Three Reasons to Write Devotions

By Terry Whalin @terrywhalin

Recently at the Colorado Christian Writers Conference I spent some time speaking with Susan King, who for many years has been an editor at The Upper Room. If you don't know about this devotional publication (a bi-monthly), it reaches six million readers. Each devotion has a particular format and are less than 300 words. I have been published in The Upper Room but it was years ago. In the early days of my writing for publication, I often wrote devotionals. Susan told me they continue to need more devotions from men and in particular from the Old Testament (except Psalms). These pieces of advice are important so I write something that meets their publication needs. As a writer, you can go in many different directions so this focus was very helpful.

After speaking with Susan, I decided I would write some devotions and submit them for consideration. During the conference, I went to the freebie table and collected a sample magazine and their guidelines. Whenever you want to write for a magazine, studying their publication and guidelines is always the first step to getting published.

With a publication and writing target in sight, I began to think about writing some devotions. It is a different type of writing than I have done in a while. I decided to write several devotions for the same publication to increase my possibilities for getting published.

Here's three reasons to write devotions:

1. Different can be good for your writing. Sometimes we get in a rut with our writing. Devotional writing is a connection to the spiritual and applying these lessons to your writing. For me, writing a devotional is different from writing a chapter in a book or a book proposal or other types of magazine writing. As a writer, you still get to practice your storytelling craft with devotionals.

2. Devotions are short. They are often 300 words or less. This type of writing can be a challenge to say something meaningful with only a few words. The Upper Room guidelines give insight into this area encouraging you to look at snapshots of life in the stories that you include.

3. Looking for devotions to write puts you in touch with the “God moments” in your life. It is easy for life to drift past if you aren't in touch with these spiritual moments in your life (at least it is for me). I began to consciously look for these moments and grew more aware of them in my life.

Bonus reason 4. Devotion writing is another way to serve others with your writing and also a way to gain your own exposure. If my devotion gets published in The Upper Room, I will reach millions of readers.

Do you write devotions? What are your reasons for writing them? Let me know in the comments below.

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Writers Study their Craft

One of the ways we can grow as a writer in the knowledge of our craft is to read how-to books. Even though I have an undergraduate degree in journalism and have shelves of how-to write books, I continue to read books on the craft of writing. For years I've read at least one of these types of books every month. New how-to books continue to be created and published—and I learn something from each of them.

In fact, I'm on the lookout for notices about new how-to books and I enjoy reading them and writing reviews about the books. In this article, I want to highlight two new books that I've recently read and reviewed. I don't recall where I found out about these books but in each case, I looked the book on Amazon and noticed the book had one or no reviews. From my experience I know other readers are making buying decisions all the time based on these reviews. I know they are important to the author. Most authors are easy to find their website and contact information. I reached out to each of these two authors, Ann Byle and Carolyn Scheidies. I expressed my interest in reading and reviewing their book.

As a way to support other writers, I encourage you to take similar action. Reach out to these writers and offer to read their book if they will send you a review copy. Yes you get a book but this book comes with some responsibility: that you read the book and write your review.

First, CHRISTIAN PUBLISHING 101 by Ann Byle:

Journalist Ann Byle has compiled and edited a wide-ranging look at Christian Publishing from her years in this business.  As she explains in the opening pages of the book, “Most chapters are based on interviews I did with the professional or about his or her area of expertise.” The 45 chapters are broken into seven sections: Creating a Writing Life, The Craft of Writing, Exploring the Depths of Nonfiction, Discovering the Breath of Fiction, Writing for Children, Tweens, and Teens, Reaching Your Readers, and the Business of Writing. Each chapter includes an “Assignments” section with a series of questions for the reader to dig deeper into that particular topic. Some chapters include sidebars with additional resources and insight.

For a couple of the chapters, Byle writes from her detailed experience in the Christian market such as Chapter 16 Contents Is King: Article Writing for Magazines, Websites, and More or Chapter 42 Book Proposals: Whys and Hows of Creating a Great Overview of Your Book.

For almost any area of the field, reading CHRISTIAN PUBLISHING 101 will give you the basics and insights you need to start in this area.  Byle has compiled a book of experts in each area that the book explores for example: Jerry B. Jenkins, Nancy Rue, Bill Myers, or James Scott Bell. Many will want to read this book over and over as a valuable resource. I highly recommend it.

