On Writing

But I (write) about my life anyway because, on the one hand, hardly anything could be less important, on the other hand, hardly anything could be more important. My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours. Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually. (Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets)

You can check out a long clip of a new documentary on Buechner here

I write with a story in mind. Mine is the autobiography of a selfish, occasionally selfless, thinking, analyzing, sometimes secure, sometimes terribly insecure, self-proclaimed observer of life, hopeless romantic, searching man of meager faith. I have a story to tell, and it is the one borrowed to me. On this side of a life as writer, I don’t know if my story will jolt anyone but me-and it has done that if I quit today-but I know that I need to scribble my part, nevertheless. It’s a strange place to be: energized by the clicking of a keyboard, watching letters dance onto the screen in such a way as to make any good sense to the reader that they would continue reading and even, even take from it a morsel to eat. And so in the only way I yet know how, this is the answer to the question that has plagued what I would call my rookie writing year: what is left to write? If there is nothing, then there is my story. And, it’s not important because it is mine, but maybe you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.

For me, writing has a direct correlation to reading. Engaging with a book is opening to a safe vulnerability with its author, sopping the drops of wisdom wine with my soul bread. Excellent writing bridles my heart nearer to the flame of God, closer to the life I was meant to live, a deeper, richer experience of earthly years. Both reading and writing give me the opportunity to commune with the church in marvelously unique ways.

The writer of Hebrews says that the word of God is living and active, and I believe the writing of men and women God-seekers is similar. In this silent community where voices are loud and soft, weak and strong, we (writers and readers alike) offer fragile thoughts and faulty pretenses and one-sided opinions to another faithful or faithless for a sitting, bantering in that conscience place where daydreaming and decisions are made, a place made welcome to the warmth of God's Spirit. We commune in this place where it is safe to poke around with intellectual sticks at the profound.

Reading and writing opens doors. A hypnotizing novel offers a place of fantastic living, a place other than ours to live if only for hours. Reading gives us solace and comfort and sanity in recognizing a heart that has gone astray, a way for us to fully grasp that we are not alone in this marathon. Both reading and writing are a great source of laughter as we prod our own memories and share others’ in a step back to look at lighter living. It is a community of interaction.

I have excavated profound wisdom from books on the writing life. Enamored by the practices and habits and patterns of writers, these lives seem to leap off the pages at me and usher my nonsense to sense. I seem to have found my way into a fraternity to which I’m only now rushing. A giddy schoolboy, I gobble the wisdom and insight, snarfing the clues to successful writing. My back straightens, my eyes wide, I sit on the edge of my seat for a hushed voice to give me holy wisdom on the writing life. Sssh, the author is about to reveal hidden secrets! Read and write. Read and write. Read and write. Some say it with eloquent reverence, and others, like Anne Lamott, say it with a raw spiritualism, “For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.” This is actually the third draft of this piece, Lamott would be proud.

It is in the third and fourth draft, searching for the right words, throwing and retracting thoughts and phrases that the writer is the ringmaster in a circus of word acrobats. Again, Buechner,

You sit down at your desk in front of your typewriter, or if, like me, you don’t use a desk and a typewriter, you sit down wherever you sit down with a pad of paper in your lap and a pen in your hand. Is it a book you are going to write, or a letter to a friend, or a diary, if you keep one? Or are you sitting down not to write anything at all, maybe, but just to think, to remember, or just to pray, maybe which is another kind of thinking, another way of remembering? Whichever it is you sit down to, the process is much the same. Writing, thinking, remembering, praying-you need words for all of them. Words are put together from letters, all twenty-six of them. So the alphabet is your instrument. Everything you have it in you to say must be said by means of A’s and B’s and C’s and D’s. By means of vowels and consonants, you must put together the best words you can-words that, if possible, not only mean something but evoke something, call something forth from the person you address with your words. Christ himself both spoke such a word and was such a word.

Using words as acrobats, we fling them to, toss them at, the screen, the pad of paper, and see if their choreography elicits a response. Do the limber and elusive and tumbling words chosen form a cohesive production to draw us one step further? Is the formation molded in such a way as to wrap our understanding around it, fingering the grooves, recognizing its shape, holding it in the very palms that we thrust to the sky in misunderstanding? If so, I have done my job, I have succeeded. If it is Tom Foolery, I will scrap it. I will try again.

There is limitation in writing. Take the word ‘blessing.’ A thesaurus might suggest the following as appropriate synonyms: absolution, baptism, benediction, benison, commendation, consecration, dedication, divine sanction, grace, invocation, thanks, thanksgiving, unction. Still, can we truly fathom the astounding value and significance of a blessing from God? We are limited to 26 letters of an alphabet to piece together what we can of the concept of blessing. There will come a time, however, when the experience will no longer be limited. True recognition of God’s blessing will burst our hearts in a way words have never done.

Until then, I will try to be faithful. I will write as I know and learn and practice. I will get better and closer to the real meanings of things. Still, I won’t reach that place where words are rendered useless, though I long for that time.