y o u r w r i t e r s g r o u p...

What Are You Waiting For?

“How do you begin? The answer is simple: you decide to. Then you push back your sleeves and start ... It will be completely awful. It will be unreadable [excrement]! You won't have a clue how it will amount to anything, ever. And to that, I say, Welcome. You just do it anyway.”  
— Anne Lamott
 
 
This wasn't an easy post to write.
 
I’ve been working too hard, running too fast and too long and burning out.
 
For some reason, though I know my tendency to try to take in too much and over-think things to death, I still believe I have to catch all the good stuff. And when I'm a one-man show in control of all my issues, then I'll be able to slow down a bit.

Does trying to control your issues only prove you have "control issues?"
 
Be anxious for nothing... 

I'd say I had a breakdown this week, but the truth is less dramatic. I've been broken down in the writing department for a good six months. I'm not exactly sure how it happened. I started an editing business and the writers group, but two years in and I'm still only infrequently dealing with my novel--the book I claim to love and from which I've gotten all my best material for helping frustrated writers.

The soup grows thicker...

Despite so many attempts to rededicate my life (remember those little commitment cards? maybe that's what I need.) and despite untold recommitments to my own advice to write every day, it seems the stronger the impulse gets to go back to this wicked novel, the stronger my desire to flee.

Thanks to Joseph Campbell, I know that cave I fear to enter holds the treasure I seek. But I'm still not going. 

I don't want to be vulnerable like this and share that I'm frustrated. But even more, I don't want to share the true source of my frustration....which appears to be my choking fear of vulnerability.
 
I recently started running regularly again (probably another subtle way to avoid writing). I told myself I didn't have to run fast, I only had to keep moving. There’s definitely something important there. I need to do less. Think smaller. Quit trying to control so much.

But there’s still the issue of the fear I'm trying to outrun. And until that's resolved, I won't be well.

Let me ask you, when you hear the word vulnerable, do you think like I do, that it's weakness?
 
So why when we read someone who's writing with vulnerability do we think, Oh, I wish I could be that strong? (need proof?)
 
Dr. Brene Brown studies vulnerability. She says that courage comes from the Latin word cor, which means heart. Courage—“to share from the heart, from the core”—is anything but weak.
 
I suppose the good news is, feeling this way means I recognize the herculean task. I'm all-too-aware what writing this book requires. I don't need restraint. I need encouragement to speak.
 
My opposition, what Steven Pressfield (his book The War of Art is essential) calls “Resistance,” it all seems to stem from a core complaint: I'm afraid of what I don’t yet understand, and I pretend I don’t care that I don’t understand. If I was simply ignorant, I could fight back with wisdom (i.e. "the fear of the Lord"). But I’m not just ignorant. I’m also arrogant. I'm a spoiled mule, self-sabotaging instead of opening my eyes and seeing God’s all-too-obvious care.

At least part of the trouble is, I've forgotten how to be a child. Simply eating from God's hand.

Picasso said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” 

Though at 39, I do finally know a few things about myself. I know I fear vulnerability in part because I fear being ordinary. And I've known unconditional love, been comforted and nurtured regardless of deserving it, and still I believe I have to be "special" to be worth loving.

Somehow I'm still continually forgetting that it's the other way around and that it's being loved that makes us worthy.

Unmerited. Undeserved. Unearned by any action I could ever perform.

I've told writers that our readers most need our story to fight back fear. I've compared a writers’ story to a weapon, to silence the opposition.

And I know first-hand how writing that way, you may feel like you're dying. 
 
And there's really no choice because staying silent would be an equally deadly killer. Maybe just a bit more slowly. The "quiet lives of desperation" kind of death.

And if we did die while writing for the only One we should be writing for, now that would be a story.... 
 
And maybe even in this fearful place, I can en-courage both of us. If anything I can say to you can help at all, maybe it's here, in the encouragement to go ahead and just die. We do all desperately need to see someone giving up their lives for that higher purpose--scared witless maybe, but mindlessly sacrificing everything and throwing themselves to their wolves.

Oh, let's just do it. Yes, I feel that fear coursing through, constricting the throat, the ice in my veins locking my knees, souring my stomach, crippling all control. And I'm going to write anyway.

And as I do, maybe you and me together, can show how that fear that weakens us becomes our greatest chance at freedom...

And ah, yes! I'm remembering now... Thank you, God. It's impossible to ever write alone! All of this and everything is borrowed--ideas, connections, stories, metaphors--even the words! What exactly did we think would be ours to claim as evidence of our worthiness?

Without all that we can finally give up. And give back.
 
