Why I Write

It's summer (no stay-at-home-mom of school-aged kids needs this reminder). It has not been a season of prolific creativity and productivity for me. More like road trips, incessant bickering, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. That's okay. I'm forever grateful for these years, and for my presence in them. I'm not complaining. But I do miss writing. It's been weeks since I've had those long, quiet, isolated hours before the screen. All I have time for right now are quick bursts of words, dumped into a blog in the early morning hours before the monsters begin to stir in their lairs.

I needed something easy, something to get the juices flowing, something to get me writing. Writing about writing is about the easiest thing there is for a writer, so here it is: a summer series on Why I Write.

Why I Write Fiction, Why I Write Young Adult, Why I Write Historical, and others are planned and coming shortly.

Today, I'll tell you simply why I write.

1. I enjoy it. 

Every part of it. I love to feel the throb of a story aching to coming out, and the gush of words when I finally put fingers to the keyboard. I love the fine-tuning, the hours spent staring at a paragraph, a line, a word, even when I return to it the next day and decide to delete it.

I also love the hard, intellectual labor, the constant refining, and the continuous learning. I know I'll never know all there is to know about writing, and that knowledge pushes me, awakens me, and drives me.

It gives me something to work at until it's finished. I know what I'm going to do every day, from the moment I wake up.

It gives me purpose. It makes me feel useful to my Lord, who has given me the luxury of time, freedom, and a gift with words.

2. It keeps me close to the Lord. 

Not because I think writing, in and of itself, is so noble and godly a thing to do, but because I'm constantly talking to him about it. Is this a fitting labor? I ask. Does it please You? Take this dream from me if it's not from You, I beg him.

I ask for practical things too: for my time to be well-used, to be kept from distraction, for Him to show me what's missing, and what to cut.

I confess my sin to him: my pride, my shame, my hesitancy, my laziness, my fear of man.

When I get frustrated by what I perceive to be silence, as I often do, I back away from writing. I can't help it. My confidence wains, my work slows, my heart constricts.

And like clockwork, my prayer life dries up.

But I am always (so far) pulled back somehow to the labor of writing, and with it, I return to praying as I should.

I realize anew with every return, that if my writing never amounts to anything in the wide world, if it never yields earthly fruit that I can see, and taste, and spend, it doesn't matter. My writing bears the kind of fruit that matters to God. It keeps my heart tuned to His grace, mercy, and sovereignty.

3. I can't not. 

Writing is quite possibly the most all-consuming activity I could have undertaken. Even when I have to remove myself from the screen and do normal things that normal people do, I'm consumed by writing. I may have a day that's full with bible study, and picking up my husband's uniform at the cleaner's, and shopping for ingredients to make minestrone soup and homemade bread for my friend who just had a baby, but all those things are punctuated by thoughts of my story. Dialogue streams through my mind as I drive. I feel the sun on my character's skin when I feel it on my own. I use my one precious hour alone to unload it all into the Word document, and read it over fourteen times to make sure I like it.


Whether or not God does anything with it, I think, for me, there will always be writing. It's a part of who I am. It's a part of how I function. The tap has been turned on, and it flows constantly for me.



And that's why I write.

The Value of Keeping a Journal

Thinking today about the importance of telling my own story as it's happening, instead of retroactively. There's something useful about that, I think. Not knowing how the story will end, but telling it anyway.

I've been a nearly lifelong journaler, though not with any sort of rigorous discipline. I do it when I feel like it. Sometimes I write two days in a row. Sometimes a week goes by. Sometimes a year. Somehow I've managed to fill several volumes over the years. These are the ones I've managed to preserve.

In the green box at the top of the heap are my earliest scratchings when I was an angst-filled, love-starved teenager. I didn't have a fancy book with a built-in ribbon bookmark back then. It was simply lined paper ripped from a spiral notebook in which I also did homework, folded up, and tucked away some place where no one would find it.

I don't know how they survived intact and unread all these years, but I found them this morning, stuffed in a storage bin in my closet, the breathings of my 17 year old heart, and I read them for the first time in nearly 20 years. When I plucked a random folded paper from the box, unfolded it, read my old bubbly script, tried to recall my world, my circumstances, and my heart, I cringed, as you might imagine.

