Faith Sees in Them

When I read fairy tales through the lens of my faith, I find something that looks more like deep pattern.

• Darkness
• Testing
• Transformation
• Restoration

The structure of so many classic fairy tales highlights the idea that things are not as they should be. That something real and valuable can be hidden or distorted or put under a kind of curse. That love willing to pay a real cost has power that other things don't. That restoration is possible even after what seems like an irreversible ending.

I don't think fairy tales are secretly Christian, but I do think they're tapping into something true about the human experience. And the resonance between that and faith is part of what makes both so enduring.

When I write fairy tale retellings, I'm going to do my best to follow the truth that's already present in the original and ask where it leads when you follow it all the way. There may or may not be an overt faith element, but the stories will come from the shared foundation of faith along with the human experience borne of a Creator.

Fairy tales know things. They've always known things. I'm just trying to put my own little spin on them.

Is there a specific fairy tale that has always felt real to you? Something in the tale that resonated beyond the surface of the story? Which one, and what did it touch in you? I'd love to hear about it.

The Mastermind Effect: Why Brainstorming Partners Are Essential

This post is geared more toward those in the Creatives category. You know who you are. Ideas buzz in your mind at all hours of the day and night, and you're constantly looking for things or thinking outside the box at any given situation. If you're a creative person, you already know the particular loneliness of having a mind that won't quiet down.

• The ideas that arrive at eleven o'clock at night when you should be sleeping.
• The project that's been living in the back of your thoughts for months, half-formed and insistent, waiting for the right conditions to become something real.
• The vision you can see clearly from the inside but struggle to explain to people who don't naturally think the way you do.

Creative minds are a gift. They're also, at times, an isolating one.

Over the years of working in a creative field, I've discovered that the ideas themselves are rarely the problem. Most creative people have more ideas than they'll ever have time to execute. The challenge is finding that small, trusted circle of people who can help you see what you're actually building, ask the questions that move you forward, and tell you the truth when something isn't working yet. That makes an enormous difference!

You may have heard this called a mastermind group. I much prefer the phrase finding your people.

Why General Community Isn't Enough

A broad creative community is sustaining and necessary. The workshops, the guilds, the online groups, the conferences. All of it matters.

But there's a difference between being known generally and being known specifically. A large community knows you as a creative person. A mastermind circle knows your particular project, your particular voice, your particular way of approaching a problem. They also know it well enough to meet you exactly where you are when you're stuck.

Anyone can offer encouragement, though. A true brainstorming partner offers insight. And that's far more valuable.

• They can stand at a distance and say, I think the problem is here, and here's why.
• They can ask the single question that reorients everything.
• They can remind you of what you said about your project at the beginning, before you lost the thread, and help you find your way back.

That's what I used to have in the early years of my writing career. Then, through a series of unforeseen circumstances and betrayals, I lost it all. It wasn't until recently that I realized just how deeply the impact affected me.

For years, I struggled to maintain the writing pace and the engagement I had established. With each passing month, the community, the interest, and the support dwindled, until no one even knew I was an author anymore. My days got consumed by reacting to life instead of planning it. I ended up living day to day, without much of a plan, reacting to the immediate without any intentionality or progress toward my goals.

Eventually, I started believing that what I did didn't matter to anyone, because no one was reaching out. No one was asking when my next book was releasing or about any current projects. And instead of squaring my shoulders and first *being* the engagement I needed, I watched life happen all around me. Watched others enjoying and celebrating the community and support they had found. All the while, feeling like an outsider and trying to find my place again.

How to Find The Community You Need

Of course, these relationships develop slowly and can't be forced. For someone like me who tends to move at high speed with my fingers in multiple things at once, it's not exactly what I want to hear. But I need to listen, regardless. I need to rebuild....on several levels. And this is how:

• Start in community.
• Pay attention to who asks good questions.
• Watch those who engage with specificity and care.
• Look for those who shows up consistently.
• Find those who demonstrates genuine interest in other people's work.

Those are the people in whom you want to invest more deeply. And when you're ready to invest your time or attention:

• Be willing to offer before you ask.
• Show up for someone else's creative process before you need them to show up for yours.

The relationships that grow into real brainstorming partnerships almost always begin with you giving first. You need to extend generosity without any expectation of immediate return. And while I've spent years sowing into others, my giving always came with hope attached to it. Hope that someone would return the favor.

It's definitely a fine line to walk, as you ARE hoping to form relationships, but you don't want that to be the condition of your generosity.

I'm definitely still learning. Even though I'm quite outgoing and help others smile when they see me, the intimacy of those sustained and mutually beneficial or rewarding relationships still eludes me...even at nearly 50 years old.

Just remember. Your brainstorming circle doesn't have to be made up of people who do exactly what you do. A novelist and a visual artist and a musician can form a deeply effective creative circle if they share the qualities that matter:

• Curiosity
• Honesty
• Genuine investment in each other's work

The medium is less important than the mindset. Your ideas and passions deserve that kind of company. And so do you.

Have you found the people who understand how your creative mind works? Who can meet you in the middle of a stuck project and help you find your way through? How did you find them, and what has that relationship made possible? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

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.