“There’s a strange paradox about writing. It is precisely this: There’s no occupation in the universe that is lonelier, and that at the same time depends more radically on a community, a commonwealth of other writers.... As lonely as is the craft of writing, it is the most social of vocations.” — Walker Percy
 
I know that feeling inside, that knowledge of having something to say. It must come out. It’s not going to go away. We must speak! It is our gift. Yes, we'll want to ignore it, run from it at times, but it won’t leave us alone. It was put there for us to seek it and speak it, and in the process of learning to love and fear it, to discover its higher purpose--to work in the change that can reclaim and save your very life.

Listen. You hear it as well as I do. And better, because you hear it differently. Just show up and listen. And keep showing up. So many others are seeking that freedom with you and their journey is completely unique but universal too. This is a sacred tool and if we'll put it to use in our craft, we may just come to know why it was put there.

But not before.

I will preach this gospel to myself: It's up to you to deny inhibition and be vulnerable. And get it out.

----------------------------------------

Fred Rogers was asked his thoughts about a shooting that had taken place. The interviewer told him the young man had boasted beforehand about planning “something really big.” 

Mr. Rogers had hung his head. “Oh, wouldn’t the world be a different place if he had said, ‘I’m going to do something really little tomorrow’?"

Do something little with me today. Show up and write.

Mick

Do You Feel Your Readers' *Real* Felt Need?

This morning I was back in the orange shag carpet of my childhood home in Long Beach, California. The light green walls and dark wood panneling capturing that perfect inexpensive elegance...

I recalled the impressionable boy of newly-evangelical parents, the sensitive first-born son of a family "saved" in the California Jesus movement. Campus Crusade, Maranatha music, door-to-door witnessing, and 2 men representing two major streams of influence.

Two representatives of the path he could go. 

"Mr. Rogers" of PBS' Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, and Dr. James Dobson, author of "Dare to Discipline." 

Both men asked themselves, what do people really need from me? And both delivered their answer.

Having taught writers to consider their influences at conferences and retreats for several years, it finally dawned on me there was a connection to the 2 questions I've heard most often:

"Is this any good?" and

"What can I do to get published?"

I believe both questions are really one:

"Am I good enough?"

It's a fair question. And I want to move fast and furious to the meat of this because certainly, publishing has long been built on the idea that experience and dedication is how you become worthy of the writer's title. But many, if not most who write will spend years learning to pitch, propose, shape and polish just to publish their story of hope and spiritual guidance to a few hundred and is that really worth all the effort?

Why should publishers and agents require such a high standard? 

After 10 years in the industry, I was so burned out, I was despairing over the disparity between requiring people prove their worthiness and knowing that very requirement was exactly the same as the vice grip of religion, duty, and legalism that bound so many sad, beautiful souls to the lie of performance.

I soon went into full-scale inner debate:

You can't escape this. You must provide an answer. Which way will you send them?

The immature idealist in me wanted to fling the doors wide, burn the ships and create an enclave of revolutionary artists. The other part of me knew that would seal my fate as Editor of Really Bad Books.

But the question I kept circling back to was, What do people really need from me?

It was this side of 35 that I finally discovered my answer. A book arrived out of the seeming blue to help me slow down and look back to focus on what I really believed. The book was eventually titled One Thousand Gifts and it told a story that was too painfully familiar to be just coincidence. 

In time, God revealed that in every situation, people need only one thing from me. It's the answer to that fundamental question: "Am I good enough?" Because strangely, somehow this well-known answer remains a secret. But it's a secret I see now Mr. Rogers knew, and Dr. Dobson as well. At the root, both knew we need to get past the surface to deal with the foundation, to sidestep the mind and get into the heart.

As Jonathan Merritt touched on in an excellent post called "Restoration in the Land of Make-Believe," people need to know their feelings are "mentionable and manageable." Mr. Rogers did this for me. 

But there's something more than that.

I've posted this video of Mr. Rogers before. This is a courtroom moment more real than any Hollywood movie. This is what I believe all writers need to know when trying to get their message across, whether in a pitch, a book, or a radio interview... 

I watch this and consider his deliberately slow way of speaking. I think of the care he uses in his words, the meaning honored by his delivery, how he seems guided by something, or someone higher than himself.

He speaks as a man who knows the answer to What people really need.

....

Is it true that we can never really know what people need, so why try? Should we just give up trying to "please" people and get busy with whatever we want to get out of our writing? 

After all, we're the ones putting in all the work. 

Or is writing less about "pleasing" people and saying what we might want, and more about writing what everyone needs? Isn't the real point of being a writer always about just one thing?

God reveals special needs by inspiration directly to our minds, right in the moment sometimes. And those can be great, instructive directions. But more often, the daily foundation of writing what people need from you will come from knowing this one thing. And when you consider the short time you have to grab attention any more, maybe this is something that can help you.

What if we could really get it into our bones what Mr. Rogers said here, what he came to know so well about his true job, the higher purpose of his work that wasn't really work at all? I believe that's the one thing everyone needs: to feel known, really known in all their struggle and anger, and accepted there for who they really are.

