Lauraine at the ACFW local chapter meeting.

At this past OCW conference and ACFW meeting last Monday, author Lauraine Snelling spoke on the stories of life and how those play into making your writing real.

This lead me to stop and think about my own life and my own writing.

The drafts I wrote in high school are as simplistic as you can find. Not in the writing skill or plot, necessarily, but there is a definite lack of real-world perspectives.

Of course there was. Back then, I knew nothing. I had seen nothing.

Even now, I know I’m entirely green to the world. I could name twenty people around me who have seen more in their life than I ever expect to see in mine.

I did an entire blog series on the “Story behind the story” where authors shared what inspired their novel. Sometimes it is a question, sometimes it is a situation they endured, sometimes it is something a family member went through. These life experiences are God’s way of providing us story fodder—whether we are writers, speakers, welders or mechanics. These stories can affect others in the way we share them or learn from them.

As Lauraine highlighted, we can react to the high and low situations with reverance for God’s plan, or we can narrowly only look at that situation without hope.

I choose hope.