9.10.2008

why I write

I think I'm using the same template as firstimportance.org (whose RSS feed or daily e-mails are Christ-exalting and highly edifying-- I'd highly recommend subscribing to either if you want to love Jesus more!)

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For one of my English courses, we were asked to purchase a book about the art of writing by some Chinese masters. I thought it'd be kind of a crock, but it actually has some legit material. One idea I resonated with while perusing the book the other day is how hard it is to start writing. One of the Chinese masters uses a really rich image to show this: "It is hard to get started [writing] at first, like talking with cracked lips." I have so many ideas to write down that I get overwhelmed, but I never know where to start!

I've been wanting to blog for a long time, but haven't because it reminds me of Xanga from tenth grade when I'd give a play by play of my entire day. No structure, no emotional significance to anyone except the people I'd give shoutouts to...which was probably more often than ont. When she assigns us personal narratives to read and write, Professor Hougen always reiterates that it should be theme guiding our essays and tying them together, not chronology. I want my writing to reflect that, Recounting mundane, chronological details about my day won't connect anyone to me. Using images and specific details about more overarching themes will. Ah, it's so wonderful, writing.

I'm definitely a writer. I've been learning a lot in some of my upper-level writing classes about rhetoric: why we write, how literacy affects us, how to integrate faith in Christ into writing that isn't blatantly evangelistic in its purpose, et al. In my Writing Theory class, we read and discussed a scholarly essay about literacy. It seems like there's an unspoken western principle to regard the illiterate with disdain because of something they lack. In other countries (mostly eastern), the literate are lauded. Illiteracy is the norm as opposed to the exception it is in the west.

I began to wonder: do illiterate people feel mentally claustrophobic? I'm serious. When I can't write something down, I freak out. I mean, I carry at least three noteboooks in my purse to write in, some for creative purposes, some for pragmatic purposes, but all for the sake of being able to write things down. My theory professor asked us to write a narrative about our literacy--mostly, what construct in our lives affected our literacy and most basically, why we write:

My mind is always at work, and I think I've always been so overwhelmed with ideas that I feel the need (or even the burden) to “pin” these ideas down somwehere with words. As my compulsive/obsessive nature dictates, I panic if I cannot capture my thoughts before they blow away in my mind. It has become second nature to me, this impulse, and as I've learned about writing and what it really means to be a writer and a Christian, I've also learned to take pleasure in this impulse—great pleasure, even. I love the translation of an ambiguous, distant cloud in my mind to a tangible, emotionally real sentence strung together with precise words and sensory images. As a child writer, I wrote for myself, simply to get thoughts out of my head. This impulse manifests itself in my compulsive list-making (even when I was eight years old) and harasses me still. I keep at least three notebooks in my bag at all times to ensure I have a place to write everything down. As an adolescent writer, I saw writing as a “release” of emotions (I was beginning to understand. . .) and stayed up late writing angsty “poems” that I'd rather not reread.

Now, as a pretty serious writing apprentice, I understand writing's value in Christianity.I've become less selfish with my writing in my realization that writing is really a means to duplicate important feelings (often in mundane situations) using images that my non-writing friends can understand. The language I use indeed “pins down” my feelings and can function as a “release” or a remedy to my compulsions, but it should ultimately serve to help other people understand important things about humankind--namely, its need for a savior. I see now that it's only in the past couple of semesters have I become aware of the profound impact my Christian worldview (or Bible-colored lens, as I sometimes call it) has on my writing and reading. In studying Christian writers in classes and intense discussion with professors and classmates and dead authors (e.g. O'Connor--some are alive, though, like Ryken), I understand the pleasure I experience in reading and writing can point me to the cross of Jesus Christ, something I value above all things.


I write because my mind's usually a mess.
I write because I crave words.
I write because it rips the hazy veil from feelings.
I write to duplicate emotions and experiences I'd otherwise forget.
But mostly, I write because it makes me love Jesus Christ more.

Big shoutout to my boy Leland Ryken, a lauded English professor at Wheaton and editor of some pretty amazing collections of essays on writing and Christianity:

“Poetry is not eloquence or decoration or a nice way of saying things. It is a way of seeing, a way of discovering perceptions, moments of awareness that were not there before. The poem is the body of a different kind of knowing, a kind of awareness that the conscious intellect by itself cannot get to." -Leland Ryken



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