If more writers believed this and came together to support each other in that belief, maybe we'd know better what we were called for, and be able to give what all those before us gave, what our brave Savior gave, what those who leave a legacy have always given....

Yes. That one thing. And nothing less. 

I never met either man, though my life was heavily influenced by those 2 men who guided me in expressing myself with honesty and restraint. And both were heavily influenced by their friend, Jesus, and so I've been deeply influenced by him as well.

To say I'm grateful doesn't quite cover it. But I still try. Every day.

As a friend of mine says, remembering is the way to be re-membered. All the pieces do make a whole again. And only the One who set the model to follow can use your simple, borrowed words for what you really long for.

Because this is what I've come to know: when I'm writing to give my fullest self to what readers really need, I know I'm good enough because of my friend who is always enough.

Writing More Than Your Story

“When the words mean even more than the writer knew they meant, then the writer has been listening. And sometimes when we listen, we are led into places we do not expect, into adventures we do not always understand."

―MADELINE L'ENGLE

The first task in writing your story is letting go of what you wish your story was. 

When I first wanted to write my story over 15 years ago, I hoped to tell the world what I knew. Telling that would prove I was a writer with something to say. It seemed so simple and guileless.

It took years to shed that notion. And now you'd think I'd have compassion for those starting out there. But I'm here to tell you: I don't. I resent the presumption when writers ask about publishing and publicity, even if they know they're not really ready. They haven't let the story teach them patience, perseverance, perspective. And until they know how destitute they are, I want to insist that they haven't learned the first task.

They haven't let go of what they wish their story was. 

Editing and coaching authors is a way for me to take them to the well to look down and say, Do you see that? That is you. That's me. That's everyone before we've been saved and renewed.

This is why the message must be more than simply what you're hoping to get from it right now.  

That process always produces good things. Nonetheless, what I need, even as I'm guiding others, is a deep conviction of my own lack of sufficiency. I don't have the answers. My complete inadequacy brings the needed humility to my conviction. And I can't see my insufficiency when I'm using my editing work to right the injustice of the world or bring me the appreciation I so rightly deserve. 

Yes, I do struggle with this. I hope you're not surprised.

Writer, editor, publisher, whoever--entitled people are the opposite of listening people. Whatever I want is always in the way of what I really need. My desires are not God's. And that's the trouble. That's in my way. That's always what's keeping me from the Way. 

But the question remains and it's in the way of our stories: how will I get what I need to justify the suffering I've endured in my story? If you needed proof, that question should prove how ignorant and unbelieving we are, how far away from The Way our way really is. How great our need for a greater story. 

When I ask "What's in it for me?" I'm prevented asking "What can I do for you?" But when "What can I do" replaces "What's in it for me?" paradoxically, I find the answer every time. 

I think this is the foundational principle of storytelling. This openness, humility, this is the starting place. Letting go of all we may hope to get out of telling our stories--the accolades, acceptance, affection--all those things are completely and utterly forfeit in the light of a higher purpose, dedicated entirely to whatever result your Muse may have for you beyond this lowland where you can't quite see what He so assurredly does. 

Oh, how often I forget! I'm the worst at remembering this--which only proves it to me all the more. As a worker with words, I always go back to trying to twist them into my service, back to not letting my story teach me or anyone else that first task. I need to go back up to the top and read it again now...

When I think I can't be far off from what I need, I'm still expecting something. But when I finally, fully, let go of my way, I'm somehow given the very thing I'm after. 

 Before the message can liberate others, it must liberate me.

 I have to be reminded of it regularly: show up empty. You can't pick up the daily manna if you're already holding to what you want to say. 

 For this is the lesson: we don't have stories, we become them. They will say what we never could, what we would merely turn into the opposite, if left in our dry wells. 

 

Thank the Lord we never, ever are!

Will you let your story go to let it live beyond you?

What are you after? Acknowledgment? Acclaim? Apology? Validation?  

Let go of it. Let a new, unwritten story take its place. That one can never be taken away.  

He would make you more than a writer. He'd make you a witness unto him. 

Do you want it? Have you encountered it? Have you been waiting for a reminder before you come back and with your empty jar to simply pick up the daily manna again? You need an encounter to bring you back. 

But it doesn't need to be a miraculous encounter. You will find it in the blank pages as you look with the right eyes. As the words rise to the surface, the utterings too soft to be heard until you show up empty.

The writer's soul longs for this desert, this wasteland where the words rise. It's available all the time. Don't wait. Come and listen. 

You will be a witness--and nothing more.  

"All artists are vulnerable. Suppose there is no audience? Suppose no one will read or care about what you have given out of your heart's blood? Suppose the reviewers are brutal in their clever misunderstandings? Suppose that the words are unacceptable after all? It makes no difference. The writer is called to offer. [And] it is the offering that matters." 

