Category Archives: Writing

Writing

The Writer’s Calling: Usefulness

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If writing is a calling, similar as how we think of the ministry as a calling, then the writer must somehow recognize the calling. I’ve been thinking about the same three items that have sometimes been used to describe a minister’s calling: grace, gifts, and usefulness. Today I’ll look at the latter.

Question: How do you know if you have the calling to be a teacher?
Answer: They ask you to teach, and you don’t fall flat on your face doing it.

Question: How do you know if you have the calling to be a lawyer?
Answer: You have the ability to understand the law, and are able to use that ability as an advocate.

Question: How do you know if you are called to be a writer?
Answer: Your writing makes a difference for someone.

That’s what “usefulness” would seem to be to me, in the context of a writer. If you write, and no one ever benefits from it, are you called to be a writer? This may not mean publication (though that is certainly one manifestation of making a difference and hence usefulness). Emily Dickinson had almost nothing published in her lifetime (mainly because she didn’t seek to be published), yet her poetry has influenced millions after her death. For every Stephen King or Jerry Jenkins there are probably thousands of writers who have the calling, yet never achieve acceptance from a major publisher.

So how would I define usefulness, if not acceptance by a major publisher. I think I would define it as, after the writer applies the grace given and the gifts given and enhanced through education and experience, the writer looks at his composition and decides, “Somebody other them me needs to see this.” Now, who that somebody might be, either a loved one, or near a acquaintance, or a critique group, or the people that reads the local newspaper, or an agent, or a publisher, I’m not prepared to narrow that down. It may not even be someone in the present, but someone in a future year, or age.

Of course, in making the decision “Somebody other than me needs to see this,” the writer should not be fooled or limited by his own experience. Such a claim should be made in the full knowledge of what good writing consists of, and a judgment by the writer and others that this indeed should be read by others. This has been the toughest part for me, finding others who know good writing, and who are not my relatives or close associates to look at my work and say whether it measures up.

Usefulness. The third yardstick I need to use, alongside grace and gifts, to know whether I have a calling to be a writer. I’m starting to acquire enough independent reviews to believe that I have the call to be a writer. The next step: submit those three proposals and series sell sheet, and see what some decision makers in the publishing world think. Stay tuned.

Writing

The Writer’s Calling: Gifts

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Grace, gifts, and usefulness. These are means by which a minister recognizes the calling of God to be a minister. Last post I considered how these may also mark the calling of one to be a writer, and what grace would be for the writer–not the grace that saves you, but the grace that is evidence of a calling.

Today I’ll consider gifts. It seems to me the writer should certainly have specific gifts:
– to be able to find, combine, and manipulate words to communicate effectively
– to be able to tell a story in a compelling manner
– to have ideas, things to write about, or
– to be able to communicate the idea of another with words.

The use of words may or may not be an inherent gift for the writer. We generally call this craft, and it ranges from the breadth of vocabulary to correctness of grammar. Grammar can be learned. Vocabulary can be expanded. Dictionaries and thesauruses can be consulted. Perhaps this is a “gift” the writer can learn.

Or maybe not, or only partially. Much learning in this area is no doubt possible, but I wonder if some special inherent gift of words is still essential. Knowing the words and grammar, and knowing how to use them effectively seem to be two different things. I don’t want this to sound snobbish, as if I’m saying unless you are born to be a writer you can’t be a writer. Not at all. Appropriating teaching and expansion of skills should be possible. But I think some kind of gift for words should be present to produce the spark that later ignites the tinder and kindling of ideas in presence of desire.

Yet, words are not enough. Story-telling is critical. Is this something learned, or something given to the writer? I wish I knew. You can certainly study plots, and learn the essentials of a story told in a way to capture an audience. Or, with non-fiction, you can learn how the “plot” is the organization, and how to pace the material to keep the reader’s interest. Either way, both fiction and non-fiction require their own brand of story-telling. As with words, how much of this is a gift given and how much is a gift learned is beyond my ability to say.