It was painful to see how confused I was about the world, how obsessed I was with trying to figure out what would make me happiest, and especially, how far I was from God.

I was headed down what, I am confident now in saying, was a path to destruction. I was dating a boy I had no business going out with, probably as an act of rebellion against my parents, who I was sure were disappointed in me, and who, I frequently admitted in my writing, had no reason to be proud of me. It was also a rebellion against my sister, who had been doing things right, and was about to be married to a wonderful man.

I suppose you could call it a self-fulfilling prophecy. A head-first dive into a whirlpool in which I would be sucked voluntarily into a downward spiral. My shame in my poor decisions was compounded by each deliberate step I took down that path. And when shame doesn't result in repentance, it turns into something altogether different: contempt, anger, haughtiness, and pride.

I wrote many rambling pages before and during my relationship with this boy, justifying, rationalizing, and explaining why it was okay. Despite the youthful bluster, there is a sadness in my writing. A reigning cluelessness, a desperation to avoid pain and regret.

I spent a lot of time thinking (I had forgotten this) about moving out of my parents' house before I graduated. I had a job, after all (in 1997 minimum wage was about $5.15 an hour). And the people I had been hanging around--the family of this boy--were my picture of what this life looked like, which, in a word, was poverty.

But I didn't care. I wanted to be independent. I wanted to be away from my parents. I didn't see it at the time, but now I recognize that what I really desired was to be done feeling ashamed, which I felt every time they looked at me, or tried to talk to me.

That was a powerful longing, but there was a still more powerful being at work in me, and I didn't even know it.

I broke up with the boy before summer was over, though I feared he would probably never talk to me again (he didn't). I wrote on one of these folded up papers, "I don't know what changed. I just see things differently now."

That chapter ended--just like that. The page was turned and a new chapter began. Within a year I would be far away from that town and that life, studying for a teaching degree, and reconciled to my parents. I didn't pull myself out of that pit by my own maturity, wisdom, clarity, or strength. I had none of that. I was dragged out by my collar with a mighty hand, unwitting and unwilling, by a God who had already ordained my eventual salvation.

It would be another 6 years, a college education, a husband, a teaching position, and a child, before I would be converted. But the work was begun during that awful time of rebellion. My journaling revealed that to me.

God saved me by his restraining grace and I didn't even want it at the time. He took me off that path of destruction and set me on a path that will ultimately culminate in righteousness, and I can take no credit for it.

How I thanked him this morning when I read those cringe-inducing words of my youth. How grateful I am that he prompted me to write them down, even while I was in the pit, with no desire to get out of it, so that I could, 20 years later, sit on the floor of my closet, with tears in my eyes, praising him for the good work he began in me so long ago.

That's why I spend my days writing and editing a fictional story for young adults. It's why my heroine is 17 years old, why her heart churns with the same dangerous concoction of pride and shame that mine did so many years ago. It's why she teeters on the edge of a family that expects more of her, and comes dangerously close to missing out on sharing their great destiny.

This story is my witness to the world, in the way I know best how to communicate. It's my testimony to the faithfulness of God, my response to his saving grace.

Where would I be if he hadn't pulled me from that path of destruction?

Where would any of us be?

What's your story?

How are you sharing it?

On Diligence

Thinking today about how diligence goes hand-in-hand with contentment. And the idea that contentment does not mean having everything I need or desire.

Paul, through Christ's enabling, was content, even when his needs weren't met. That's what Philippians 4:13, everyone's favorite verse, is really about.

"I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength."

People latch onto these words for the wrong reasons, I think. They want it to mean they'll succeed at their task, accomplish something great, finish something hard, overcome something big, or build something with their own strength.

But I don't think that's where Paul was going with these words.

He was in prison, facing death, uncomfortable, probably hungry, as miserable as a human being could be. Yet he was content--why? Because in that moment he was being diligent at the task he loved. He was laboring as he should. Praying, working, writing, chipping away at a monumental, impossible job.