 

—Acceptable Words, Schmidt & Stickney
 

Mick

Bring Nothing Today

My Dad's spiritual father (my "spiritual grandfather?") sends out this daily email called "Dear Friends." He finds insight in words and linking them to THE Word, which I find so fun.

I thought this gem was worth reproducing in its entirety. He asks,

    "what can I possibly contribute to the Lord this morning or any morning?"

Read the email below, then come back up and read Spurgeon... "I am entirely dependent upon Thee for support, counsel, consolation. Uphold me by Thy free Spirit, and may I not think it enough to be preserved from falling, but may I always go forward, always abounding in the work Thou givest me to do. Strengthen me by Thy Spirit in my inner self for every purpose of my Christian life. All my jewels I give to the shadow of the safety that is in Thee—my name anew in Christ, my body, soul, talents, character, my success, wife, children, friends, work, my present, my future, my end. Take them, they are Thine, and I am thine, now and for ever." http://www.spurgeongems.org/prayers.htm

This love is taking over the world. I hope you'll let it take over yours. 

Hope you'll be well and feel his presence today. 

--Mick

 

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Dale Vander Veen" <[email protected]>

Date: February 20, 2013 10:55:30 AM PST

To: "Ahome" <[email protected]>

Subject: February 20 - What Do You Have for Me This Morning?

   

Dear friends,

    Every morning I begin my time with the Lord asking, “Lord, what do you have for me this morning?” This morning I sensed an instant reply from him, “Dale, what do you have for me this morning?” After some moments of stunned and anxious silence, I replied, “Lord, you know that I have nothing for you.”

    Then I turned to my book, Dear Friends: Seeing Our Best Friend in His Word and World, to read today’s entry. I was shocked to discover the title “I Have Nothing,” based on Luke 11:6: “A friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have nothing to set before him.” Jesus, my friend, has come to journey with me today, and I have nothing for him.

    Following today’s Scripture readings in Seeking God’s Face: Praying with the Bible through the Year, I read David’s words, “Vindicate me, Lord, for I have lead a blameless life” (Ps. 26:1). I do not have a blameless life to give the Lord. “I have trusted in the Lord and have not faltered” (v. 1). There are times when I have trusted in the Lord, but I certainly cannot set before the Lord an unfaltering faith.

    After inviting the Lord to test and examine not only his actions, but even his heart and mind, David continues, “I have always been mindful of your unfailing love and have lived in reliance on your faithfulness” (v. 3). O, my! In comparison to such an offering, what can I possibly contribute to the Lord this morning or any morning?

    God has been blameless to me. He has been unfaltering in faithfulness toward me, unfailing in his love for me. “What shall I return to the Lord for all his goodness to me?” (Ps. 116:12). Lord, I have only one, no, two things for you this morning. I have a hand and a voice. The hand shakes, the voice cracks. But I will employ withered hand and wavering voice to answer your question and the psalmist’s question. “I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord” (Ps. 116:13). A hand to lift the cup, a voice to call, “Deliver me and be merciful to me” (Ps. 26:11).

    That is all I have this morning, Lord. And I know it is enough, for your grace has nerved this paralyzed hand and awakened this muted voice. I gladly join David in “proclaiming your praise and telling of all your wonderful deeds” (Ps. 26:7).

 

    Verse for the day: "The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit." (Ps. 34:18)

     Phrase for the day: "Nothing is enough."

     Quote for the day: from “Nothing But the Blood of Jesus” by Robert Lowry (1876)

        This is all my hope and peace, nothing but the blood of Jesus.

        This is all my righteousness, nothing but the blood of Jesus.

        O precious is the flow that makes me white as snow.

        No other fount I know, nothing but the blood of Jesus.

When You Realize You're Writing to Escape Life

I've long turned to writing as an escape from life. 

That fact alone has been enough to incriminate.

The guilt of that came on slowly, but it's inescapable now. As my secret's been revealed more and more, the words I've kept inside, reserved for myself, where I believed I'd be safe from those who would judge me for not going out and saving souls like my dad, or loving people more like my mom who was always doing things for people. And I could not even do one thing for anyone, afraid to connect with my neighbors and their needs that would keep me from the little time I had to write and be truly alone with my thoughts.

And all along, I've believed I was wrong. Why couldn't I be more like them, more in love with people?

Am I digging my own grave here, deepening my intollerance to overstimulation? Aren't I only weakening my resilience and strengthening my hypersensitivity? Why do I carry this preference for isolation? And more important, how do I escape it?

The day begins early. Same as always. Feet find floor and check the weather around the flannel-lined island while searching for slippers. Some days she's there, some days not.

But in winter, we always rise to the dark.

The winter of my heart slowly thawed in the consistency of her love. Yet do I need to ask who it was who gave me all of this on which my feet find balance, and every day become more certain and confident?

