As you may know if you’ve been with me a while, my husband and I work part time with a New Testament church in Tallinn, Estonia. Every summer we go to camp with the church to help out teaching lessons, playing with the kids, doing whatever needs doing at summer camp.
This year, camp was a little different. For 29 years, camp was about youth and kids. It was a camp geared to reach out to families by providing a place for children to go for a week to learn a little English from the various missionary groups who support it, to play, to sing, and to feel the love of God in their lives. In 2024, the campground was sold by the Estonian government. This meant that camp had to be reframed.
Instead of giving up and deciding that camp was impossible because we had to go to a smaller campground and make changes in the way it worked, our camp director wisely decided to reframe the camp experience. Instead of being a youth camp, our summer camp became a family camp. Yes, it was smaller. In the past, we’ve had 140+ kids and teens attend camp. This year, we had families and the location could only support about 125 campers. The activities were different, though some were just reworked for families—we still played Minute to Win It, my favorite camp game. At the end, even though it was different, campers all agreed it was the best camp ever. (Just like it is every year!)
Does your novel need a reframe? Maybe you’ve been stuck for a while, thinking that something has to happen a certain way, or that you have to follow ALL the writing rules. What if you reframed it? What would happen if you let yourself imagine your novel in a different POV? Maybe added an antagonist, or a struggle to build conflict? How would that change things?
Maybe it is your writing practice that needs a reframe. If you are trying to force yourself to get up at 5 AM or write an hour a day and it is not working for you, think about how you could reframe your practice. What if you wrote for fifteen minutes a day? What if you did three writing sprints per week? What if you wrote during lunch instead of doom scrolling? How could you reframe your writing practice and make it work for you?
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