On the Mornings I Can’t Write, I Read My Wall

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There is a verse hanging on my wall. I did not put it there as decoration. I put it there because I need to be able to look up and find it.

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. Second Timothy, chapter one, verse seven.

I write about darkness for a living. Demons, curses, things that move in houses where nothing should be moving. People sometimes assume that means I must not scare easily. The truth is closer to the opposite. I know exactly what fear feels like, and it does not always come dressed as something supernatural. Most of the time it looks perfectly ordinary. It looks like a blank first page. It looks like a voice that says, “Who do you think you are to write this?” It looks like the quiet certainty, somewhere around the middle of a manuscript, that I have nothing left worth saying.

That is when I look up at the wall.

I have started six books now. Every single one of them began with some version of that same doubt, and every single one of them began again when I read that verse and remembered who I am in Jesus. Not who I am on a good writing day, and not who I am when a review is kind or a launch goes well. I remember who I am, period, when none of the rest of it is cooperating.

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What strikes me most about those words is what they do leave room for. Power, love, and a sound mind. That is the whole inheritance, and fear is not on the list. So when fear shows up anyway, and it does, regularly, I have somewhere to point and say, this did not come from God, and I do not have to keep it.

That is also, if I am honest, the reason Ravens Cove exists at all, and the five books that followed it. I did not set out to write about evil because evil fascinates me. I set out to write about it because I do not believe it gets the last word. Six books in, I am still finding new ways to say that, and I am not finished yet.

A verse on a wall will not write your book for you. It will not make the blank page less blank or the middle of the manuscript less lonely. What it does is smaller than that, and better. It tells you the truth about yourself at the exact moment you are most inclined to believe a lie.

So it stays on my wall. And I keep looking up.

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Mary Ann Poll is the author of the six-book Ravens Cove Iconoclast series and the host of Real Ghost Chatter, a weekly podcast of true supernatural stories. She lived in Alaska for more than forty years and now writes from Texas. Find her books and her podcast at maryannpoll.com.