Tag Archives: Writing

Update: I’m Still Here

Well, back at the end of April I sure didn’t expect that I wouldn’t be posting for two weeks, but that’s what’s happened. In fact, I was all ready to continue on with more thoughts from Koontz’s book, and had even written a rough draft of a post, but somehow, when I went back to it again, it all fell apart. Suddenly it was no longer saying what I wanted, but wandering off on tangents that weren’t really illustrative of what I was trying to say… In fact, I’m not sure I knew what I was trying to say. All I know is I ended up cutting out three quarters of the words in the post, and found myself with pretty much nothing left.

Maybe that was appropriate and maybe not. My brain felt like mush and I knew I was tired. I’d seen the doctor that same Monday  and he confirmed about the tiredness, even thought I was still trying to do more than I should and that it would be at least two more weeks and maybe four before I felt 100% again.

So for the last two weeks, in addition to letting myself do whatever (which included obsessively making cards), I’ve been paying more attention to what made me tired and when.  Im also getting better at actually recognizing the tiredness, instead of misidentifying it as laziness, lack of self-discipline, feeling depressed or hopeless, feeling guilty and bad cause I wasn’t getting things done….  Some days I didn’t want to get out of bed at my usual time, so I didn’t.  I never stayed there longer than an hour more than usual, but it definitely helped.  I tried to get chores done, but didn’t push it. If I got tired and didn’t feel like doing any more, I didn’t.

I stopped pushing the daily walking, too, but did finally walk three miles around the park with my hubby — he handled Quigley — on May 5. It felt fine at the time, but the next day was Communion at church, which meant a longer service and food preps for the pot luck that were a bit more involved than my normal. When on Monday I had a major crash, unable to do anything but lie around, I knew why.  Tuesday was also pretty bad, but Wednesday I was mostly recovered went ahead and walked again, this time with Quigley and it went fine. I haven’t really had a huge crash since the 7th.

I also haven’t written much of anything. Not email, not blog posts, not the book, not even in my journals. I did watch a lot of TV– for me. I detest daytime TV, but in the evenings in addition to our regular shows, we’ve  plowed through the first season of  The Mentalist and are now almost halfway through the second. Still enjoying it a great deal.

Anyway, sometime in the last week a change began to occur. The messages in Bible class had already begun to change. Both the ones I’m listening to that are current and my fill-in’s from last summer: Pastor Farley talking about Spiritual Gifts in a way that made mine more clearly a “legitimate” spiritual gift than I’ve ever heard. He taught that each person’s gift is unique and even in similar categories of gifts, the way each manifests will be different and unique to the person having it. You can’t look at anyone else and copy them. It’s between you and God the Holy Spirit. That was strangely empowering for me. (I think mine’s exhortation/encouragement, carried out mostly through my writing.) (which may seem like a “Duh” to many people — certainly my close friends — but hey, nowhere in the Bible does it say “writing novels and blog posts” is a spiritual gift!  And I can use anything to psyche myself out.)

 He went on to say that whatever your gift is, you should jump into it with your full effort and focus, knowing God is going to empower you to do whatever it is HE has in mind. He’s already provided everything you need, so you have nothing to fear. Just go forward. 

For a few weeks now I’ve begun to think that maybe God has been giving me a vacation for the last six months or so. At first I thought it was me being bad. Then I moved into “He’s just shutting me down” which was credible because of everything that was happening. But now… with this latest episode coming to an end, I’ve more and more had the nudge that it’s really been a vacation, a time He’s let me do quite a bit of playing… 

And also the nudge that it’s time for that to come to end and for me to get back to being a novelist.

I told Him it better be Him doing it, because for months I haven’t been able to muster any interest, any words, or even any order with this project. I would go in and look at the work and there would be nothing. Just a sense of being utterly overwhelmed. No guidance, no direction, nothing. I really had little idea of where it was going. I’d stare at it, as I’ve recounted here, and then suddenly find myself doing something else. Reading the news, or blogs or watching card making videos, or making cards or… sitting in a chair watching the birds.

I have worked my way literally paragraph by paragraph  (as in one or two a day) through Chapter 5 and every day I’d go in and it would be hard to remember what I’d done the day before, or I’d be so sick of reading the same words and dealing with the same scene that I’d want to leave. But it wasn’t coherent yet so I tried to stay, but more often wandered off.

Suddenly, that’s stopped. I don’t know if what happened today is going to continue, but for now… I worked on Sky almost all day. I have not done that in a long, long time. I didn’t feel the weird aversion… in fact, if anything I feel aversion for the card stuff. Suddenly the power the card projects had to pull me away was not in operation — at least for today.