There was no indication that he would succeed. Quite the opposite. He was suffering, and he was writing to people who were likely to suffer as well. Success, they way the world defines it, was not a condition for him. That's so important for me to get. I have said the words (how I cringe to think of them), "If I only knew he would cause my stories to be published, I would work so hard at this and not worry about my work, my time, my energy, my life, being wasted."

Do you see what I did there? I made publication, or success, as the world defines it for an aspiring writer, my condition.

I have worked halfheartedly, even hidden my work, because if it's not God's will to bring it to fruition, I will be embarrassed for having tried. So I have not been diligent. I have not been content. I have languished over the question of whether or not I should even be doing this.

How awful would it have been for Paul to do the same? Maybe that's not a fair question to ask. Paul's gifting, calling, and labor were not the same as mine. But if I can learn contentedness from him, perhaps I can learn unhesitating diligence too.

Perhaps his life and work can show me that diligence is the seed in which contentedness germinates.

Diligence when no one is looking. When no one seems to care. When no paycheck is forthcoming. When it seems, by the world's standards, to be a fruitless labor.

Only then will I look up from the screen at the end of a long work day, and say with Paul, "I know the secret." Whether men praise me or not, pay me or not, mock me or not, understand me or not.

I am content.

Content to submit. Content to work. Content to wait. Content in his providence. Content with the journey. Content to learn what he has for me right now, knowing that the temptations of "affliction and want" are easier to manage than those of "fullness and prosperity," as Matthew Henry says about this verse.

I can do this only because of Christ, who gives me the strength, not to succeed, but to be content.

Writing Tip #1: Weeding out Adverbs

I read Stephen King's On Writing like every good aspiring author should. I remember the passage about adverbs: 

"They're like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you have five the next day...fifty the day after that...and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, profligately, covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are."

When I took to the keyboard, eager to get my story out, an adverb popped up. "It looks pretty," I thought. It can stay. It's the only one.

I dropped another in.

And another.

And another.

There was a twinge of doubt every time. But it needs to be there! I convinced myself. How else will the reader know my character is anxious, willing, in a hurry, or that this is inevitable?

I typed on, comfortable with my rationalization.

Now the MS is complete and the revisions made. It's time to edit.

Microsoft Word has a tool in the upper right corner called, "Find." Click on the little binoculars and you can find any word, phrase, punctuation, or partial word. It will highlight it for you in dandelion yellow.

I nearly spit coffee on the screen when it showed me 764 uses of "ly" in my 65,500 word MS. Little yellow dots everywhere.

My beloved MS was totally, completely, profligately, covered with weeds.


How does a writer begin to tackle this?

Now that you know there's a problem, go to the experts before you try to fix anything. Pick up a classic, timeless piece of fiction you love. My go-to's right now are Les Miserables for the complexity, brilliance, and use of metaphors. And The Hobbit because it's delightful and conversational. I feel like I'm in Tolkien's home, and he's just pulled up a cushy chair, and begun to tell me a story. It's a good style to emulate.

Pick a page at random (you're not reading for the story) and take it in. Appreciate the work. Grow accustomed to the rhythm of the writing. Notice things about it. See any adverbs? Probably not. Figure out what you love about it. Take some time with this. Spend whole days away from the screen. Designate them as reading days. Sometimes just an hour is enough to give you a fresh perspective when you look at your own work again. Your taste in your own writing will have changed--like magic. You'll see problems you didn't before.

After you've done that, and you're ready to face the mountainous 764 words, don't be overwhelmed. Pour yourself a fresh cup of coffee, take a deep breath, and remind yourself that some of those words are "family" and "rely" and other non-"ly" adverbs.

Tackle the unnecessary words like "really" "only" and "nearly" first. You can eliminate them without much thought. Maybe a minor sentence adjustment. Get those things outta there. All of them.

The other ones, the ones you thought about and used intentionally are going to be a little tougher. You don't need to get rid of ALL of them. But I hope you'll begin to see that you don't need MOST of them. Don't automatically replace them with description. Sometimes a sentence or a paragraph needs to be tightened up. Maybe you need cut words to increase pacing, not slow it down by adding more words. You won't know that until you're reading whole passages and getting a feel for how fast it's moving.

