DOUGLAS BOND BOOKS

   O'Conner               Lewis                Spurgeon            Sutcliff            Shakespeare           Milton             Calvin

"I count myself one of the number of those who write as they learn and learn as they write." Augustine, Letters cxliii.2, as cited in John Calvin to the Reader, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1559

"Luther once said, 'The devil hates goose quills,' and, doubtless, he has good reason, for ready writers, by the Holy Spirit's blessing, have done his kingdom much damage." C. H. Spurgeon (May 29, Morning and Evening)

After reading John Calvin's incomparable response to Cardinal Sadoleto, who was trying to woo Geneva back to Rome, Martin Luther said, "Here is writing with hands and feet."

Teaching Truth With Fiction, Douglas Bond speaking at Heritage Home Educators Conference, 2009

1. Be a careful observer of people and events around you. Keen, perceptive observation is essential for any good writer.

2. Write down your observations. Keep a blank book handy for writing careful descriptions of people and places. Keep paper and pencil by your bed at night so that when ideas come you are ready to write them down--then you'll be able to get back to sleep. 

3. Find the best books and read and reread them. Study them carefully and decide what makes them so good. 

4. Write about things and places with which you are already familiar.

5. Show; don't tell.

6. Avoid clichés--like the plague! 

7. Avoid adverbs. Show action with active verbs, and you will not need adverbs.

8. Never aim at style; aim at authenticity.

9. Be brief. Keep it simple and clear.

10. Don't cave in to gender inclusive language. It violates the most basic principles of good writing: be brief, and less is more. He/she fulfills neither principle.

11. Read good poetry. Practice writing poetry in conventional forms, like sonnets in iambic pentameter.

12. Know the English language, the quintessential multicultural language. Study Elements of Style, by Strunk and White.

13. Read what you have written out loud. This is the big test.

14. Remember the three keys to good writing: Rewriting, rewriting, and rewriting. I am not a good writer. I am, however, making progress as a rewriter.

15. Carefully examine your motives for writing.

16. Above all, prepare your mind and heart to write by reading the Bible. It is God-breathed. We are image bearers of God. We have been made new creations in Christ Jesus. There is no greater book than the Bible, the Word of God, or "The Law of Christ" as John Wycliffe termed it. Master its content, and you will write from the heart about enduring things. Master its style, and you will write about them in the most imaginative, Christ-honoring, and winsome ways. 

 by Brittany Bond 

    I rowed as quietly as possible across the glassy bay—squirming on the thwart because I’d stepped on it with wet feet before sitting on it. As I rounded the spit the house came into view, looking more like a fortress made of silvered wood than the humble dwelling it had been. Its once brightly lit window stared vacantly at me without recognition.

    "Well, what did you expect," I muttered to myself, "it to welcome you with open arms? You hardly gave it cause for that."

    After beaching the dory, I stepped gingerly up the seaweed-coated stairs that led to the empty doorway to the basement. The basement was now bare but for a few sawhorses in the far corner. Yet in my mind’s eye the room came alive, as it had been long ago.

    "John, John, Danny’s here!" shouted my Aunt Meg as she dragged me by the hand down the steep stairs.

    Uncle John nodded in my direction but said nothing.

    Still smiling like a three-year-old, Aunt Meg skipped back up the stairs, despite the silver braids that swung behind her. I was left alone with the silent man, who was to be my guardian. Getting one slim strip of wood perfectly smooth seemed to be his only concern. As if I needed a guardian; I was twelve years old and big for my age, and here I was packed off to some obscure bay in Puget Sound with two old relatives. For what seemed like hours I sat, eyes half closed and lips sneering at him. He was humming softly, apparently rejoicing in his work. Now and then he sang a few snatches of words, "…sands of time are sinking…" his head wagging to the tune but his hands all the while worked steadily on the dory slowly forming before my eyes. My stomach growled.

    "Get that thwart there sanded and fitted—then we’ll think about dinner," he said, without glancing up. I did not move.

    Presently a great din came from up the stairs—like someone was kicking pots and pans down some stairs. But it was only Aunt Meg setting the table.

    "She’s hint’n she’s hungry," Uncle John said, with the slow smile he always had when speaking about his sister. "So am I." He stumped up the stairs deliberately, but when I tried to follow, "You will not be welcome at dinner till that thwart there is finished, Dan." And he closed the door.

    While they ate, I slaved over the thwart—my first meal with them and I never ate it. That was fifteen years ago, just after I had been suspended from middle school.

    I climbed the now rotting stairs leading to the kitchen which was still yellow and the evening sun still glowed through the west wall that was all windows. Ivy had invaded through the arched windows and entwined about the cupboards. In a neat row across the ceiling of the kitchen nook were the hooks Uncle John had hammered up for Aunt Meg to hang her lavender to dry. Aunt Meg loved lavender and all herbs, any flower with a scent. She used to sit there, beneath her lavender, listening intently to the sea lapping, the waves breaking over the sand spit and the gulls wheeling above,

    "It’s like listening to a concert to hear all that richness," she would say to me as she breathed deep breaths of the lavender and salt, she even liked the smell of seaweed drying on a low tide.

    She could tell when the tide was ebbing or flowing from the sound of the waves; she could tell the call of a tern from a kingfisher; she could tell where Uncle John and I were just from the sound of our feet. I glanced into the bright little room, off of the kitchen, which had been her bedroom, fearful of the memories it would hold.

    I saw a boy, old enough to know better, slink in and lift the lid of Aunt Meg’s treasured money chest, but as I reached my dirty little paw into it, another hand softly brushed mine aside and closed the lid. I froze for a few seconds, then swung around—her vacant eyes seemed to pierce my soul, and I writhed as one would at the touch of a red-hot poker.

    "I expect you’ll find the view from the kitchen’s the same as here," she said leading me away. I cried silently with shame and anger at letting myself get caught; she pretended not to notice, but she had never missed a sound in that house.

    I hastily left the room and its memories, turning to the kitchen garden. Aunt Meg loved the cool, richness of dirt, but she never grew anything but herbs. She could grow every herb, both commonplace and exotic, except for thyme, which refused to grow in her little plot of land, despite all her coaxings. I think it had something to do with all the salt in the soil there by the bay, but then, all the other herbs grew. She laughed as once again, come spring, her thyme seed refused to show its head,

    "Must be we’re not made for time, Danny," she said; then her face began to glow as if washed in the light of some unknown sun.

    That was the last time she ever worked in that little plot of soil.

    As I turned away from the overgrown plot of land, a phrase from the song Uncle John had been humming flitted like a ghost through my mind, "Dark, dark hath been the midnight, but dayspring is at hand." Aunt Meg had been overflowing with that dayspring, that "deep sweet well of love." And my life, despite her faithful love, had been a dark, dark midnight. Will dayspring ever come?

                Brittany Marie Bond