Whenever I read the work of a great writer, someone like Anne Lamott, whom I am currently reading, I end up feeling simultaneously inspired to write and afraid. Inspired because words can become poetry, their meaning cascading off the page and into some place deeper than my mind, right into my soul, and the essence of their message, something far more real, more meaningful than what they literally say, takes root there. I feel like I’m growing again, like I might be an inch taller when I put the book back down.
I feel afraid because I don’t want to contaminate the page. It’s as if there is only so much goodness in the written world and they’ve used most of it up. Anything I write would have to be dribble in comparison to CS Lewis, Lamott, Salinger or Irving. Loving what they create as I do, I don’t want to spoil it.
But that’s the tension of writing, I think. I might screw it up. I might write pure crap, something that’s nothing short of a colossal waste of time to read, something I think is wonderful and witty at the time but will later look back on and read, expecting to be impressed by myself again, only to be embarrassed at the thought that other people have seen this. I put it on the internet, for crying out loud. The internet. What was I thinking?
I don’t write as much as I should, partly because I’m married and busy with life and work and my wife. Partly because I struggle with depression and sometimes feel no desire to put thought to paper—it would just be too much work. But mostly because I’m scared. I’m always “working on a book”, if not in the literal sense then at least laying one out in my mind, imaging that it would get published and that I would enjoy a mild form of success as a writer, enough maybe to write and not have to work a desk job anymore. Maybe I’d get to go to conferences and speak along side folks like Donald Miller. Maybe people would read what I write and feel something deep inside of them. Maybe I’d be passing the torch to someone else without even knowing it.
I don’t have wild, fanciful thoughts of being famous or rich. I used to. Now I just want to make a living, maybe enough so that Katie doesn’t have to work when we have kids, and if I could do that through words that would be marvelous. Fame is overrated I think. Truthfully, I hold very few famous people in high regard. If I could only work a craft, you know, something more than a job, and make a living doing it, that would be magical.
But I have to face my fears. I have to carve out the time, something that is harder than it sounds, and I have to write.
Hey bro–hope your holidays were good. Our were. Have you seen the movie Akeelah and the Bee? I saw it again this weekend while we were cooped up with the ice storm. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a teacher/student movie, and one of the main premises is that we are afraid to succeed.
Just want to encourage you to use your God-given talent.
left by Trey on 01.16.2007 at 11:10 am