Interrupted Writer

By Nancy Janes

One of my earliest memories is bending over a brown card box trying to decipher the letters written on its side. Once I entered school the squiggly characters puzzled me no end until I learned to put them together. Spelling became one of my favorite subjects (In those days spelling was a separate subject.) I loved how the little letters linked to each other to make a word. And the words connected to create a sentence of meaning.

The sentences, then, were diagrammed up hill and downhill and like Jill tumbled in all directions. The words came together in paragraphs and soon into stories. Reading became the passion of my life. The most adventurous book was the Bible, and from it I made forays into the world’s great literature.

My ambition to be a writer went out to sea in the ebb and flow of life. I became a Clinical Social Worker. The years passed, and the busy time of hands on service to others has morphed into a time of reflection and quiet peace. I am back to writing. The pauses in my daily writing stem from working out the problems of the book’s characters, instead of ‘real life’ ones.

We imperfectly see how God moves in our lives as we obediently become clay in His hands. If dreams lie asleep they can be revived and mixed into the clay of our life. A richer, deeper level will emerge in the vessel, He creates, and is continually creating. If an aspiring writer seeks the how’s and the do’s of writing, the stage is being created. 

Fill a page with words, start linking them into sentences, and be surprised by what will surface. And keep linking.

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A clinical social worker by training, Nancy Janes has been writing since adolescence from a Christian perspective. She grew up in the Appalachians of Kentucky where her Christian heritage rooted firmly before she moved to an urban setting as a young adult. After a career in mental health she returned to small town living, and now resides in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. A full-time writer she finds the demands of writing as absorbing as her former occupation. Her book The Boy Who Walked A Way is set in the future.  Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pages/authornancyjanes/498424470193886?ref=hl