A Stream of Words

On the writing life, dog training, and plans for the future.

After the prompting of many friends, I’ve finally caved and started a Substack. I’ve tried blogging before (many times), and it usually goes something like this: I write a post. I tell myself I’ll write another post. The second post never gets written and the whole plan slides first to the back-burner of my mind, and then to the adjacent counter, and lastly to the kitchen sink, attempt abandoned. Like many writers, my perfectionism often kills my creativity. It’s hard to write often and share writing, even in a conversational format like a newsletter or blog post, when you overthink every sentence or feel the need to share Serious Thoughts every time you share anything.

But this year, several things happened to change my perspective on writing and on the writing life. I spent this year working on an extensive writing project—a short collection of familiar essays titled The Luminous and the Hidden. Although I only produced thirty pages, this collection was the most intense work I’ve ever undertaken. From research to draft to revision, I wrote and rewrote each essay again and again, rolling up my sleeves every week to dig back into the weeds of words and ideas. And along the way, I realized a few things about writing.

1. Writing is rewriting. This is not some great secret, kept from the masses of amateur writers by the literary masters. I’d heard it again and again, but I’d never experienced it before this year and the four or five drafts of my essay collection. As a writer, it’s easy to think that all the work has to happen before you meet the blank page–– that you must approach your writing with all your thoughts perfectly articulated, and that what follows is only a tidy setting down of grand ideas. This is not the case. Rather, the writing process is more like training a dog. You do the same thing over and over again, coaching the rowdy, ill-behaved beast of a first draft into some semblance of decency and order. And then one day, you look at the animal before you, and instead of seeing muddy fur and attacks on neighbors, you realize that the work sits nicely on the couch, genteel paws crossed. The ideas flow, the sentences resound, but only because you have spent hours nudging them in the right direction and giving them a stern command when they jump in the wrong one. Good writing happens in the process of writing, and rewriting, and rewriting again.

2. Writing happens in community. This year, more than ever, I’ve appreciated the relational nature of art. Whether trading book titles with another writer over dinner or reworking a paragraph with my project advisor, I’ve spent this year making art with other people, and this has opened to me a broad and expansive room. We need art, not as a product for individual consumption, but as a conversation—whether a conversation between artists, or friends, or church family. Anne Lamott, in her book Bird by Bird, reminds artists that the goal of the writing life is never publication, or success, or greatness. Rather, writing is a gift—or a love letter—that we give to others. The best writing happens when we write, not for a faceless “audience”, but for those familiar, sometimes frustrating, and dearly wonderful persons whom we actually know. I wrote The Luminous and the Hidden for my family, for my professors and friends at New College Franklin, and for the child I used to be. (For we not only write for others but also for ourselves. As Joan Didion said, “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.”) When we write as a gift for others, we side-step the anxiety of pleasing a faceless audience and the egoism of self-focus, aiming, rather, for the fresh and honest speech of one heart to another.

3. The writing life is work. From all of this, these new insights and the many hours spent whittling words, I’ve gained a new sense for the rhythms and requirements of the writing life. It is a life spent perpetually “in the weeds” of words. Therefore, one of the best ways to keep your hands in this garden is to write often, whether good or bad. Every day, the writer must put something on a page, if only to keep the stream of words flowing for when the right idea arrives.

All that to say: my aim with this Substack is to keep my stream of words flowing. I can’t promise the greatest insights, or the sharpest prose, or anything more than the steady trickle of one writer’s chatter in your inbox. I’ll probably talk a lot about writing, whether my own or that of the authors I most admire. I’ll likely talk some about theology and philosophy, about poetry and literature, and about art and music. I love to write about nature, about place, about friendship, and about the new life of the believer in Christ. That’s a broad tent, but if art aims to capture “the texture of life” (Ray Bradbury), there’s a lot of ground to cover.

So I’ll be writing. And sharing some of it. At the moment, I have a lot of projects on the back-burner, and hopefully most of them end up on the feasting table and not in the kitchen sink. If you’re interested in following along, this is the best place to do so.