I know the solid ground on which I am upheld.

I find my books on the small desk. Their well-worn pages wait for someone new to read and value them, to take them in and make them their own. And I'm that man, that someone new each time I read.

I go to the coffee pot to wait and stretch. A bird has left some astonishing art on the skylight. It fans out in a jagged multicolored circle. I reach and realize the distance to my toes is slowly diminishing as I give myself to the strain in my back and legs. The tension lengthens out and gives me that beautiful lightness as I roll back up. So simple. So inescapable.

Portland winter skyline

I look up through the window to the ever lightening day through the reaching trees and I remember it has always been that the world will pass by my windows and I'll stand here catching none of it, all of it escaping through my untrained and semiconscious senses. This is the ordinary ground upon which my island of ignorance rests.

But if I let that reality spoil everything, then I'm the fool.

"The multitude of thoughts that crowd in on us spoil everything...so we must be careful to reject them as soon as we become aware that they are not essential to our present duties." --Brother Lawrence

I take my mug and I go to my spot and sit, fighting even now to escape the insufferable strain against the encroaching thoughts. I open the books and find my place. I read the words waiting, the ones put there for me and no one else to discover. And I am right here and right now and always right where I'm meant to be.

I may not ever help anyone but myself with this, but is anything ever spoiled when we're escaping to listen to his voice in everything? And why shouldn't writing be my escape from one life so I might escape into another? Isn't everything we do held in this tension of imminent escape, from one thing and into another, always and forever in the ever-lengthening love of He Who Holds sure and vast, by whom all is being stretched tight in his grip? 

He is our escape into fuller life. And all in his time is made to truly live.

Again and again and again.

Reading slowly, I watch the words rise up and I feel my breath escape. It curls invisibly on the page in whorls, paisleying the cold symbols with tiny fractals of multicolored wind and lifting them into the air to be caught and carried off. Heaven knows where.

And even this is not my own to claim but the very life within me that gives me the breath and calls me to breathe myself alive. 

The Story Uses You

I'm a PK (pastor's kid). So for many years I resisted anything that smacked of churchy Christianity.

But stories could always circumnavigate my barriers.

Jesus knew this too--the story was everything. When he asked which man did the right thing, everyone knew it was the Samaritan. Story sticks in the brain and causes the hearer to rethink their ideas in light of what their minds can no longer deny.

That's because fiction or nonfiction, a story is its own proof. It either works or it doesn't. And when it works, that's something no other method (business, campaign, powerpoint, one-sheet) can match.

Without a story, nothing gets done. Good grief. Case studies abound. If you don't believe the best stories create an unstoppable force by now, it's time to get studying, my friend. For example--check out the video here too ("Unstoppable") Or here: poetry is apparently rocket fuel for brains (think poetry isn't story? think again) Or check out the power of "case studies," i.e. stories.

Your work may be many things. But when we all get home at the end of the day and tell our spouses about it, it's always a story.

Feel free (as I did for many years) to avoid the unbeatable power of story and go for something "better." Technology. Ads. SEO. Fun activities. A bunch of bullet points. A convincing blog post. Plenty of things can assist story. But there is nothing better than story.

It's always inevitably about the story.

As an editor, I urge people not to try to "use" a story as subservient illustration. It may work for some pastors and already-well-known business gurus. But you need to know a good story uses you. Defines you. Creates you. Show you accept this and your readers will respect you. If you don't have an unstoppable story of your own yet (and you probably don't), try to tell others' as best you can. Just be careful: be a user and try to profit from story and you will fail. The new rules favor a new sincerity.

We'll be learning more on the power of story all year with Donald Maass' Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook at YourWritersGroup.com.

There are many ways to learn about story, so even if you can't commit to reading this book with us, do yourself a favor and engage your brain in a good story today.

See what you learn...

When It All Comes Down

What we do when it all comes down says who we are. And who you are is a writer. This work of words. All you do is this...this flinging.

 What are you really doing? Anything? Sometimes it doesn’t look like much. People’s huge, busy lives swirl around and you sit here alone. You take so much time for this, do you realize? When all else is stripped away do you honestly believe this is your real work, this constant grappling with concepts extracted from a life that’s not nearly so full as others'? Would anyone be able to take the simple scraps you choose from the heaps of the unsaid and be able to point to why in the world you do this?

I believe you might finally find the answer to that question once and for all today. Sounds too good to be true, right?

Now think about your writing time. Let’s say it’s now (or at least once you’re done reading here). You’ve heard it before: now is all you have. And you write because you believe (however weakly) it’s the work you were given.

It might not look like much—and sometimes it will look bad—but all the work you do here and now makes everything else you could do, at least for you, pointless. I know excuses can pile up like leaves but this shouldn’t need any more establishing: your work is inspiring hearts to prepare them for their true work.