The transformation of an idea into a story first requires the capturing of an idea; recognition of something in life that registers on the brain, which then says, “Ah ha! I must write about that!” Or, when someone says, “I have this idea for a story”, to be able to recognize whether that is truly a workable story or not. Not all ideas can be made into stories (though maybe more can than we realize). I ask (myself) again: how much of this is a gift given, and how much is learned by experience, by trial and error? It seems much is gift, which can be enhance by experience and trial and error.

I may just be talking to myself here, because I’m not sure about all this. But it seems to me, at this stage of my pondering, that a writer must have certain inherent gifts, of language ability and of story-telling and idea recognition, which become the sparks that eventually must be built on and expanded to fuel the finished product.

Next time: usefulness.

Writing

The Writer’s Calling: Grace

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As I mentioned in this post, I want to explore the idea that a writer is called to be a writer. This would be especially true for writers who seek to convey a message, rather than only entertain the reader. Are writers called, in the sense that a minister is called to the ministry?

I, for one, have never felt God saying to me that I should write. At Christian writers conferences they will almost always ask, “How many of you feel the Holy Spirit is calling you to be a writer?” I cannot raise my hand, since I have never felt a direct call to write. I have a burning desire to write, a desire that has intensified and expended over the last seven years. As I look back on my adult life, I realize this desire was in me from the first year after college, when I almost applied for a writing conference scholarship from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. That year I also wrote a poem, a pastiche of “Vincent” by Don McClean.

A few years passed before I again thought of writing creatively. Those were years of business writing, engineering stuff. Hundreds of letters, contracts and specifications for maybe a hundred construction projects, technical reports both long and short, conference paper presentations, a trade magazine article, technical standards, how-to design guides, and marketing materials—brochures, project descriptions, resumes. For years, wherever I was in my work, the writing tasks always seemed to fall to me. Writing became almost second nature, never creative writing (well, maybe some of the marketing materials were creative), but always chances to learn and improve grammar, work on spelling, and learn that different language use is appropriate for different documents and end purposes.

So, when about 1998-99 I got the creative writing bug, and when in 2001 I was diagnosed incurable, I had had twenty-five or more years of training in writing, the training I shunned to the greatest extent possible in high school and college. That’s not a bad apprenticeship. But I’m digressing from my original intent.

Am I called to be a writer? In the absence of a specific statement from God, or a bolt of lightning or some such visible evidence, does my life and writing exhibit the needed grace, gifts, and usefulness? Is the desire within evidence of this calling? Grace, for the writer, would mean embracing writing and loving it to the point where that’s what you want to do. Gifts would be evidence of ability: acceptance of writing by the more knowledgeable and by the intended audience. Usefulness would be the writing having an impact on the audience.

Just dealing today with grace, I suppose I would define the grace to be a writer as embracing all that is required of a writer, and deciding that is for you. If you learn what a writer must go through, and balk at some part of it, but go on to try to publish just the same, maybe you don’t have the writer’s grace. Sometimes I get so angry at all the hurdles to becoming published, I sometimes wonder whether I have the grace needed. But, I believe I can change, and perhaps learn to embrace what now I tolerate and which once I loathed.

Does a writer grow in grace? I hope so.

book reviews, Writing

Book Review: Coaching the Artist Within

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A few months ago a co-worker loaned me Coaching the Artist Within, by Eric Maisel 2005 New World Library. I read it sporadically for a couple of months, then mid-May I attacked it with purpose and completed it.

Eric Maisel is a creativity coach. This is a relatively new profession (see the appendix in the book), but it has educational and qualification standards. Eric works with artists of many mediums–painters, writers, actors, musicians–to help them reach their potential in creative endeavors.

The book is built around twelve skills the artist (this word used to mean anyone in the creative arts) can learn to coach themselves, to become more creative more consistently. These skills are:

Becoming a self-coach
Passionately making meaning
Getting a grip on your mind
Eliminating dualistic thinking
Generating mental energy
Creating in the middle of things
Achieving a centered presence
Committing to goal-oriented process
Becoming an anxiety expert
Planning and doing
Upholding dreams and testing reality
Maintaining a creative life

For each of these skills, Maisel presents two exercises. He also offers personal experience he has had where he worked with a client-artist to show them how to use either the skill or one of the exercises to improve their creativity. The book includes a list of references and an index.