So. Is it the sea change I’m thinking it is? Time to go back to being a writer? A change being worked in me more than me working in myself? I don’t know.

Did I work more than I should have today, so that tomorrow I’ll be tired again, and not wanting to get out of bed, or flitting around from thing to thing? I don’t know. 

But today. My goodness. The book has come alive again. I feel like I made more progress today than I have in months. Which may or may not be true, but it feels good in any case.

So… we’ll see what tomorrow brings.

Only Half an Hour

“‘It is only half-an-hour’– ‘It is only an afternoon’ — ‘It is only an evening,’ people say to me over and over again; but they don’t know that it is impossible to command one’s self sometimes to any stipulated and set disposal of five minutes — or that the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day…” ~ Charles Dickens

I had a dentist appointment today at 1:30pm. Just a routine cleaning, only an hour’s worth of time… but yes, it pretty much “worried” if not the day, at least the whole morning. I also had to go grocery shopping, and set up a lunch date for Saturday…

And so I plead those as the excuse for why I couldn’t get settled into writing this morning. Well, plus searching for my special plant trimming scissors which had been misplaced… and a half- finished card with a new technique I was trying out beckoning to me from the desk where I’d left it in disarray. I was afraid to proceed because it seemed hard and I didn’t know if I could do what I was intending.

I told myself I didn’t need to mess with that and should go write. And then suddenly just decided to DO It. Of course things went awry, and then I had to figure out how to fix it… I did… I like the finished result… but…

I wasn’t writing. Perhaps because yesterday I reached a similar stage with chapter 5, which is almost done but has been like pulling teeth: sentence by sentence I’ve pressed through it. Working through a paragraph, thinking it’s done, wandering off to do something else, coming back, discovering it’s not done after all, repeat that sequence a number of times, all the while, uncertain that the direction the words are taking me is the one I really want to go in. My mind says it’s all logical and the only course that makes sense. It’s just not what I had originally in mind. And I’m not sure if I like it…

I keep asking the Lord, “Is this really the direction I’m to go in?” He doesn’t seem to be answering.

So it’s easier to think about the dentist and fiddle with the card…

A Fresh Infusion of Interest

Well today, after having taken a month-long break from writing (though even before the break I was having trouble with intrusions and interruptions and lack of motivation)… today I came into the office feeling completely out of it. As I wrote in my log this morning, “I have this book to write and absolutely no interest in writing it. No excitement, no anticipation. Am I even supposed to be writing it?” Worse, I had no idea what to do to renew my interest in it.

Well, as it turns out Pastor John Farley has just been teaching about how sometimes God leaves us in dark places, where we’re confused, where we don’t know what to do, where “the excitement is gone” and we need a fresh infusion of life and energy. Could that possibly apply to my situation with Sky?

So I went to the Lord, and asked for it. Then I went off to do Morning Pages again for the first time in a LONG time because I could think of nothing else to do. They were somewhat helpful. When I was done I took down my logs from during the time I was writing The Enclave and randomly opened to a page where I had highlighted and boxed in the following words from a message by Pastor Bob in 2008:

“I am convinced  this spiritual life is not about us. You must go at the pace God has determined. Your own ways, plans, will and power need to be handed over to the Lord Jesus Christ.  You must learn to enjoy the ride. Don’t let the Kingdom of Darkness [or your own flesh] come and say you’re going too slow, you’re not where you should be. God will tell you that, and it will be conviction, not condemnation.”

Well. Could that be any more pointed?

I went on from there and as the day progressed, the chaos in my notes and in my mind slowly subsided. Order began to take over. New ideas came to me. I saw ways to put the old ideas together where before they just lay there like spilled laundry on the floor, nothing seeming to go with anything else.

But now that’s passed. I have the beginnings of a new vision, an infusion of fresh life… For today at least. But today is all I’m told to concern myself with.

Thank you, Lord!

[I am, by the way, finished with chapter 4, chapter 5 has already been sketched out (years previously) and I started on ch 6 this afternoon. See the little Chapter progress widget up on the left!]

The World Is Not Christian

I owe this post to Becky Miller who, on her blog A Christian Worldview of Fiction, recently referenced a viewpoint put forth by another Christian blogger that she took issue with. I read her post with interest, and decided I also have issues with the referenced viewpoint. Quite a few issues, in fact.

The unnamed blogger’s contention? That “this is an objectively Christian world regardless of what people think and regardless of whether anyone ever points that fact out. The truth of the Trinity blazes forth from the very creation, so much so that people have to forcibly repress it (Ro 1).” Therefore, as Christian writers if we simply present “the world as it is – as a broken, warped, redeemed place of buzzin’, bloomin’ confusion – we are actually presenting Christ.” And that without having to “include one second of overt Christian theology in our work – if we are presenting the truth about the world.”

