Wednesday, November 1, 2006

Writing for Love "Writing a book is like rearing children--willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love. Willpower is a weak idea; love is strong. You don't have to scourge yourself with a cat-o'-nine-tails to go to the baby. You go to the baby out of love for that particular baby. That's the same way you go to your desk. There's nothing freakish about it. Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do." Annie Dillard. "To Fashion a Text." From Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Ed. Willaim Zinsser. 9:07:33 PM    comment []

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

A Major Draft of the Book is Done A friend of mine accused me of dropping off the planet, wondering when I would be back. I suppose it's true, that I dropped from cyberspace in order to get some work done. And I did get the work done. Hunting Grace is done. Or at least a major draft. It is in the hands of various readers even now, including the publisher, and we will see where we are shortly. Early personal reviews are positive, thought it is still early. Anjie was the first to read it. When I finally finished assembling all the pieces--the blank pages inserted so that copies would run correctly on both sides, Sara's journal entries, the dates, the front matter, etc.--I felt a surge of pure joy that was greater than anything I'd felt in a long, long time. I'm not sure what such a thrill means about the way I've ordered my life, but it was a sweet, sweet drink for a man who's been thirsty for awhile. Her response was gratifying as she rode the emotional roller coaster that is this part of the story. I worry about these characters as they bare their lives to the people who knew them in Ruin, as well as to new readers. The journey is not an easy one. Another thing I discovered was that I think I need to get on to writing the third book while the iron is hot, partially because those readers who have come to care deeply about the Mannings are going to want to know ASAP what happens next in their story. So I'm determined to get started within the next 30 days, and to not take the four and a half years it took me to do Hunting Grace. I'll let you know when the book is going to be published and when it will actually appear. Thank you for all your prayers as I went through the process of writing. May God do what He wants with this new book, and I hope it's that many, many people will take the journey with Cyrus and company. ...thought you'd like to know... 6:44:26 PM    comment []

Friday, March 31, 2006

Is anyone there? Yesterday, I wrote about looking for my own voice (and you looking for yours), and trusting both the voice and the God who gave it. But saying it like that, a question immediately follows, a question that a friend unknowingly placed in front of me this morning. It goes like this: Trusting the voice and the God who gave it to do what? The assumption in this question is that we are all "for" something, that there is meaning to be made of this life. To be created "for" something is more than mere utilitarianism. (As artists are prone to point out, wanting to constantly battle for the "uselessness" of art, the idea that art is in the world as all creation is here, for the delight and glory of God.) So what are we "for?" And to ask with more direct, more challenging, and more disturbing clarity, what am I for? I am sitting quite still just now, hands poised over the keyboard, waiting. There is a thought that's trying to emerge that somehow insinuates itself as being important, even critical. So bear with me as a I try to play midwife to the process of discovery. Who is the audience, the audience for the voice? Maybe audience is the wrong word, but being a man of the theatre from way back, I can't help but think that way. Who are these assembled people gathering to hear a word from a voice that is about to come from your own heart? Are there any? In the end, is there anyone to hear and respond to these wonderings, these questions, these beginning attempts at answers, these stories? Is there anyone? Is anyone there? Just now, this feels like the most fundamental question a human being can ask. There may be others, but the felt aloneness of standing in a wide field with seasons and years raining down on you brings the question on with unrelenting consistency. I notice other people standing in this field as well--thank God--but still, though we are together, their presence alone is not answer enough. Is anyone there? If the answer is the Existentialist's answer, the Atheist's answer, that indeed there is no one, to discover what life is "for" is dicey at best. The postmodern hook-in-the-mouth is that--locked in the eye glasses of your own cultural construct--you can do no better than make life up as you go, inventing meaning, fabricating reasons for all manner of social, political, and religious behavior, living practically as if there were some authority standing behind your choices, when in fact, all you're doing is pretending at a very high level. Which I am not scoffing at, by the way...this sort of living takes great courage and faith, though faith in what may be a killing question in the end. What if the "aha" was that I know my own voice all too well, but my fear--perhaps well-supported by experience, perhaps not--that no one is really listening makes me shut my mouth? What if we know after all the timbers and rhythms and nuances of spirit and soul, but convinced of futility and loneliness, we simply wind down until finally there is silence, and waiting for it to all be over. Is anyone there? Yesterday, Dick Staub wrote a great piece on the release of Jill Carroll, the U.S. journalist who has been held in Iraq for the past three months. He references the loneliness and despair inevitably experienced by those kept in such captivity. When I think of all the people imprisoned for their faith, or those who are martyred in the cause of Christ, my little question--is anybody there?--looms very, very large. So...we say God is there, and because the voice belongs to Him, and we trust Him to make it "for" whatever He deems best, then...then what? The truth is that I too often make the affirmation intellectually, all the while knowing in my emotional heart that because I cannot seem to feel anyone listening (especially those who I long to hear me the most--those closest to me), then I will give my voice to God quietly, silently, taking defunct vows of silence so as to not feel the pain of shouting into the emptiness, receiving back not so much as an echo. Is anyone there? What I really want to say with this post is that someone is there. God, yes, but that's what I mean. You are there. If you are reading this post, then you are there. There is an audience, there is a gathered people, and here I am talking to myself as much as anyone. I suppose I'm talking to myself as a writer, saying hello to an audience that is my reason "for". Truth is, I've been unfaithful to you in some ways, wanting perhaps a different audience, a better one, one that doesn't exist, and that I probably wouldn't recognize if it did. Forgive me. I'll write now. I'll write for you, for the hope of community, for the longing that each of us holds in our hearts to find the beauty God has placed in the world today, and to answer its call. Is anyone there? ...You are...thank you... 9:40:15 AM    comment []

