Today I came to a conclusion about writing. More specifically, about how I’d like to write more consistently, and more unashamedly, especially for this blog.
Thinking about writing is a common occurrence for me, actually. I think about writing–as an idea, an art, a calling–every day, probably more than I think about Abraham Lincoln, and at least as much as I think about ice cream.
Lately I’ve been pondering the act of writing in more practical, life-course-guiding terms (finishing one’s junior year in college will do that to a person). My daily, sunshiny walks around campus seem to be filled with prayers and unanswered (sometimes unasked) questions. Where is God leading me? Why do I feel this urge to write, to seek the truth and unleash its power onto the world? What am I to do with that kind of focused yet punishingly broad passion?
Thinking about it can be… exhausting.
But I realized something today. Not, oddly enough, while out running in the clammy-fingered air this morning, but when I got back and sat down to read some of C.S. Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms. It struck me almost as soon as I started reading–on the first page of the introduction, no less (kids, when they tell you the introduction doesn’t matter, they’re lying).
In the introduction, Lewis acknowledges his lack of expertise in formal Bible study. He claims no infallibility, but humbly presents his thoughts in Reflections as a pathway for deeper understanding. And that got me thinking (again): beyond this one work, Lewis wrote in different formats, at different times, to different audiences, and he kept writing even as he was cognizant of his own shortcomings.
This brought me to an awareness of my own primary limitation as a writer: I think about writing too much, and actually write far too little.
I think it’s because somehow I’m afraid to venture into territory that isn’t my own. I’m a poet so I should write poetry. I’m a historian so I should compose densely forested theses on events and people now expired and why we should care about them in our modern age. It’s comforting to me, to stick with these two mediums and keep my eyes averted from the temptation of other paths.
But a writer should write, period. And a writer is what I want to be–more than that, it’s what I am even when I find myself trying to avoid it by going outside.
Pen and paper have always held a kind of sacred significance to me. I feel driven to write, in the same moment as I feel terrified of what it might mean to really pursue writing. Which is how I know it’s what I’m meant to do.
Fear demands that I create structure, so I can categorize my successes and failures. Thus I’ve tended to let my unwritten thoughts stay inside, because whoever heard of just letting thoughts out into the open like that? Writing simply to write? I wouldn’t know how to shape that current, let alone where to begin.
Though maybe here is as good a place as any.