To which I say … nonsense! The Scriptures say this world is anything but Christian. Yes, it was created by God in perfection, and though it became corrupted when Adam fell, it can still reveal God’s invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature. But it is not a “Christian” world.

A “Christian” by standard definition is one who adheres to the Christian faith, core to which is the good news that anyone who believes in the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the God-man, will be eternally saved. Those who do not believe are condemned already for one reason only — that they have not believed in Jesus. (John 3:18)

The world does not adhere to the Christian faith. Not by a long shot. Nor do the trees, rocks, mountains or houses. They may proclaim that there is a divine creator — God — but believing in God is not the same as being a Christian. Even the demons believe in God — and Christ! — in the sense of acknowledging their existence, but demons are most definitely not Christian. (James 2:19)

Though created in perfection, the world fell when Adam fell as I mentioned and is now said, not to be “redeemed,” but longing anxiously, enslaved to corruption, subjected to futility, and groaning as it waits for Christ’s return. (Romans 8:19-22)

Christ said His kingdom is not of this world. (John 18:36) And we as Christians are also said to be not of this world: our citizenship, our true home, is in heaven. (Phil 3:20)

Christ said that the world hated Him because He was not of the world, and if we are in Him and follow Him, the world will hate us, too. However, if we are of the world, which is not a good thing, then the world will love us. (John 15:18 -20)

We are told to love not the world and all that’s in it. As Christians. (1 John 2:15) If this world were intrinsically Christian, why would we be told not to love it?

In fact, the very next verse in 1 John 2 specifically says, “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life is not from the Father but is from the world. (It) is passing away, and also its lusts, but the one who does the will of God abides forever.” Clearly the world and the one who does the will of God are not the same.

2 Pe 3:10, 11 tells us that the world and all that is in it will be utterly destroyed, and a new heaven and earth made… Why would it be destroyed if it were Christian and proclaimed Christ?

It wouldn’t be.

In fact, this world is ruled by the devil; its system of operation was created by the devil who, in 2 Co 4:4 is said to be the god of this world. Adam gave up rulership to Satan when he adopted Satan’s viewpoint (exalt self, oppose God, believe lies). We know this because when Satan tempted Jesus in Matthew 4, he took Him to a high vantage point (not a literal mountain) and offered Him “all the kingdoms of the world.” Satan couldn’t have offered them if they weren’t his to offer.

Ephesians 6:12 tells us there is a system in the atmosphere (“heavenly places”) — which is, boiled down, talking and communication — that is devised and controlled by Satan, who has deceived the whole world. (Rev 12:9) He has schemes (2 Co 2:11) and seeks to devour Christians. (1 Pe 5:8) His system shoots flaming thought missiles at us (Eph 6:16).

This one who is the god of this world, ruler of this world, is a liar and has been one since the beginning. Not a Christian.

He disguises himself as an angel of light and has deceitful workers, false apostles, ministers of righteousness, that look good and right (2 Co 11). He has a false gospel, false righteousness, false doctrine, and a false communion.

The world is not only NOT Christian, it is anti-Christian and anti-Christ. The idea that as writers we can simply record in a truthful manner all the depravity and futility and evil machinations of sin and human good and evil, without one word of anything theological and by that “present Christ” is just wrong.

The world is a place of darkness and death and very, very bad news: ie, that all men are sinners, cut off from the life of God. As a Christian, to simply portray it as it is would be, in my view, an utter waste of time. We’re here to be a light in that darkness, and our light is not us, but the word of God that we carry within us. It’s a light that, yes, can be manifested in our behavior and lives, but inside it is very much thoughts, concepts, words. Jesus Himself is said to be the very Word of God. We are to offer words of good news. Which I’m pretty sure means you need to get some “theology” into a book (by which I mean distinctly Christian thoughts and concepts as taught in the Word of God) before you can call it “Christian”.

That Nameless Faculty Again

Journal Entry – 13 September Tuesday 2011

11:15am  Writing trumps the Y. I’d planned to go to the Y today, but Quigley got me up at 3:30am with diarrhea, then woke both me and Stu up around 4 by barking at something unknown outside, And then he had to go out again around 4:30. When I went out later there were three piles of runny poo so I decided to drive over to Speedway Vet Clinic to get some Fast Balance GI for him, stopped on the way back at Starbucks for an iced mocha latte and scone plus a bag of decaf whole bean Cafe Verona. When I got home, Quig wanted out again — after I gave him a dose of the Fast Balance — and did another poop. While looking for that and cleaning it up, I found a bunch of monster goathead weeds in the back corner of the yard and even more in the alley so I had to pull all those up (goatheads are evil plants; they even look evil, and grow like wildfire — I can’t even pick one of the horned seeds out of my shoe without impaling myself on it). After that, since Quigley was just standing about oddly, I pulled regular weeds while I waited to see what he’d do.

