Slowly with planning

Tabi and I have just been away on a creative writing course. Actually the course was for home ed teenagers but I joined in most of the morning workshops and learned a lot.
But what struck me most of all is that writing a novel takes time. It isn't something you can just sit and do. There are things like working on the character so that you know them like a real person so that even if you don't use any of the history about them you know how they will think, feel and act in a given situation; that you know why they do and say what they do even if the reader doesn't know why, and in fact doesn't need to. And the story needs to have a bit of planning and organizing. Some writers let their stories flow but because they know their characters and the basic idea they are portraying, the problem and the solution, then it does flow and make sense to the reader. We were also told that the first draft, which on the whole you do just go for and not worry too much about grammar or spelling, is really only the start of the project. From there not just the spelling and grammar needs to be sorted but the whole thing needs to be looked at, read through, critiqued and criticized, reworked and made to make sense.
I am also doing a bit of study towards a degree in theology - another story that I will go into more on another day - but from that too I have realised that there is much more to study then just reading the Bible and the notes, much, much more.
And it has got me thinking as to how much do we as Christians expect everything to be instant. We evangelise and expect people to do it, go with it, even those we send out we do with the minimum of time and effort put into them. I feel that there is so much in our churches that we look to for an instant hit, and instant answer and yet to really produce something of worth - which I am sure is what God wants of us with our lives - we have to be like these writers dedicated, willing to give up time and effort, to very much set our faces to the goal of where we are going and not get distracted and go for it. But we don't so often. We go to various meetings, take on various projects and ideas that are thrown out at us, try to run home and family and friends around it, giving all the minimum we can get away and wonder why the world isn't clammering to know the God we claim to know.
There is so much here that I am hoping to explore myself. I have read a book called "So you don't want to go to church anymore?" which actually doesn't advocate not going to church, as its title may suggest, but very much talks about how we cannot use anything to substitute our relationship with God, no matter how good or how expected it is.
More to follow!!!