But as I worked, I was held in the hand of God, my work inspired by the Spirit of God breathing life into the words that sometimes poured generously across the page and sometimes had to be wrenched and wrestled there.

Let me be specific. My book is an introduction to the church year. Each chapter corresponds to one of the eight major seasons or days of the Christian calendar. The two chapters I was most dreading were Epiphany and Pentecost because these are not seasons but rather single days, and I wondered how I would ever find enough to say about them to fill a chapter.

The Epiphany chapter, particularly, gave me fits. I wrote and found nothing usable, so I wrote again with the same result. It took me 12 of my 16 hours to even find a gem I could use to provide direction for the chapter. But once I did, the writing flowed, and in just a few days I was able to finish the whole chapter, piecing in material I’d written—and written off—in those frustrating days of what seemed like wasted writing time.

Months later, when I got my editor’s comments back, guess which chapter he wanted me to significantly revise? Yep, Epiphany. He particularly wanted me to change the opening story and suggested moving one of two anecdotes from within the chapter to its beginning. Again this chapter gave me fits. I went through eight drafts, using various iterations of my editor’s suggestions before one line—one line!—from the chapter morphed into a story, and that story fit the themes of the chapter far better than I could have ever dreamed.

As I look back, I see dozens of instances like this one, where I felt like I was getting nowhere, banging my head against a wall of words, none of which were yielding to let me through to the road I knew was on the other side. But all that head-banging was not wasted, however painful it was at the time.

I think often of Jesus’ words to his disciples after they feed the 5000: “Gather up the fragments, that nothing may be lost” (John 6:12). Indeed, nothing was. Nothing is. Amazing, that.

I wrote a book last year. Really. A whole book. In about an hour a day. I’m still not sure how I did it. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I know that God had a lot to do with it. From getting the contract to creating a writing plan to actually writing and revising, God’s grace was present throughout this process.

After my initial dance of euphoria upon getting my book contract, reality set in, and with it, fear: how on earth was I going to write a book? When the contract came in the mail I had a three-year-old son and a three-month-old daughter—and eight hours of childcare each week.

Add to this the fact that I’m a lousy writer. Now, I’m a really good re-writer, but this means my writing process is highly time-consuming. I have to write a whole bunch of nothing, spewing all my random thoughts onto the page before I realize what I’m trying to say, or what is trying to be said through me (I’m never entirely sure which it is; it’s probably both).

Given the time-eating nature of writing garbage and then sifting through the garbage to find the one gem of a paragraph or sentence or even phrase that’s present in it, I wondered how I was ever going to finish a 35,000-word book in nine months.

Lynne Baab, author of eight books and my patron saint of writing, helped me map out a plan for finishing my book that took into account the fact that I spend about a quarter of my writing time actually writing, and the rest of it rewriting and revising.

It was a very aggressive schedule: two weeks (about 16 hours) to initially write/rewrite each of the eight chapters of my book, then one week (eight hours) to further revise each chapter. Then I sent my still very rough book out to five readers for feedback, after which I had another month (40 hours) to incorporate their comments into another round of revisions.

Amazingly, I was able to keep to this schedule, even managed to stay a little ahead of it.

Each day, I faithfully showed up at my computer, prayed that God would make it possible for me to do more than I knew I could do, and started typing. Some days, it felt obvious that God was working, and I wrote or revised way more than I expected to be able to.

Other days, it felt like I was pulling teeth to even get words on the page, like there was no gem to be found in the pile of garbage I’d written—and I’m usually really good at finding the gem in a pile of brain barf on the page, able to rework the entire piece around that one sentence or phrase. (Oddly, the gem as often as not doesn’t make it into the final draft, but it was necessary to move me in the direction the work wanted to move.)

But even on those days when I felt like my muse, the Holy Spirit, was silent, I see now, in retrospect, that He was still breathing inspiration into me. His words just needed time to gestate, germinate before they were ready to be birthed, to blossom. Invariably, though, those words eventually did blossom, and they were always better and more beautiful than I am capable of.

to be continued…