Evelyn Griffith - July Monthly Newsletter

|Evelyn Griffith|

Monthly Newsletter

First of all, thank you so much for subscribing to my author newsletter. If you’re new, I’m grateful to have you join me. If you’ve been here since the beginning, welcome back and thank you for your continued support!

In this newsletter, I hope to tell you about what I've been working on, what’s new in my writing world, and how my career has developed recently. 

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Professional Development

For those of you that don’t work in a Creative Writing field, it may (or more likely may not) come as a shock that novelists cannot make enough money to live on whilst just writing books. There’s a few outliers of course, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, etc. but these writers are few and far between.

I would love to believe that I'll become such a profoundly successful writer as either of the previous examples (or the category of uber-success they represent), but I think it’s wiser to hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

For this reason (as I mentioned in my Newsletter for June) I have been looking into other career paths that I might use to provide for myself and my family while writing my books on the side.

Don’t misconstrue what I’m saying here, I want to have a job I love. I want to work on things I’m passionate about and can pour my creativity and dedication into, but I also want a job that can support my existence.

As I mentioned in my previous newsletter, I’ve been thinking hard about potential career paths and options for myself after graduation from my MFA.

I’ve come to a few different conclusions. One is that it would be nice to work in a field where storytelling is key! You might be thinking, “what fields besides writing work with that concept?” but you’d be surprised. A few fields that pay very well that also work with storytelling in mind are: marketing, game design and narrative, customer relations, comms, and much more.  Lately I’ve been doing research into each of these and thinking about which one calls out to me the most.

Right now, the two that are most interesting to me are Narrative Design in the gaming world, and Branding/Copy in the Marketing world. With these two things narrowed down, I’ve been working on building up my portfolio and resume to match these career paths.

For the Marketing side, I’ve been spending time working on The Undiscovered and making it a case study for my portfolio by rebranding it and making it as professional as possible. For the gaming side of things I’ve just recently started working with Twine, which is an interactive “choose your own adventure” story building platform. 

By working with Twine, I can show gaming companies that I understand what it means to write a story in which players have multiple options for gameplay, all while keeping the story consistent and building up character decisions on the back end to limit their outcomes by the end of the game.

This is a bit of a pivot, but on the writing side of things, I’m happy to announce that I received another writing residency for The Singing String! This time it will be in Harper’s Ferry, WV and will be for 8 days in January.

I’m so floored that two different residencies thought my book was worth sponsoring in this way, and I’m grateful to have the extra time this will provide to work on it.

Because of these successes, I decided to apply to a few other residencies/funding opportunities. One is called StoryKnife, a month-long retreat in Alaska. The second is a grant opportunity which is awarded to writers working on a novel-length project.

I’m excited to see where these two opportunities might lead.

The Undiscovered

The Undiscovered is still doing quite well! I now have 348 subscribers, and 960 followers! I’ve managed to make a post every week for 32 consecutive weeks and I’ve been able to build my platform out into Facebook and LinkedIn as well.

As for where I’m planning to take things next, for now my goal is just to stay the course and continue growing my subscriber count as quickly as I’m able. I’ve learned that on substack it’s very difficult to rush these things, you just have to wait for people to notice you, be consistent, and create notes as often as you can. The Undiscovered is meant to be something that I eventually form into a business, but right now I need to continue growing my subscribers in order to launch effectively. I’d also like to continue growing my Facebook and LinkedIn influence so that I can get more people to apply to be interviewed from those platforms. I plan to go to conferences later in the year and now that I’ve done conferences before, I can refine my approach and hopefully ask more writers to apply. 

For now it’s just as I said, “stay the course!”

The Undiscovered

Progress on The Singing String

If you’re curious about this project’s origins, you can read about it on my website!

The Singing String

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that I had a bit of a writer’s slump over the past few weeks. This is not to be confused with writer’s block, with Writer’s Block, you want to write, but you don’t have any ideas. With Writer’s Slump, you have ideas but can’t write.

As I mentioned, I had the latter. I kept checking my clock and wondering when I could check off the “I wrote today” box. Most days I didn’t try because the idea of writing left me feeling drained even though I had so many ideas I wanted to get out of my head and onto the page.

It wasn’t pleasant. 

But lately I’ve been getting back into the swing and I think it’s actually because of the “choose your own adventure” game I spoke about earlier. Doing that was so out of my comfort zone, but it’s helped me to remember that writing is supposed to be fun. It loosened up those creative juices that were so locked down by my need to accomplish “big” tasks. With my book sometimes I find myself getting paralyzed by the scale of it. I know what edits I want to make, but getting the book to where I want it to be can sometimes feel like I need to zap it into its final form within a few hours. Doing a project that breaks up each bit of text into choices for a player has actually been really nice because each bit is small! I don’t have to think about it all at once when I’m looking at each action, and when I step back, that’s when the bigger decisions come into play. Since I started with Twine, I’ve been able to think about the sectionality and step-by-step nature of my writing which has been keeping me from getting overwhelmed.

Since then, The Singing String has been growing by leaps and bounds! I’m truly so excited that I’ve had time this summer to work on it. I’ve nearly finalized my first half, and I spent the first part of my day today working out a schedule for the next two weeks. This will set me up nicely to work on line edits across the entire book when my MFA semester starts. 

Because I can, and for accountability, I’ve decided to publish my tentative schedule of editing so that you can get an inside look into my progress and the process I use to write! So that there’s no spoilers (or any issues if I decide to change things later), I’ve decided to call my characters by letter names!

