To learn more about Anna’s writing, you can visit her website or find her on Instagram.

At hope*writers, we love to celebrate our members and their writing progress. Each month, we highlight a member whose work caught our attention, and this month we’re celebrating nonfiction writer Anna Beard-Greeno.

We asked Anna to tell us about her writing journey as a hope*writer. Here’s Anna’s story in her own words.

When did you first realize you were a writer?

I have always loved writing, but didn’t start taking it seriously until about two years ago. I had just come to the end of a twenty-year homeschooling journey with my five children and was wondering, “Now what?” I started listening to Emily Freeman’s The Next Right Thing podcast and decided to start getting serious about my writing. The writing I do is nonfiction. My goal is to encourage others in their relationships with Jesus, others, and themselves through my writing.

...

What Is Voice?

It can be difficult to define what a writer’s voice is, much less figure out what your unique voice is in your writing. Essentially, your voice is what you sound like on the page. It’s what makes your writing unique to you and recognizable to a reader. It includes your style and tone, which are shaped by your perspective. Your voice is not the words you write, but how you write them.

“Whenever I think of the writer’s voice, I think of who I am or who we are as writers at our very core. The truest form of our heart, our expression, our passion, our skills, everything about us authentically put before another human being as an offering.” — Ashlee Eiland

How Do You Discover It? 

Some writers simply say that you’ll know your voice when you find it, but at hope*writers, we believe there are concrete steps you can take to develop a consistent voice in your work. These five tips will help. 

1. Write,...

As writers working in the internet age, we have the unique opportunity to publish our work on any number of platforms. From social media to blogs to webinars, e-books, and self-publishing sites, we have the power of choice at our fingertips. These publishing opportunities offer great flexibility, but they also come with the challenge of discerning the best platform for our words.

Hope*writers sat down with prolific author and speaker Beth Moore, and she shared the steps she takes to determine how and when to publish her work. 

Hint: It never begins with a book!

Start Small on Social Media

Choose the social media platform you like best and test your ideas there first. If you feel satisfied after sharing an idea on social media and it no longer occupies your thoughts, there’s no need to pursue it any further.

After posting on social media, you may find that the conversation it creates with readers may spark even further thought. If you continue to feel yourself...

The creative work of writing often requires writers to focus on numerous aspects of the job at once. From developing a daily writing habit to honing your voice, identifying your audience, executing a marketing strategy, and connecting with publishers . . . it can feel overwhelming, especially for writers who are new to publishing their work.

One of the keys to success as a writer can be found in applying the principles of essentialism, a word coined by Greg McKeown, the bestselling author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. 

What is essentialism?

Greg defines essentialism for hope*writers, saying, “For so many of us, modern life produces the undisciplined pursuit of more . . . Essentialism is the disciplined pursuit of less, but better.” 

How does this apply to writers? At hope*writers, we believe essentialism means doing the right things in the right order.

Why does it matter?

Every writer is at a different stage of their development, and...

To learn more about Erica’s writing, you can visit her website, check out her podcast, or find her on Instagram.

When hope*writer Erica D. Welch planned her first live online workshop on self-publishing, she wasn’t expecting that everything would go wrong all at once. Even after she lost her internet connection, had to move locations, forgot her microphone, and had family members drop in unexpectedly, she decided to view the experience not as a failure, but as valuable feedback for her next live event.

"Yesterday was as bad as it could get,” Erica wrote in our hope*writers Facebook group. “If you’ve recently experienced a ‘fail,’ look at it as valuable feedback for your next attempt. Press into the disappointment . . . then show up again." 

Erica has been showing up to write since she was a child, and she’s never given up. She’s always taken her writing seriously, and her family supported her writing...

Many writers struggle with a lack of clarity about their writing. Writers often believe a lack of clarity is the result of not having enough material to write about, but in reality, most writers have countless ideas swimming around in their heads or written on random scraps of paper. 

It’s not a lack of ideas that presents a problem for most writers. More often than not, the problem is that we don’t know which idea is worth pursuing or who will want to read about it once the piece is written. 

One of the most effective ways to gain clarity in your writing is to consider the needs of your audience. This means you need to spend significant time and energy determining who your audience is before you can write to them in a meaningful way. 

At hope*writers, we believe every writer has a reader to serve, and we help writers uncover their ideal reader so their message matches the needs of their audience. Once you spend time identifying your ideal reader,...

What is hope*writers? We’re so glad you asked! If you’ve found yourself here, it’s probably because you’re a writer looking for help on the internet. Maybe frustration with your progress has led you on endless Google searches, or you’ve followed rabbit trails all over cyberspace and come up either overwhelmed or empty-handed.

We’re here to help. 

We are a community of working writers dedicated to helping you make progress as you learn to balance the art of writing with the business of publishing. We help smart, creative writers do their work forever without losing their minds today. 

Here’s what you need to know about hope*writers to decide if we’re a good fit for your writing life.

We are a writing community.

We take seriously the creative, social, and spiritual call to the deep work of sharing our stories and ideas with the people who need them the most. We help writers find and follow the path to sharing their words...

At hope*writers, we’ve found that one of the main reasons writers struggle to make progress in their writing is not that they lack ideas, but that they’re doing all the right things in the wrong order. It can be difficult for writers to figure out their next steps when they’re lost in random advice found on the internet. 

In our work supporting writers, we’ve found that there is a six-stage path to making progress in your writing life. The good news is, you’re already on it!  

The purpose of the six-stage hope*writer path is to help you pause, take inventory of where you are, and give yourself permission to ignore all the other stuff for now. Do you recognize yourself in one of the following stages?

Stage 1: Writer

In this stage, you’ve begun to call yourself a writer. You’re focused on establishing a daily writing routine so you can write with confidence. In Stage 1, your goal is to practice your craft.

Stage 2:...

Goal-setting guru Lara Casey recently joined hope*writers to offer words of wisdom and grace for the writer with big dreams and a fuzzy idea of how to make them happen. Lara is a three-time author, the creator of the PowerSheets Intentional Goal Planner, and the founder and CEO of Cultivate What Matters.

She’s both a writer and an expert in grace-filled goal-setting of all kinds, so we asked her how we can apply her grace-filled goal-setting techniques to the writing life. 

 Lara shared three key tools that we can stick in our toolbox and use to structure our writing goals in a way that is both kind to ourselves and productive.

Believe in the Power of Little-by-Little Progress

When she set out to write her first book, Make It Happen, Lara planned to write as much as one chapter a day. She soon realized this goal wasn’t realistic for her writing habits. Instead, she decided to embrace the power of little-by-little progress and adjusted her daily word...

When novelist Robin Jones Gunn began writing her second Christmas novella, she had already published fifty books in her decades-long career as a fiction writer. When Robin’s editor asked her to rewrite the book to include an element of romance, she leaned into the skills she’d honed as a professional writer and produced a fresh manuscript. 

Robin rewrote the book four times before it finally went to publication, and she jokingly says she hoped to never see the book again after spending so much time developing the story. She moved on to her next project and didn’t think about the novella again until the Hallmark Channel showed interest in developing her Christmas novellas into a movie for the holiday season. 

Over the next few years, Hallmark filmed three Christmas movies based on Robin’s books, and each movie became the most-watched and highest-rated film that year.

Hope*writers spoke with Robin specifically about writing fiction, and she shared her...