If you start to wonder why my posts are late or short this week, I’ve got a pretty good excuse. Several, in fact. But the one I’ll share is that recently, I was at a summer camp with my church’s youth group. Now I have your pity, right?

Actually, it was a great trip. I felt the most exhausted I’d ever been in my life at the end of the week, but it was worth it. I got to see so many kids’ lives changed as they followed Christ and I was able to forge deeper relationships with my students. Plus, I got to do archery and rock climbing! (Oh, and the girls beat the boys in tug-of-war. No big deal. I’m not still bragging about it or anything.)

Even though the only writing I did during the trip was taking notes during the sermons, I realised at the end of it all that I took away quite a few insights about writing. I’m absolutely positive this is because I’ve been editing my friend Minola Jac’s book, Everyday Inspiration for Change, for the past few months. Minola excels at taking everyday circumstances and applying them to change management, so subconsciously, I started to do that with writing. And my camp week was rife with lessons learned!

Let’s dive right in:

Long breaks are good—occasionally

I both hated and loved not writing for a week. A big part of me missed working on my WIP and my blog posts, but another part of me really enjoyed getting to rest from that part of my life. It’s been a very long time (a year or more) since I last took a week-long break from writing. When I got back to my beloved documents at home, I found that my mind was “reset” in a way and better prepared to tackle the challenges I’m currently facing with my WIPs—not to mention my aching fingers felt refreshed and renewed.

However, I don’t recommend long breaks all the time, as they can disrupt your creative flow and ruin your motivation. Instead, try a day-long break every week or every other week. Short breaks should be a part of your weekly schedule while long breaks will come along occasionally—and hopefully leave you with lots of ideas!

Do the work now so you won’t have to do it later

When we arrived at camp laden with all our stuff and ready to get into our cabins, we were greeted with a paperwork disaster. Our cabins and camp teams had been changed around, plus there were tons of errors in our activity schedule. Needless to say, our arrival was a bit more chaotic than expected, and some of these issues we dealt with throughout the entire week.

I’m not here to play the blame game; this kind of stuff happens sometimes when you have hundreds of kids coming into your camp and we were able to resolve most of the issues fine. But this whole scenario got me thinking about how we set ourselves up for disaster as writers. We don’t plan or plot enough, we don’t do our research, and then when we’re in the thick of our rough draft and should just be writing and letting creativity take over, we’re wading through the mires of planning, research, and stuff we should have done ahead of time. Same when it comes to self-publishing: we think that we’ll learn as we go and then find ourselves floundering as we can’t figure out how to market our book a week before its release.

It’s far better to get the work out of the way first to make the process go much smoother. Don’t save it for later; do it now and save yourself stress, time, and confusion.

Improvise

Sometime during the week, we had a bad thunderstorm roll through—so bad, in fact, that lightning struck on campus while we were all there. (No one was hurt, thankfully!) Just as the storm started dialling up, three girls from another cabin appeared at my cabin needing shelter from the deluge. I let them in, but I had no clue what to do. I didn’t know these girls very well and they were in a totally different age group than the girls in my cabin. We all sort of stood around for a few minutes. I checked the time on my phone to see how long I’d be subjected to the awkwardness…but then saw one of my apps and had an idea.

“Hey, does anyone want to play Head’s Up?”

Everyone jumped at the idea. And so proceeded one of my absolute favourite memories from camp: playing countless rounds of Head’s Up while the storm passed by. It didn’t matter that we were all different ages; everyone was laughing, acting silly, and just having fun.

Sometimes, as you’re writing (or editing, marketing, formatting, etc.), things will not go the way you planned. It’s almost guaranteed it’ll happen at some point. In these situations, you have two choices: moan and groan about your now-useless plan, or improvise. Roll with it. Let the story take you in a new direction or try a new advertising method. When you improvise, things might not turn out perfect, but you almost always gain something so valuable from the experience!

These are just a brief few of the many things I learned from camp. I’m so grateful to Minola for teaching me to see everyday experiences as teaching moments—it’s something I’ll never forget!

Before I go, I want to share one more experience from camp with you. While worshipping and praying about the “ministry” God has given me through all of the amazing people he’s put in my life, an idea came to me. Most of you have probably guessed that my newsletter has fizzled out a bit; to be honest, I never truly felt passionate about it in the first place because I felt like I said all I needed to say in my blog posts. I really only did it because everyone says you have to have a newsletter. (The further I get in my writing career, the more I realise that the stuff you’re “supposed” to do concerning your audience rarely ever gels with me—and I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m not alone in that feeling, too.) 

Well, that night, I decided to start up a newsletter again—but not the same one. This new newsletter might have a bit to do with writing sometimes, but mostly it’s just about joy, peace, fun, and smiles. If you’ve wondered what the new “Good News!” page on my blog means, then you’ve come to the right place. The new newsletter will be exactly that: good news! In our negative, downtrodden world, hope and positivity can be hard to come by on a daily basis. Through Good News!, I want to spread messages that make you smile rather than despair. I want to highlight beauty rather than death and darkness. I want Good News! to be one of the best parts of your week!

I’m still working out the details of the newsletter, but when it’s live, you’ll be the first to know! This is a newsletter I’m actually excited about and I can’t wait to share it with you! 

Have any questions about the newsletter or the writing tips I shared above? Drop a comment or contact me!

Happy writing!
—E.J.

---

If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll consider buying one of my books, donating to the blog, reading my stories on Vocal, and/or taking a look at my RedBubble shop so I can continue to produce 100% free content!

Photo by Josh Campbell on Unsplash