Second, ESPECIALLY FOR THE CHRISTIAN WRITER by Carolyn R. Scheidies

Whenever I learn from another writer or editor, I want to learn from someone with experience in what they are teaching. Carolyn Scheidies is just such a person. In ESPECIALLY FOR THE CHRISTIAN WRITER, Scheidies teaches about writing letters to the editor, queries to magazines, articles, news releases and much more. You will gain insights for your own writing as you study the pages of this well-written book.

In the opening pages, Scheidies gives critical information saying, “Want to get published? Then you need three things in great abundance: passion, persistence and patience. Without these, you will never persevere as a published writer. If you don’t care about your subject, how will you make your reader care? And if you give up, you’ll never know how far you could have gone.” (Page 10)

ESPECIALLY FOR THE CHRISTIAN WRITER is full of practical insights for every writers.  I recommend this book.

I hope you will check out these two books about the craft of writing and they will help your writing life. Do you regularly read books about the craft of writing? Let me know in the comments below. 


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On Being A Writer, On Being a Christian

It's an honor to have Bret Lott as a guest for The Writing Life. Bret is a bestselling novelist. He wrote Jewel, an Oprah Book Club selection which was made into a film. His latest book is Letters & Life: On Being a Writer, On Being a Christian (Crossway Books).

By Bret Lott

At the beginning of every semester, I read out loud Richard Brautigan’s short story “1/3, 1/3, 1/3” to my students. I do this be¬cause (1) it’s a terrific story; (2) when it comes to learning craft, I place a whole lot more stock in examining well-written work than in yammering on about the how-to of technique; and (3) this story has two of the best descriptive sentences I have ever read.

Brautigan’s writing is funny, beautiful, and strange. He was most famous for his novel Trout Fishing in America, published in 1967, for which he became a counterculture literary icon; he later committed suicide for the reasons people commit suicide: their own overruling of the gift of creation.

But this story and its remarkable voice and precision are still here and still alive.

After I read the story—it’s only four printed pages—I quiz my students, asking them which two sentences they believe are the ones I believe are among the most precise descriptions I have ever read; that is, as all good teachers are wont to do, I ask them to read my mind.

The first sentence is this: “My entrance into the thing came about this way: One day I was standing in front of my shack, eating an apple and staring at a black ragged toothache sky.”

The second is, “The novelist was in his late forties, tall, reddish, and looked as if life had given him an endless stream of two-timing girlfriends, five-day drunks and cars with bad transmissions.”

These are two of the most precise descriptive sentences I have ever encountered, not for the exactitude of their physical or tangible descriptions; in fact, you’ll find that the physical element of these descriptions may be merely and only serviceable, indeed might even be a bit vague. But I value these descriptions for their spiritual acu¬ity. What happens in these descriptions is that a kind of descriptive triangulation occurs, and by triangulation I do not here mean the sort Bill Clinton made famous in his campaigns and subsequent presidency, that surveying of every possible side to be taken and managing somehow to support every one of them. Rather, by triangulation I mean the navigation technique that uses the trigono¬metric properties of triangles to determine a location or course by means of compass bearings from two points a known distance apart.

First, Brautigan gives us descriptive elements that are a known distance apart; that is, we know what a “black” and “ragged” sky looks like (and if you don’t, you haven’t paid enough attention to the sky). But in giving us that next word, “toothache,” he allows us into the unseeable realm of description, the point to which we need to navigate; he gives us the spirit of the sky and so the spirit of the viewer, a young man eating an apple, the story tells us, who doesn’t know what he meant by living the way he did all those years ago. With this word “toothache,” we have been placed on a three-dimensional grid and know now not only exactly what the sky looks like but exactly the ache and trouble of mystery of a young man’s life.

The same quality of known distances apart holds for the first three descriptors of the novelist: “in his late forties, tall, and reddish,” The fact is that these words are, finally, quite dull, and quite vague. If you were a student of mine and used them in a story to describe a character, I would most likely write “ugh” in the margin, which is usually a sign that I think you’re not actually trying to write well. But if you were to append this last phrase—“and looked as if life had given him an endless stream of two-timing girlfriends, five-day drunks and cars with bad transmissions”—well, if you wrote that, I’d call you a genius.

Because, as with that toothache sky, we know not only what this guy looks like but also the spirit of this man. We could each of us get a police lineup in which six tall, reddish men in the forties lined up against the wall, and we would know immediately the one with the endless stream of two-timing girlfriends, five-day drunks, and cars with bad transmissions. This is because the description we have been given transcends the physical and leads us into the third dimensions of writing: that point when we leave simply seeing something and enter into knowing that something.

An Excerpt from Letters & Lie: on being a writer, on being a Christian by Bret Lott (Crossway Books, 2013). Used with Permission.