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

The Concrete Last week, I submitted a piece of writing to the Milton Center Writing Group at Seattle Pacific University, a pretty salty bunch of writers working weekly under the leadership of Greg Wolfe, editor of Image Magazine. The writing was a piece of the novel I'm working on concerning the further adventures of Cyrus Manning, the lead character in Leaving Ruin. The piece was one I was curious about, because I had written it in a style that was very removed from Cyrus' normal voice, and was trying to get at a sort of furious violence that often lies underneath the search for God, a violence we see too often expressed these days. What I learned from their strained, decidely cool response to the writing was nothing new really, but something that I needed to hear again. In fact, the concept I walked away from that session with has been forcing its way into my consciousness with the relentlessness of the jackhammers recently tearing up the concrete in my neighbor's back yard. Live in the concrete. Since graduate school, I have been accused of overintellectualizing things, thinking too much. And since I decided to attempt the writing life, I've been struggling over and over to commit to the concept that universals--which in the end, are what interests me--only come through the particulars. That the only real way to talk about abstractions such as love, freedom, sin, and God are through concrete particulars related to the stories of real human beings. And of course, the corollary to that is that it's the only way to live those universals, too. Again, our universals are discovered and revealed through our particular acts. That's just another way of saying "Faith without works is dead." Concrete means sensual, means paying attention to the reality in front of us, means observing without turning away. To see is the crux of the matter. I had the thought this morning that sometimes, in order to think a thought, you have to close your eyes. It's strikes me that the way of abstraction is to do just that...to close our eyes. Open the eyes of my heart, Lord... 8:42:59 AM    comment []