This book helped me. I bogged down in the first chapter, as the suggested exercises seemed hokey to me (talk to yourself, moving between two facing chairs to let your creative and non-creative sides have it out). The second chapter was better, but I still wondered at that point if I should finish the book. By the end of the third chapter, however, I was rolling and learning much. I was especially helped by Chapter 6 Creating in the Middle of Things, Chapter 7 Achieving a Centered Presence, and Chapter 9 Becoming an Anxiety Expert. This last one helped me the most, I think. The difficulty of the writing process gets me down, perhaps to the point of depression. This chapter explained how that is really anxiety, and gave help to overcome that.

After completing the book, I went back and re-read the first chapter. I still found that exercise hokey, but I did get more out of it. I recommend the book for anyone who wants to create, but finds it difficult to do so on a regular basis. Eric, if you should stop by, I’m sorry my having borrowed this book didn’t add to your royalties, but perhaps this post might help.

Carlyle, Writing

Carlyle: writing contemptible to me

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After Emerson wrote to Carlyle that every writer is a skater, a sailor, and that a book has more variation than a surveyor’s compass (see my post on June 17), Carlyle had this to say in reply.

How true is that you say about the skater; and the rider too depending on his vehicles, on his roads, on his et ceteras! Dismally true have I a thousand times felt it, in these late operations; never in any so much. And in short the business of writing has altogether become contemptible to me; and I am become confirmed in the notion that nobody ought to write,–unless sheer Fate force him to do it;–and then he ought (if not of the mountebank genus) to beg to be shot rather. That is deliberately my opinion,–or far nearer it than you will believe.
Carlyle to Emerson, 2 June 1858

Carlyle is a difficult writer to understand. His motivations for being a writer are unclear, except that he could. No doubt his statement that the business of writing has “become contemptible” to him is an exaggeration, an over-statement at a time of physical or mental exhaustion. Yet, in all his correspondence to Emerson, Carlyle always complained about whatever he was writing: how difficult it was to do the research; how the book never came together as he wanted it to; how he had to change directions often in midstream; how he would go mad if he continued to write. I’m sure Emerson’s statement of the nature of writing and of the book was somewhat in response to prior complaints by Carlyle.

Carlyle was either considerably down in the dumps or revelling in over-statement to say “nobody ought to write…unless Fate force him…and then he ought…to beg to be shot rather.” Yet, I suspect these words contain a large measure of truth. While I would ascribe it to a calling rather than to Fate, perhaps the writer ought to make sure he has a calling for it, with proofs of the calling equivalent to the preacher’s proofs: grace, gifts, and usefulness. An urge to write may not be enough.

I think, in a future post, I will write about the writer’s grace, gifts, and usefulness, and see where that takes me. Not tomorrow, nor maybe this week, for I have some accumulated book reviews to post.

Carlyle, Emerson, Writing

Every writer is a skater

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As time allows, I continue to read through my ancient volume of the letters between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle, a letter or two at a time in the evening, every few days. I came across this tidbit from Emerson.

Every writer is a skater, who must go partly where he would and partly, where the skates carry him; or a sailor, who can only land where sails can be safely blown. The variations to be allowed for in the surveyor’s compass are nothing like so large as those that must be allowed for in every book.
Ralph Waldo Emerson to Thomas Carlyle, from Concord 17 May 1858

These two friends had been writing for twenty-five years. Emerson had made two visits to Carlyle in England during that time, but Carlyle never ventured across the seas to America. In all his letters, Carlyle always complained about the books he was writing. Each one was an arduous task he would love to be rid of (I’ll cover that specifically in a future post); each was likely to cause his death; each resulting work was terrible. At present Carlyle was about done with his longest work, a biography of Frederick the Great, and he complained about it in every letter to Emerson (these letters now being a year apart, with Emerson the reluctant to write).