When you come across the highlighted "ly" take some time to read the sentences around it. You'll find, probably....85% of the time, it's already preceded or followed by sufficient "showing" and you can just delete the adverb. For example, you may say she looked around nervously, and then describe her as fidgeting, and eyes darting. The reader "sees" that she's nervous! We don't need to be told. Get rid of that "ly."

Don't trust your gut. Your gut is the reason the adverb is there. Your subconscious wants to make sure the reader "gets" it. The reader is smarter than you're giving him/her credit for. Don't spoon feed the reader. That's lazy. Good, succinct writing is about subtraction.

For some omitted "ly"s, you may want to add description. You have to be judicious. That part is hard. You have to treat every one of them individually, and look at what's around it. No shortcuts. It's worth it. You used that "ly" because you were trying to convey something to the reader. Make sure you're doing it.

If deleting feels like ripping off a scab, you can copy the sentence and paste it in a file called "Deleted." That way, it's there, and if you find that you still don't like the sentence sans adverb, you can put it back. But at least *try* the sentence without it, and leave it that way for a while, and see if it doesn't grow on you, and strike you as better, stronger writing.

Secrecy of the Writer's Life

I have a secret. I write and think about writing more than anyone knows. I don't like that this is true. I don't like that I answer the unmistakable urge to click on the Pinterest tab I intentionally left open to cover up the Word document I've really been working on when I hear someone walk in the room.

I don't like that 90% of what goes on in my brain can not be shared with anyone I know in real life.

It's lonely.

It makes me feel like I'm hiding a part of who I am. It hinders my creativity by limiting the amount of time I can tap into it, and the amount of feedback I can get, and the potential encouragement I might receive from people who would believe in me and pray for me--if only they knew.

I've talked to God about this, lamented all these things, asked him for boldness to share what I do in my quiet hours. I worry this intense need for secrecy is a pride issue, that it's simply fear of people thinking my writing is bad, my knowledge of history is wrong, my ideas silly, my ambition vain, my dream stupid.

I have a picture of myself in my mind, holding up a book cover, beaming, announcing to my little world that it finally happened. Then, I imagine I won't feel the urge to keep my labor a secret anymore. What a relief this will be! A burden lifted. Payoff after years of hiding this enormous part of myself. This vision is more enticing to me than the thought of my first royalty check, or the thought of my first positive review.

I don't crave a publishing contract, or professional accolades. Only enough success to crawl forth out of this dark place of isolation I'm in and be honest, open, and transparent.

I don't know if this is right or wrong or spiritually in line with a person who is mature in her faith, loves God, and seeks to honor him with her work. It's what my heart dictates.

But I wonder if, maybe, there is something God-honoring in the secrecy. If it's okay to avoid proclaiming to my world, "Yes! God did surely call me to do this even though I have no evidence. Here, look. No, wait. Now, look. No, let me work on it some more. Forget that first thing I showed you. This one is better."

Truthfully, when I look back on my first drafts, I want to gag at the triteness, silliness, and blandness of it. It's boring and awful and I think God is not honored by that, he is honored by the process. The faithfulness of returning to the same document, day after day, improving it, sharpening it, like the blade Solomon speaks of in Ecclesiastes 10:10. "Using a dull ax requires great strength," he says. "So sharpen the blade. That's the value of wisdom. It helps you succeed."

When I think of using a dull ax, I think of the wasted effort, the witnesses who snicker and shake their heads at the fool who began his work before his tool was ready. It's not wrong to go into the shed and sharpen the blade in secrecy, in anticipation of the work to come. This does not indicate a lack of confidence in the work, or in the hand of God to bring the work to fruition.

Some people don't want an audience to watch while they drag the blade back and forth against the pumice, hold it up to their eyes, and return it to the stone for a little more refinement. They may not enjoy the darkness and secrecy of the shed, but they endure it, knowing it's not forever. They stay as long as necessary, knowing they are sparing themselves and the God they seek to honor the indignity of coming out too soon, before they are ready.

I pray, O God, this secretive time is not wasted time. That there will be a time for transparency, a time when you can look at what I've made and say, "The blade is sharp enough. Step out into the sunlight and put it to use. It's not a sin for you to be confident in this."