When I was nine, my grandparents took us to the petrified forest. Giant log-shaped rocks lay all over in the scorching desert sun. Chemical reactions, pressure, sediment, I couldn’t follow it, but something to do with the volcanoes and a lot of time had turned these once living things to stone. The park center was basically a room large enough to contain all the signs threatening imprisonment, torture and excruciating slow deaths to anyone considering laying his hands on a piece of their fascinating wood rock (actually, several billboards outside assured children their relatives would be stoned and buried shallow if they so much as thought about stealing rocks). The experience leaves such a strong impression on me that to this day, I can’t look at a big rock without losing a little bit of my bladder. So scared I was (petrified!) of the park officials seeing me eyeing their treasure, I crept around the desert, my hands sweating in my empty pockets, eager to escape.

Altar boys never felt guiltier.

The more people I meet, the more I think there are unbelievable numbers of people feeling this way, day in and day out. They haven’t chosen to feel like outcasts, or worse—suspects. But living as though they're unworthy, and liable to be useless at parties and probably going to steal something given the chance, they miss out on their dreams, on the party, on life.

And I think it's this certainty of hopelessness that most often makes people into real thieves—stealing from their better selves to ward off this false belief they should be ashamed.

You’ve done it yourself. Stealing time. Stealing topics. Stealing words. All to feed a lie.

It’s the writer’s curse. We sit to write and we can't even see the road in front of us. Yes, we’ve proven over and over how useless we are. How can we possibly think we’re supposed to write?

Maybe that’s just it. We can't do it ourselves.

God knows we’re useless. That’s why he’s given us everything we have. We don’t need to steal. We’re free to steal if we want, ignore all the warnings, even our original design, and fling out whatever words we like. But what is really ours? Nothing. And if only we'd finally realize that, maybe we could write what we’ve been waiting to for so long...

This isn’t stealing: take the time you need. What will it finally take to make you realize that we have nothing else because we need nothing else? What would you do with anything else anyway? You could have all the wood rocks in the world but would you write like no one could ever shut you up no matter what threatening realities they flung at you? Would you give up this chance to make something of all the beauty in this homesick world, this sanctuary you're asked to witness and speak to life for someone?

I know it's a dark road, but what if this was your chance, your one chance to give back? To sit here. Alone. And to think about this. Isn’t this why you return again and again?

Are we ever really alone?

 ///    \\\

What better place to remember the point of it all than right here?

Write, you beautiful, child of the true King. Write, and never, ever stop.

M

All These Silent Years (What My Mom Taught Me about Voice)

Sit with me. Just one moment.”

 
I sit, wondering what we’re looking at.
 
Her hand covers mine and I recall my old selfish attempts to deny her—denials of home. Now we’ve come here to watch all these silent years pass between us and she’s exactly how I imagined my mom would be at this age.

 “Sit,” she says. But she really means look.
 

 Look with me. See what’s here. See, so you can write it.
 
 Because of course she’s always believed in me even when I didn’t. Time’s finally stilled to this single bench in a boundless garden. And in this theater of ochre leaves suspended in the fading light, the first scene glimmers:

 
...my first day of preschool, waiting for her to appear and take me home to safety.... 
 
...the swings at the park and lying about lying just to trick her...
 
...hiding behind a pile of homework, a fight with a bully unmentioned.... 
 
...my icy snubbing at the airport before London...
 
...her sneaking a writing sample to an editor friend landing my first real job...

More scenes pass, but my sins of omission figure prominently in many. All my silence for her sacrifices, these moments lined up like medals for her endurance in a battle for connection. I’ve withheld her prize for years and only one who’d already endured all this could still want to love me.
 
How could I have missed this for so long, the awesome power my mother holds?
 
My silence is before and after all, how can I not dedicate to rescuing these, the countless such moments our relationship rests upon? How can I fear speaking when so many moments wait to speak of all they hold?
 
My silence has lied. Just who do I think I am?
 
Eventually, maybe we do all realize all we’ve been given.

I feel her hand covering mine and how always this love for me has been between us and how much I want to know all she’s given.
 
Why did she always love me so readily? The struggle of wanting to escape my own timid skin has defined not just what’s between us but both of us as well. I’ve carried this curse, and this was possibly her finest lesson to me, in her compassion she willingly traded her life to enable mine.
 
So at last I will say this. I will write it. And I will speak.
 
I choose to deny a life of waiting for someone to understand me, to become just one more old voiceless casualty.
 
I reject my right to an answer to why I was so easily silenced, sacrificing myself to appease.
 
I forfeit the cripple in my soul.

A truer voice is speaking—“Pick up your pallet and walk.”
 