Finally I left him outside for a while (it’s finally cooling down) and decluttered my old files to make room for newer stuff that I’ve got piled here and there. I went over my 15 minute time allotment probably by two times, and by then I started to get upset. Here it is 11:25 now and I haven’t even gotten to Sky.  But agitation is not God’s thinking. It’s my flesh. So… rebound guilt, anger, frustration, power lust, self-pity…

(Oh, earlier I also retyped my routine charts, took stuff out of the morning routine and put it in the afternoon and evening routines– with less in the morning, I should be able to get to the writing quicker… Still, it took up time and suddenly it’s way later than I’d hoped to get started..

So, though I had planned on going to the Y in about an hour,  based on priorities — given all the walking I have do with Quigley, I’ve decided writing can trump going to the Y. So I won’t be going today.

I’ve also been reminded of the importance of… empty time, I guess. Dorothea Brande talked of it, as have others… I know I’ve blogged on it before, but somehow I just keep coming back to this…

“[The writer] will only know that there are times when he must, at all costs, have solitude, time to dream, to sit idle. Often he himself believes his mind is idle, empty… [but] the idleness is only surface stillness. Something is at work, but so deeply and wordlessly that it hardly gives a sign of its activity till it is ready to externalize its vision. The necessity which the artist feels to indulge himself in solitude, in rambling leisure, in long speechless periods… “

I’ve had some of this time of late and it is delicious. It feels right, it feels rich. Peace wells out of it. I find my thoughts going to the story, the world and people of Sky. Not in any purposeful way, just going there.

I always want to find fault with all this. I feel like I’m bad. The world advises you to come up with a plan, to try to control it, force it. It offers the motivation of ambition, greed, jealousy, approbation, money, success… fear. Guilt. None of that jibes with the “something” that is at work, deeply and wordlessly.

Time and again I’ve read about the empty stage, the waiting period, the artistic coma, the “nameless faculty.” I’ve even experienced it, and I believe it’s a part of the creative aspect of our souls, believer and unbeliever alike. I suppose the clearest notion for me is the old, out of vogue right brain/left brain model. The right brain is non linear. It doesn’t communicate in words and lines of logic, but images, sounds, feelings, scenes. It’s holistic. It’s mysterious because much of our existence is governed by left brain things — the logic, lists, categories, plans, execution of plans, problem solving (though of course right brain activity often figures strongly in the latter…) All those things involve activity, doing, accomplishing, solving, actively working. Not just sitting idly. Waiting.

We live in an impatient culture. No one wants to wait. Often — maybe too often– we don’t have to wait. We don’t want to take the time to rest. And, as my husband said recently, “no one wants to pay people to rest on the job,” anyway.  Even if it would make them more productive in the same amount of time.

And yet, the prime element of the Christian way of life IS rest. We’re to fear nothing but not entering His rest.

We don’t understand how the creative faculty works, it just does, often quite independent of our efforts. This is for believers and unbelievers, a part of our brains, that we don’t understand, where processes we can’t follow or explain are taking place. All people have it, some more than others. One minute we’re blank, the next the entire scene unfolds before us and nothing we “did” caused it to happen.

Some Christian books on writing attribute that to the Holy Spirit. Yet it happens with unbelievers, as well as believers, so it can’t be the Spirit, because He doesn’t abide in unbelievers. Which means it’s something about us as humans in general.  A subterranean process we don’t understand, maybe a collating and sifting and ordering of elements beneath our conscious mind, something that reminds us of how much we don’t know even about our own selves, but common to all.

But while I don’t believe the process itself is the work of the Holy Spirit, I do believe He can guide it when it comes to believers. When we have put off the old man and are allowing Him control of our souls, He can guide the elements of that process, unbeknownst to us. Whatever of God’s Word we have learned and understood and believed, and especially that we’ve applied to our lives, He can use in shaping a story… and not in immediate perfection, for the most part, because His purposes are far larger than the generation of the story itself.

No, it’s a slow process, just like spiritual growth is. He could easily arrange it all in an instant and dump it into my head. So why doesn’t He? Perhaps because He wants me to learn to wait. To trust. To stop trying to take control and instead, start trying to listen. To accept. To be at peace.

To rest.

