Imagine this. Years from now, you’re sitting in an audience, listening to your name being called. You’ve spent years writing, rewriting, learning your craft, finding your voice, creating characters who refuse to stay on the page, and telling stories that only you could tell.
And now, someone walks onto a stage to introduce you.
Maybe it’s the Nobel Prize for Literature. Maybe it’s an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, a Tony, a Pulitzer—or an award that doesn’t even exist yet. Whatever award your spirit desires, imagine the moment.
What would they say about you? Not the bio you wrote for your website. Not the résumé you submitted. Not the list of books you published. What would they say about the writer you became?
And someday, I hope you’ll write yours.
This is mine.
I’d say that V.S. Beals is an author, writing educator, and mentor whose work sits at the intersection of craft, character, voice, and the practical realities of becoming an author. Through her teaching, articles, workbooks, Pinterest resources, short-form content, and writing tools, she takes the things writers often struggle to articulate—How should this character sound? How do I make dialogue feel natural? How do I write action without making it read like a list? How do I develop a voice that actually belongs to me?—and turns them into something writers can understand, practice, and use. Her work isn’t about giving writers another formula for producing books that all sound so much alike. It is about teaching them how to understand the machinery underneath good writing so they can make deliberate creative choices of their own.
But what distinguishes V.S. Beals is her insistence that writers should not disappear beneath the influence of the authors they admire. She teaches writers to study craft without surrendering their own voice; to understand style without becoming an imitation of someone else’s style; and to build characters who don’t merely perform dialogue but possess recognizable voices, personalities, histories, rhythms, and ways of seeing the world. Her approach treats writing as both a craft to be learned and a voice to be discovered. Whether she is teaching a writer how to construct a fighting scene, choose a stronger verb, create believable dialogue, develop character voice, or put emotion onto the page, the underlying question remains the same: How do we help this writer make the story sound like itself?
Tonight, we honour an author who did more than write her own stories. She taught generations of writers how to find the story only they could tell—and, perhaps more importantly, how to find the voice only they could write it in. Her legacy is not simply measured by the books that bear her name, but by the books that exist because she taught another writer how to write theirs. Please welcome Nobel Laureate V.S. Beals.
This might seem silly to some writers, but the one thing I was certain about when I signed up for an additional TikTok account last year was what I wanted to contribute as a writer—and now, as a published author of more than 20 novels.
I spent more than two decades learning in an institutionalized setting, never wanting to leave the classroom. But the Creator, my Father, had much bigger plans for me.
And here I am, forever a student of Wisdom.
You have to know where you’re going—not necessarily the destination, but the journey you’re willing to take to get there. Accepting an award on behalf of my Father is only one part of that journey.
So, when you close your eyes and imagine that stage, that audience, that award, and the person standing at the podium preparing to introduce you…
What’s yours?
Stay faithful, stay quirky, and stay writing.
With love and fire,
V.S. Beals
Writer. Disciple. Woman of the Word.
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