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Blasting Through the Writing Barriers Today, I'm going to write. It's 7:55 a.m., it's a late start day with the kids still in bed. They don't have to be at school until 10:00. I woke up about an hour ago, and have been mouthing off to God for most of the time since. I say mouthing off--I mean complaining. Maybe He heard me, maybe He didn't (I think He did), but either way, I feel better. There seems to be a clarity in this moment, a lifting of the fog, and I am determined to get out some things onto the page or the screen that I'm thinking and working on down in my innards. Who knows, maybe 5000 words today. I also have to pay bills, ferry the kids around, communicate with a zillion people about the various projects in my life, hopefully get a few moments with Anjie at some point along the way, and as I go, use certain amounts of leftover energy and attention to make sure I don't eat everything in sight, including the massive amounts of leftover lasagne from Sunday's life group. But see, it's not all the busyness I complain to God about. I've been busy since the day I was born, it seems. The primary thing is that I used to not realize how corrupt the human heart can be on a simple, personal, everyday level. The lofty mountains of living God's love used to be out of sight, out of mind. But ever since I woke up to the fact that the love of God was a reality, needing to be poured out on the world through His people (that would include me), my lack of doing exactlly that (living out that love) is a pebble (more like a boulder) in my shoe. Being prone to self-absorption and navel-gazing anyway, there are stretches of time when I can see nothing but my inability to live the kind of life Jesus lived, and Paul's Romans 7 lament rolls over me with real force: "Who will deliver me from this body of death?" Of course, we know Paul's thrilling answer, but sometimes when I ask the question, there seems to be a huge pause. All that said, today I'm writing, going on with it. Breaking the silence, hoping to draw someone into a conversation about something that will change the face of the day for someone close to me. ...God bless your thinking and feeling today.... 8:12:30 AM    comment []

Thursday, August 25, 2005

The Blank Screen "Yesterday was a bad day." "Oh, yeah? What happened?" "Nothing." I've had this conversation with several people since yesterday, and it always strikes me as funny and appropriate for someone trying to do some sort of creative work. When something is stirring inside, yet it doesn't come out, it feels like a bad day. Yesterday I sat at my computer, staring at the screen for some six hours, typing a sentence here and there, then erasing it, piddling with a video game for five minutes, but there's no real relief there, then back at the sentence again, delete, delete, delete, and by 4:00 p.m., I was exhausted. Today, I got what I was working on yesterday out in about 2 hours. Ideas were there, coherence didn't seem like a miracle, but normal (assuming I had some, others will judge that), and I'm wondering what that block was yesterday. Probably just normal brooding, gestation, creation at work, etc. The fear of the blank page... Proverbial, and terrifying, just like they say... 2:39:05 PM    comment []

Sunday, May 1, 2005

May Day Ever notice how the phrase "May Day" is both a call to dance and to disaster? There's a dilemma is the land of Cyrus Manning. Cyrus is the protagonist in the novel I'm working on, tentatively titled Hunting Grace. He and I are both trying to make major decisions concerning someone who has entered his life, a character insinuating herself into his deep imaginative life, and between the two of us, we are having trouble making sense of it. There is great delight in watching a world unfold, but frustration, too, when the answers get murky. Funny how that works in fiction just as it does in life. I find the same thing true in the play of mine currently in production at Taproot Theatre here in Seattle. Arthur: The Hunt creates a world in which swordplay is expected, and what you get instead is an attempt at psychology and family relations, which in turn creates questions for both actor and audience, questions I don't always have the answers to. What am I blogging about? I suppose what I'm battling just now is the courage to make certain kinds of artistic decisions, decisions based in risk-taking and breaking new ground (new ground for me, at least), decisions that are, in terms of my own life, high stakes. What can you do if you get it wrong? Tear it apart and start over, I suppose, but after two or three years of working on a thing, that particular labor becomes more and more difficult. Funny that we should pray for writers. But when we pray for them, what we're fighting for is a quality of spirit, of thought-life, that it have integrity, courage, and that wondrous mix of level-headedness and passion. It's so easy to fall off the boat in any number of directions, and in a world where distraction is the intent of millions of dollars of media, spirit-deep concentration--that world of flow where wisdom and character insight reveal themselves--can be hard to cultivate, hard to hang on to. If you know a writer, chances are they are facing imaginative high stakes decisions everyday. Why not pray for them, that they speak creative life just as God does. God help us... 8:00:09 AM    comment []

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