I take her hand. I will. I'll let this go and take her way, the way forward from this day. She’s asked me to believe only that I might finally hear what I’m now only beginning to recognize—the deep groaning in me, a sound too holy to be uttered. It's that voice, a spirit who has helped in all my weakness. When I can’t speak or don’t know what to say, he’s spoken for me, “making prayer out of my wordless sighs, my aching groans” (Romans 8:26-27, MSG). 
 
For as long as I can remember I've wanted to speak as myself. My true self, without self-consciousness or fear. Without restraint. Without being shut down, dominated or silenced. (How many in this world have felt that? Is there anyone who hasn’t?)
 
I reject the curse of working to make myself known. I will never write all these silent years, this pity I always thought was my entitlement. I’ve got only one life and it’s bound to countless others.
 
To sit and listen for the One voice in this moment summons mine and I feel it leaping up in me to speak. (Peace, impatient heart. All will be well!)
 
I may never get an answer. But in this moment, I have something to say. And what could being known ever really matter to anyone?
 
Tozer says we come and expect to be able to control the voice we hear speaking, try to make it say what we’d like to hear. He knows this is what we do. (In The Pursuit of God, see "The Speaking Voice")
 
Is this why expressing our voice is so hard, we think we control it, that it’s ours to bring out and make it sound like we want? A writing voice is a choice. Those who find theirs have merely chosen not to focus on themselves. 
 
Show me the one who speaks like himself and I’ll show you someone who’s stopped trying to.
 
What I know is that in listening for a higher voice, attending His wishes, I'm incapable of being conscious of myself.
 
My mom isn’t leaving. I’ve plucked this scene from a (hopefully) far-distant future to remind myself. To remember before it happens. I’m simply choosing to embrace my inheritance now. This gift descended from heaven, my choice to seek one voice.
 

["Know thyself."] And is this the prime
And heaven-sprung adage of the olden time?
Say, canst thou make thyself? Learn first that trade;
Haply thou mayst know what thyself had made.
What hast thou, Man, that thou dar'st call thine own?
What is there in thee, Man, that can be known?
Dark fluxion, all unfixable by thought,
A phantom dim of past and future wrought,
Vain sister of the worm--life, death, soul, clod--
Ignore thyself, and strive to know thy God!
 

-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Self-Knowledge,” 1832.

 
 
What you’ve got to speak is infinitely more important than how.

Praying you speak the truth this week.

What a Frog Knows

This morning, I headed down to the pond and caught a frog.

I'd never have seen her if she hadn't leaped from the wooden bridge. But when she landed amongst the rocks and ferns, I trapped her with the girls' butterfly net. She was big and made no sound, so I assumed her female, an orangey-brown wood frog with a white underbelly. I couldn't wait to tell the girls, so I wedged the stick with the net between the boards of the bridge so she couldn't escape and I hurried back up to the house. 

The girls were just waking up and I told them I had a surprise for them. We ate quickly and headed down.

When we got there the net was empty. My captive had escaped. 

It had jumped like mad when I first caught her. I assumed once the initial fear passed, she'd calm down--aren't frogs content staying even in slowly warming water? Well, a net isn't water. And seeing water just below, she must have finally seen it and discovered where freedom was.

"Ah, I'm sorry, girls" I said. "That's disappointing."  

"It's okay," Ellie said. She's wanted to catch a big frog for months. Always my gracious Elianna. 

"Maybe it got through the boards," Charlotte said, showing me how the stick could fit between them. 

"I think you're right," I sighed. "We'll just have to wait and try again."

The past few days I taught at the Oregon Christian Writers conference coaching novelists in revision. I wanted to inspire them to write over the long term, so I tried to share how stilling and seeking the water is all we need to get free. But I always question whether I should have spent more time on practical tips and trends.

It's true: desperation usually makes a bad cologne and writers conferences can stink. But turned in the right direction by staff and speakers--masterfully done by Jim Rubart and Cec Murphey this year--the aroma's greatly improved.

I've met so many writers and as a rule, we tend to strain against the stories holding us captive. I talk a lot about how revision is letting our stories still us so we can reach the end and experience the transformation.

I imagine that frog catching a glint of morning light on the water below, and finally understanding she could simply squeeze through the boards to head down. 

Desperate for freedom, the water's call turned her in the right direction.

Life offers continual opportunities for revision.

"I kneel down to toss in the laundry. I set the dial to extra dirty. I stay on my knees and watch the water run into the washer, watch it splash against the circular glass of the washing machine’s front door, hear its gurgling fall. Down it flows. Down, always down, water runs, always looking for yet lower and lower places to flow. I watch water run and spiritual water must flow like this...always seeking always the lowest places—and the washtub begins to rock. I must go lower. I tell myself this, watching water run. That whenever I am parched and dry, I must go lower with the water, and I must kneel low in thanks.

 The river of joy flows down to the lowest places.”

-Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts

 

I've forgotten this insight many times. But today a frog has helped.