To know HE is the one who’s guiding me, who has the plan, not me. And my only part is to relax and trust Him to do the work, to show me the way I should go. As He’s promised to do.

But there’s more even than that. Because as I’ve written this, my mind has churned on… it’s not just that it takes a long time, it’s that the initial forays into the work are so messy. Wrong turns, ideas with big gaps in them, initial conceptions that change radically as the work develops… why all that messiness?

That’s like spiritual growth too, but more than that. If I relax and trust him and wait, the slow unfolding and all the “wrong” turns can become a wonderful journey. There is something amazing and exciting and just plan fun about having worked with some material for a time, have it seem dead and lifeless and going nowhere no matter what you try to do with it and then, one day, it all comes together. That is awesome!  To not see for weeks or months or even years and then suddenly, “Whoa! So that’s what’s going on here!”

I think it’s a tiny reflection of what it’s going to be like when we reach heaven, where so many things will suddenly come clear. If I just sat down and it all came running out like water, it wouldn’t be nearly as fun and satisfying and edifying in terms of manifesting God’s sufficiency and faithfulness and the value of trust…

So, the reason it takes so long and is so messy and requires struggle is because it’s better that way. More of a blessing that way!

Willing to Be Bad

I’m reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. In fact, I first read it years ago. Maybe you’ve heard of it, if you’ve been involved with the artsy community in any way. I think I bought and read it maybe fifteen years ago.  The book’s subtitle is “A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity” and its tagline is A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self.

It has some good stuff in it, but also lots of weird stuff, for though she talks about God and seeking out the “Great Creator” to find one’s own creativity, this is not a Christian book. And years ago, I only made it  about halfway through before I got too annoyed by all the New Age gunk and put it aside. Later I took it to the used bookstore.

About a month ago, I got down the journal I’d kept during that time, one that goes with the “course.”  Part of that course is to do morning pages — three pages of handwritten, stream of consciousness material, done first thing upon rising every day — and this journal had some of those morning pages, plus a lot of quotes from the book as page decorations. I was surprised by how doctrinal they were. Here’s a couple, in italics, with the verses that say the same thing (not italicized).

“I am a channel for God’s creativity and my work comes to good.”

“I am the Vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me, and I in him, he bears much fruit; for apart from Me you can do nothing.” John 15:5

“For it is God who is at work in you both to will and to execute for His good pleasure.” Phil 2:13

“My dreams come from God and God has the power to accomplish them.”

“Delight yourself in the Lord; and He will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord, Trust also in Him, and He will do it.” Ps 37:4,5

“And God is able to make all grace abound to you, that always having all sufficiency in everything you may have an abundance for every good deed.” 2 Co 9:8

“There is a divine plan of goodness for my work.”

“I am willing to let God create through me.”

“Faithful is He who calls you and He will bring it to pass.” I Th 5:24

You get the idea. Having recently been shown that God is able to use evil priests (like Caiaphas) and donkeys (Balaam’s ass) to communicate truth, and having experienced His ability in using unlikely sources to speak to me personally, I decided to buy a second copy of the book and give it another shot.

And today, in reading an early part of it, I found this:

“Remember that in order to recover as an artist, you must be willing to be a bad artist. Give yourself permission to be a beginner. By being a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one.”

Whoa!  Did that bring back memories! I know this. I know it from painting and I know it from writing.

Anne Lamott says in Bird by Bird :

“Why I encourage really, really awful first drafts is because this is how every single real writer I know writes. My students have this illusion that good writers sit there as if they’re just taking dictation and it’s coming out fully formed. I believe that perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor and the enemy of the people. It makes it impossible for us to get anything down. As soon as you can break through that need, and just let yourself write whatever comes out, knowing that no one’s reading over your shoulder, knowing you can go through and start to shape, cut stuff out, save it for other projects… winnow out what the real structure and the real story is that you’re attempting to capture, then you’re home free. Sort of.”

I saved this quote in a special book along with a number of others from other writers, all advocating the same thing. You must be willing to let it be bad.

In that vein of thought I realized that by trying to get everything in the story and the world and the characters worked out and logical and ready before I could move on in Chapter 1, I had hamstrung myself. That’s not even how I work. The moment I gave myself the permission to just go forward, letting it be awful, illogical, with stupid dialogue, lame characterization, inscrutable or nonexistant motivations, inconsistent, arbitrary world building elements… something seemed to release inside me. My interest perked up. Is this the key? Is this what I needed to see?

I don’t know. I’ll know better in the morning. But things suddenly seem hopeful. I am SOOO sick of laboring over the first three pages of Chapter 1, the whole of which is already written, albeit, ahem, badly. The thought of just leaving it and moving on is rather exciting.