I think these words of Emerson might have partly been in answer to some of Carlyle’s complaints. The writer begins a piece, Emerson says, but the piece winds up only partly where the writer expected it to go. Just as an ice skater sets his direction, but is somewhat at the mercy of skates and ice (depending, of course, on the skill of the skater). The exact direction and stopping point is unknown. The writer chooses the subject of the book; does the outline; maybe even writes a synopsis of the chapters; but the book takes on a life of its own as the writer writes.

Or, as Emerson says, “the writer is…a sailor, who can only land where sails can be safely blown.” Now of course, a skilled sailor, with a good ship or boat, properly rigged and outfitted, can reduce the variability of the landing spot. I remember my brief sailing days, and the frustration at trying to get my 10 foot trimaran to do what I wanted it to do on Point Jude Pond. A skilled sailor learns how to use the variable direction and strength of the wind to his best advantage, yet can never quite tell exactly what spot of water he will be on at every given time, nor exactly where he will land.

So with the writer. The Olympian skater has much less variability in where the skates take him than do I when I get on the ice–which I haven’t in at least twenty-eight years. The writer must acquire skills and experience to allow the things he writes to be more under his control. As the vessel carrying the sailor must be properly built and maintained, the writer does not get where he wants to be except with similar preparation and outfitting. Still, just as the best skaters sometimes end up not exactly where they thought they would be, as the best sailors still have variable conditions to account for, so the writer’s work is never quite as imagined from the start.

It’s something for me to think about as I progress on this journey.

Next blog post: Carlyle’s reply.

Bible study, Writing

Message of the Un-Said: Inner Thoughts

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I alluded to this topic in my last post. In the story being considered, no where are we given any inner thoughts of the characters. Inner thoughts are common in modern literature, and are a frequent topic at critique groups: how many inner thoughts to give; how to format them; how long to make them; how many point of view characters to give the inner thoughts for. Get in the characters’ heads, we are told by writing instructors.

The writer of 2nd Kings didn’t do that. He merely gives us the characters’ action and words. They did this. They said that. They responded thusly. We don’t know the motivation of the Shunammite woman as she first asks Elisha for dinner, then asks her husband to build a room for him. We never see her say This is a man of God; we must be kind to him; what can I do? We never see her husband say Why is this woman always wanting to spend my money? Well, he is a man of God. As I mentioned last post, we don’t know if he thought She can’t possibly get back from Mount Carmel before dark. What’s going on between this “man of God” and my wife? Instead, the writing draws us in. It insists we dig deeper, try to figure out what the characters are thinking based on he condensed telling of their actions and words.

That wouldn’t work today with a modern readership. Can you see someone with a Tom Clancy novel saying, “Now what is Jack Ryan thinking at this moment?” No, now readers want the full story–shown, not told, with limited points of view. Paper and ink are no loner objects of concern; attention span is. Still, perhaps the writer of 2nd Kings has given me something to think about, something to try to work a little bit into my writing.

writer's platform, Writing

Change of Plans

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It always happens. Despite the best intentions of coming back to my topic in a day or two, I was unable to. With my wife gone I had some extra things to do around the house. Also, I put in some extra hours at the office relocating my work station. I was not under a deadline to do so, but I thought, once they assigned me the different space (and good space it is) I’d better make the move ASAP. Then, I was expecting to be home all last week, and gone today through Wednesday, helping our daughter, son-in-law, and grand baby move from Kansas City to Oklahoma City, but it turned out they needed me more last week, so I changed plans and drove north on Thursday. Thus, I blogged not.

Tonight, I’m also working on a change of plans in my writing. I see myself mostly a novelist. I have no platform–best defined as a ready-made audience to whom I can directly market any non-fiction ideas I have, so fiction seems right for me. Plus, the fiction ideas came to me first, and continue to come more frequently than do non-fiction. However, as hard as it is to break into fiction (non-fiction outsells fiction 8:1, or maybe 10:1), non-fiction seems an easier sell. But again, not having an established audience is a hindrance to breaking in there. So, I have been casting about, trying to figure out what to write, and it hit me: Bible studies, and small group study guides.