Writing well requires the revision to turn our desperation in the right direction and go lower. We all forget, so we need reminders to still and seek the water. 

We searched the pond but couldn't find her and we turned to pursue our daily business--me to my computer and the girls to enjoying the lazy last weeks of summer. But even up at the house, I'm down at the pond today, turning this lesson of the frog over in my mind, the freedom she figured out. When desperation for freedom turns to straining, stop. Seek the water and simply go down. 

To all my new writer friends, you whose books need this too, think of the frog and her freedom won in stilling. I pray you find your way down to the water...

The Stories That Come to Know You: Hunting with Dad

It isn't solely my truth to hand you, of course, but I believe a story is built of the same dynamic force as relationship. In relating, it expresses and exchanges the same basic electric magnetism, the attractive-repellant force between any two things.  

A boy learns about this force at an early age, though he'll never fully understand it, even if he felt it warm as daylight as a nine-year-old... 



My father wakes me so early I’m not sure I’ve slept, though I must have since I don’t remember him getting up.
 
“Time to go,” he says and I hope he isn’t serious. It’s dark. Where is he? “Your shoes are here.” I sit up listening to his boots walking away toward the truck to prepare the rifles.
 
My arm’s wet from the condensation inside the warm tent. Are we going to eat first? I won’t ask, not because I’m not hungry but because I don’t want to give away that I’m only trying to delay.
 
Do I know why we’re here, what this really is, this weekend I’ll become a man? He’s surely noticed how my once-bold mimicry has gone subterranean, how time’s shrinking.
 
Strange, these things you come to know in the stories that come to know you. These well-worn weapons polished to amber....
 
The glow and crackle of barely-light, perfumed with coffee and pine and damp earth. The cheap thrill of watering any tree you like but working quickly to avoid blood-suckers. You learn to think ahead, to already be where the deer will show up when they’re hungry.
 
Sometimes hunters don’t tell you the why of things because they know the most important lessons are never spoken. They must be apprehended through observation.
 
You want mature ones with antlers that have grown many points with each winter survived. You walk against the wind so they won’t smell you coming. You look for cloven prints and droppings though you don’t actually taste the dark pellets he pretends to chew, a mock native, a deer whisperer. He coaxes my reluctant smile, maybe noticed it growing more reluctant as the darkness waned sometime during our quiet steps through the undergrowth.
 
Even with his gaze on the dark space between the distant trees he’s undistracted, sensing. On another day not far off I will encourage this same heightened awareness while exploring with my own kids.
 
You’re looking for a depression down a ridge that affords an ample view. You follow the position of the sun so it won’t be in your eyes once it comes up through the canopy lining the sloping horizon of the ridgeline.
 
You find your protected spot and you begin to wait. And silent hours pass.
 
Expectancy is a wonder. You can wait so long you forget your legs and the tingling. You may even drift off only to realize in sudden shock that everything has changed. Or it hasn’t yet but it could. Because everything and always is buzzing with it.
 
But the longer that passes the less likely it seems anything will happen, even right up to the moment in the story that will be recounted often over the years, each time becoming somehow both rounder and more solid.
 
A foursome of deer, slow, watchful, not 100 yards off, parades into the clearing from the thicket. And a big buck leads them, carrying in on his large twin forks what suddenly flickers to my awareness as the shiny weapon rises quick, fluid, and I straighten my thin arm and plead a whisper.
 
“Don’t shoot him, Dad!”
 
He doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t look at me. The deer continue their halting steps.
 
He doesn’t argue. Just lowers the gun.
 
Greater love has no man than this, that he should lay down his gun for his son. 

I’m so disparate, so wholly other, I should repel, but my father, compassion unfailing, his mercies are new every morning. The unlikely moment of all our effort has come and passed by and may never come again and I've mangled it. I'm Fern crying over Wilbur the pig; I'm the ridiculous old woman in The Fox and the Hound.

I've become the wrong character in the stories--and he's surely sorry he's let me read them now. And I know what's in the Happy Meals.

But for that force he felt, a power held but not grasped, in appreciation of something else, something otherwise unrelated, I may not have learned this lesson until much later--the reverence due for that fragile charge between two things.

Life brings endless opportunities to trade relationships. The test of a true hunter is in how well he listens.

Let scientists discover why relationships build intelligence and compassion. Let others sing “It’s love that makes the world go around.” I have seen this fearsome force and it is wholly mystery, pure and clear.
 
I know the power in a story. And I will work to write it on hearts all my life.
 
It’s easily forgotten, carrying your familiar stories with you every day, but it's an affective spark that could breathe new life into existence.

Because not everyone hears it, but we all sense it's there, the question--what is this attraction to what so repels? 

Is the answer in the question, there in that spark of recognition?

Is this why a story is always ultimately about hope?

Wait expectantly, dear hunter. Find your stories, these captured sparks arcing through all his created wonders.