Dear Writer Girl,

Dear writer girl. Maybe you’re perfectly fine the way you are. Like maybe it’s okay if you don’t touch your manuscript for 700 days.

 Writer girl, live your life - drink tea all night long while you pour over the great works of fiction, run away to Paris, or Dublin, or Charlotte. Find inspiration in the mundane little things around you. If you don’t write today you’re going to be okay.

Perhaps tomorrow the words will come, or maybe you need to pick up painting and you’ll find the inspiration there.

​Perhaps you need to have your heart broken and then sewn back together. Maybe you have to lock yourself in a room to finish your manuscript, or draft it in a string of text messages. Maybe you need to rent Emily Dickinson’s bedroom for an hour and write there, or maybe you need to go down to your basement and find inspiration in the unfinished floors.

Maybe it doesn’t have to look the way it looks for everyone else.

We get so caught up in word counts and publishing deals we forget about the smell of freshly sharpened pencils and the taste of coffee that has gone cold, and how disorienting it feels to finish writing for the day.

Writing’s this chaotic lifestyle of clacking away and reminding yourself that you still have to live.

A few years ago I would have told you that my best writing advice would be to write a little every day, to read a lot, and to make sure you have fun with your writing. Back then it was all about the act. The finger clacking, the outlines with hundreds of little check boxes. That was how I wrote. I thought there needed to be a method and I thought my book had to look like all of the other books and go viral on TikTok as well as bring millions of people to Jesus. I thought that I had to just pull all of this potential out of myself and throw it onto paper. 

All of that has changed. ​

​I don’t write that way anymore.

If you asked me today what my writing advice is I would tell you to listen to the Pride and Prejudice soundtrack and cry on your bed until your mascara stains your pillowcase. I would tell you to book a flight to London, to buy yourself an exotic perfume, to keep a stack of un-read books on hand just in case.

You want writing advice? I’ll give it to you - dance for an hour in your bedroom, laugh too loudly, take notes when you see people flirting, try to figure out why someone got that tattoo.

Watch movies, stupid ones, amazing ones. Laugh to them, cry to them, talk over them, hyperanalyze them. Read books, old ones, new ones, picture books, war novels, theology, science.  Laugh at them, cry over them, write all over their pages, force other people to read them, hyperanalyze them, and sew pieces of them into your personality.

​I’d tell you to make friends with random people and to listen to what they have to say. Let yourself be anxious, sad, angry, happy, giddy. Live your life, feel the things you were designed to feel. Eat food, buy coffee, start a scrapbook, take a picture every day of your life.

That’s how you write.

Yes you still have to get out of bed and find your way to your laptop. You still have to make the keyboard keys move and the letters turn into stories. But you have to experience life, let it happen. You have to be patient, maybe it won’t happen now, or maybe it will. Follow your fancies, don’t push words out that aren’t meant to be pushed out. Pray over your manuscript, your hands, each email you send, each new opportunity.

Get a job, go to school, join something, meet someone, be there for your family.

Sing along to the radio, write some letters, fold laundry.

Dance in the rain, gaze at the stars, throw leaves in someone’s face.

Live the story that is your life, and the words will come from there.

Dear writer girl. You’re gonna be okay. You’re not a failure if you’re not a success today. Live the beautiful life God has planned for you. The words will come, they always do. You’ll feel inspired again some day, even if that day is not today.

You have to live too. The stories happen out there in the big world we call home. We are the characters. The more we learn, the more we do, the more we observe, the better writers we become. 

Write poetry. Write songs. Write a play. Don’t worry about writing your magnum opus. Jot down everything, read your Bible every day, take care of your body. Tend to your mind, protect your heart. Write. 

Write on the lives of those around you by caring. Be loving and kind, be such an example of Jesus that everyone will know you live for him. Write on the places you visit by respecting them and caring for them as if they are your own. Write on your own heart your worth. Write letters to your future self telling her how proud you are of her. 

Leave your handwriting everywhere just by living the way you live.
    
Dear writer girl - you’re gonna go places. I know you will. Live and write and the rest will come.
    
Writer girl, don’t let them tell you your dreams are silly - that you’re wasting your life.
    
Write that book.
    
Live that life.
    
You are here for a reason.
  
God put you here to do this.
    
Stop telling yourself you can’t when you really actually can.
    
​Dear writer girl.

Belle Thomas

Belle is the writer and dreamer behind An Old Fashioned Girl. She is passionate about reminding girls of their identity in Christ, classic books, history, Louisa May Alcott, and earl grey tea. ​​​ ​​​