For sure, I lack credentials in this area, other than the experience teaching adult Sunday School. I’m currently teaching a study I planned and wrote, titled “The Dynamic Duo: Lessons From The Lives Of Elijah And Elisha.” That seemed to be something I could expand from my two page weekly handout into a full length Bible study. Then, a study we did previous to this was of The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. I was substitute teacher for that, and taught maybe 25 percent of it. We were hindered by lack of a good study guide. I found one I purchased through Amazon.com, but it was written for a high school level literature class, not for an adult Sunday School class or small group. So I thought “I should write the study guide we didn’t have for class.” I wrote four sample chapters, the beginning of a proposal for both studies, and went off to the Blue Ridge conference.

The good news is: an editor for a very good publishing house for this sort of material is interested in both! He asked me to get proposals to him by about June 13th. So, this week all fiction is shoved aside for the two proposals. I’m finding the writing difficult, and am having trouble concentrating. It is so different than writing the actual material. I plug away, get a little bit done, then find myself pulled away to mindless things. Hopefully taking time to do this blog post will move me back on track.

miscellaneous, Writing

It’s been a so-so week

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Back at work; hard to concentrate; too much self-starter stuff and not enough firm deadline stuff. Somehow I’ve got to do better on the self-starter stuff. Discipline, discipline is the key.

At home, I have just barely finished my Life Group lesson for teaching tomorrow. I’m printing multiple copies of it right now. I was two weeks ahead, until I had to begin getting ready for Ridgecrest. Last night and today I spent a fair amount of cleaning gutters–not of leaves, but of accumulated dirt, pollen, and grit from the shingles. The house is 20 years old, and I doubt they have ever been cleaned. The gutter guards keep the leaves out, and taking the gutter guards off and re-installing them is a pain. In one gutter on the back, above the deck, about half the gutters (or 2 inches) was full of this stuff. I spent so much time on the ladder that my legs were quivering. A thunderstorm hit this morning before I was done with the back one, and, since I worked “upstream to downstream”, it now has a small puddle.

I have found a new writing critique group. They meet on Thursdays, twice a month, including this week. I did not attend due to the busyness of life, but I’m hoping I can become a regular at this and somewhat find an answer to a question that’s been bugging me: Is my writing good enough?

I was able to write this Life Group lesson only with great difficulty. I’m not sure why, but I couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t find the words to express what I wanted to. Part of the reason is I’m trying to help the class find things in the Bible based on what is not said, rather than on what is said; or to whom the words are spoken, instead of who else they might have been spoken to. I found that difficult to write. I may blog on that tomorrow.

I still have much follow-up to do from the Ridgecrest conference: e-mails and proposals and sample chapters and summary paragraphs. My schedule right now looks like I should be able to attack some of that in the week ahead.

Well, this was a dull post. Just a report on the week following the big conference in the life of one wannabe writer.

Writing

Culture Gap

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Am I the only one in America who does not watch American Idol? Who doesn’t talk about it at coffee pot or water cooler? Who doesn’t care whether this David or that David won? Okay, obviously I’ve heard enough to know that it was David vs. David in the final, one young, one younger. And a bunch of us were sitting in the lobby that evening during the writers conference when people began receiving text messages saying which one had won. Last night and today I’ve been catching up on the week missed on the blogs I read regularly, and almost every one of them had something about that show. Most had several somethings. Christian and secular, literary and political, all were the same.

At the writers conference, Monday night was faculty talent show, and they did a sketch “Ridgecrest Idol”, where the faculty played the part of famous writers through the ages, reading the first page of some famous work. Three others of the faculty formed the panel, acting out the part of the three judges. I’ve seen enough sound bites from the show to know what was going on. I couldn’t have cared less, and probably should have left the show.

Why don’t I care? Not my type of music in general. Not much enamored by pop culture. Not much swayed by hero worship. My life is not changed by who wins the competition, or by which judge is meanest to which contestant. I guess I have a choice to make: get with the culture, or remain out of touch, further and further out seemingly on another planet. It’s bad enough I get pressured to watch Gray’s Anatomy, and Lost, and now Battlestar Gallactica, when I could care less about any of them.

I conclude that I am cut off from the current culture, adrift in a world gone mad over singers and stage performers. What hope is there for writers?