Today:

• Organize Scenes and figure out scenes to add into part two (and where they should go). COMPLETE! 😃

7/30/26

• Write the scene where character A goes to town center and meets character C

7/31/26

• Write the Old House Scene with Character B

• Write another church scene with Character A and C

8/3/26 (monday)

• Edit fight scene with Characters A and B

• Write character A showing the Church to character B.

8/4/26

• Rewrite epilogue

8/5/26

• Edit chapter 7 for continuity

8/6/26

• Edit chapter 8 for continuity

8/7/26

• Edit chapter 9 for continuity

8/10/26 (monday)

• Edit chapter 10 for continuity

8/11/26

• Edit chapter 11 for continuity

8/12/26

• Edit chapter 12 for continuity

Apart from that schedule, what I can tell you about the book is that I think it’s becoming something that all ages can enjoy while still being accessible to children. My characters are growing deeper and more complex by the day, and their relationships are starting to feel real and honest. The growth of their perspectives as separate individuals is making me only more excited to work on the text. 

The ultimate timeline I have for my book at this time is to continue with larger edits until the end of the summer. Then for the first part of the semester, I’ll do line edits and edit for plot holes and continuity mistakes I may have missed. The second part of the semester, I’ll work on line by line edits for artistry, flow and style. In the spring, my goal is to finalize it and start querying agents for representation!

I’m so excited to get this book out to people! I’ll be sure to keep you appraised of its progress until then!

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Before I start the Next Section

(Read this if it's your first time joining me!)

I struggled for a while, regarding whether or not I should include a section about my Christian walk in my author newsletters. Not only is it deeply personal, but it also might make some people feel that my writing is trying to alienate them. Regarding that concept, I want to say that while I am Christian, I never want my writing to be accessible only to a Christian audience. My faith is deeply important to me, yes, but my writing does not always deal with Christian concepts or theology. In fact, before I begin the next section I actually want to ask your forgiveness. I’m not used to writing about my faith journey and this is mainly because I find it incredibly difficult to do so. To express my thoughts in a succinct way about something that’s so all-encompassing for me and to distill it down so that anyone can read and relate to it is deeply challenging. Many times in the past, I have given up and decided that writing in allegory would be easier. You’ll have to excuse my clumsiness and my selfishness because one main reason why I decided to include these updates is that I simply need the practice. I want to be a writer who can write about their faith (for those who want to know about it) and I have an ever-growing respect for authors like C.S. Lewis and Tolkien and Keller who wrote so eloquently and accessibly about something so complex, personal, and vast. 

That being said, I hope you’ll be patient with me as I give myself the chance to develop this bit of creative nonfiction one small piece at a time. But, I also ask that you would permit me the selfish (perhaps undeserved) chance to show you that my work is for all people and audiences that wish to know it.

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A Note From Someone Who Loves the Lord

I had an incredibly interesting conversation with two of my closest friends this past weekend while I visited them in NYC (a super fun trip). We were talking about God and whether or not free will truly exists if God knows everything that’s going to happen to us in our lifetime. 

I don’t presume to know the answers to a question like this, but what I will say is that I think when people think about free will, they assume it means that the decisions you make will be outside of God’s omniscience; in fact that in order for it to be free will, it HAS to be outside of God’s knowledge. 

Someone might say, “In order for us to have free will, we need to have the ability to surprise God.”

It’s an interesting theory, but I posit that free will doesn’t need to be outside of God’s knowledge for a simple reason: God can see BILLIONS of realities for your lifetime alone. If God is truly all knowing—and I believe He is—then He knows the outcomes of every situation regardless of the decisions you or I make, and He knows where it will lead regardless of our involvement in it. 

Some people think that omniscience means that God knows all there is to know about THE path we're on (the timeline we live in), but what if free will exists because God knows everything there is to know about EVERY path we could take?

This can lead one into the question of whether or not multiple realities exist then, but I would posit that just because the Lord can conceive of EVERY reality possible across more than trillions of choices every day, doesn’t mean that all of those realities exist. It means that He gave us the ability to choose so that we might affect the nature of the single reality we’re able to perceive. 

This then begs the question, “How can God have a direct hand in our lives, if he knows about every possible reality and our choices affect the reality we can perceive?”

I think I—and other writers like myself—are in a unique position to understand and theorize about this question. 

Think about the timeline we live in as a book. A novelist writes their first draft, then goes back to edit. The author doesn’t always write chronologically, in fact they often don’t if they’re anything like me. They jump around between chapters, fixing problems as they see them come up, and adjusting things when the story doesn’t fit together anymore. 

But the interesting thing is that regardless of the novelist’s changes, the characters experience their story linearly. It’s all they can comprehend. They don’t feel the miniscule changes the author made on page 213 as they happened, nor do they feel the entire cut of their original first chapter. 

I think God is like this too, but with the caveat that His characters are alive and able to impact the story He’s written. 

This isn’t to say that God doesn’t have complete control of the plan of the universe. The way someone described it to me is that we’re all on a cruise ship and the cruise ship is taking us toward the God’s ultimate plan, but while we’re on the cruise ship, we can choose to be good or bad; thieves or caregivers; liars or honest travelers; godly or worldly. 

I know this was a lot, and that it's not a fully formed argument…it’s just something I’ve been tossing around in the old noggin’.

Conclusion

Thanks so much for reading, and I hope that you’ll join me again next month for updates on all these wonderful things!

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