Donald Miller:

“I’ve a shelf at home devoted to books about writing. I’d say I might even have two shelves devoted to those books now. I’ve read most of them and some are better than others. But the best writing advice I’ve ever received didn’t come from a book. It actually occurred to me one morning when I was lying in bed, not wanting to get up and do my job. Maybe it came from heaven, I don’t know. But the advice was this: Love your reader.

It sounds simple, but it isn’t so easy, actually.” Read the rest of Don’s short post…

>>>> >>>> >>>>

I love this. The Christian Doctrine of Vocation (vocation = calling) is the answer to so many questions. As Bob Dylan sang, “You gotta serve somebody.” Your calling, if you are a child of God, is tied up in serving the world (perhaps especially other Christians). I wrote a little about this here, and it has been on my heart for a while. It’s tied to the decisions I’m making and the disciplines I’m trying to achieve in my life right now. Especially creatively.

I wonder if this idea informs why so many great children’s novels have originated with a person telling stories to delight their kids? (I hope so.)

Who do ya’ love? Who do you want to serve?

I’m not exactly a mystic, but if you feel a strong desire to serve people who need to be loved the way you feel called to serve, then that might be an indication of the calling of God on your life. And ask wise people around you, especially people like a spouse, parents, pastors, and trustworthy friends. They’ll probably be saying the same thing.

Holy cow this is so true.

“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.”

Winston Churchill

HT: Andrew Mackay

Also, Churchill knew something about beating monsters.

I’m learning something about myself as a thinker of thoughts and a writer of words. I must resist what I feel as a need to qualify every potentially confusing thing I write. I’m growing more comfortable with the idea that I cannot provide all the caveats I need to protect myself from being misunderstood.

I’m learning to leave more room for possible misunderstanding where it can’t be helped without really altering (damaging) what I’m aiming for. The box-ticker in me dislikes this, but the poet says, “Get used to it, Bub.”

Think about how crystal clear Jesus regularly wasn’t.

Photograph by Gina G. Smith

Note: I wrote this last week. I also scheduled it last week to be published this day. Interesting.

When I do the dishes, I use way more water than my wife uses when she does them. This is because I am not as skilled as she is and I think by an avalanche of water I may drown away my dish washing inadequacies. Of course, my wife doesn’t complain about the water.

It occurs to me that the same is true in writing and communication in general. If we are unsure of ourselves, unskilled, we pile up the words. We believe we must say everything we think and so overcome any chance we might have missed something. But so often less is, as they say, more.

This has something to do with the idea of expression vs. communication. Artists sometimes get the high-minded, self-important notion we’re a special breed of human, superior and sophisticated. We might believe the most important thing is “expressing ourselves.”

But the artist under God understands she is a servant. She works, just like everyone else, to love and serve those who receive her work. She is like the farmer, the plumber, the pastor. She is concerned with communication (and communion), with connection, with service. It’s less important she “expresses herself” in all the ways that can be self-indulgent, and more important her work serves people. Not that it serves whatever they wish (as our market-driven, utilitarian society calls for), but like all true love, serves the person’s best. This is a vocation, not a cult. She is called, not enthroned.

Of course, the beautiful thing is that often our calling is at the cross-roads of what we feel burdened to express and the way the world needs to be loved and served.

In fact, an important question to ask oneself when considering any calling, including that of an artist, is “Does the world need this?” Another couple of ways to say this:

“Are people served by this to be more fully what they are called to be?”

“Does this work I feel called to contribute to human flourishing?”

If it does, then God is probably really calling you to the work.

(Other questions include “Am I good at it?” and,  “Does anyone say I’m good at it besides my mom and people really motivated to please me?” and, “Can I do this while fulfilling the more clear callings in my life?” Such as, if I am a husband, am I fulfilling the clear command to provide for my family?)

The self-indulgent artist, writer, communicator is all about expression and so may not be concerned with brevity, feeling it might limit her expression. The kind of writer I want to be can say less and so say more.

I’m striving for an economy of words. It takes more time and more care to say more while saying less. Have you ever been in a conversation with some one who is just a never-ending, Gatling gun of words? This person will wear you out. They have so much to say that, ironically, in the end you can’t remember any words except, “How might I escape?”

I can be like that, at times. But I want to be otherwise. Others-wise. I want to say less. I want to serve with my words. I want to pass them out like a soccer mom passes out snacks at a game.

And feel not a bit superior.

Carey Wallace has an excellent article in Cardis called “On Discipline.” It’s about the relationship between a disciplined life in general (and specifically a disciplined spiritual life) and a disciplined creative life. Looking for answers to why you’re too busy, blocked, or unproductive in creative work? I am. Here’s a portion below, but read her entire post here.

HT: Dr. Jonathan “Hat Tip” Rogers

There is no such thing, we discovered, as disciplining one corner of a life. There are only disciplined or undisciplined lives.

Let me be clear. Too many artists already raise artificial barriers to creation: they can’t write, or think, or paint, they claim, unless they’re seated at a pristine desk, with southern light, perfect silence, and a dozen sharpened pencils all pointed west. These are not aids to creation, or marks of real discipline: they are a group of excuses not to create if the conditions are not met. I am not saying, “Don’t bother to create unless your whole life is in perfect order. I am saying, “Creation will require your whole life.”

For years, I had seen my early commitment to prayer and writing as separate concerns. Now I wondered if my spiritual disciplines and my creative disciplines had been more deeply bound than I knew. The actions of discipline are simple, but the barriers to discipline are spiritual, rooted in anxiety, despair, and fear. And approaching them as if they’re simple matters of practicality will only result in the failure that most artists already know so well.

All spiritual problems are creative problems, and all creative problems are spiritual problems. Doubt, depression, lust, rage, greed: because the artist herself is the mechanism of creation, none of these things can be separated from an artist’s work when they’re present in the artist. And an artist’s failure to work is rarely mechanical—fingers that fail to curl around a pen or a brush—but spiritual: a fear that has rendered them artistically blind or deaf. The solution to them all is to draw closer to God, the source of all order, rest, and freedom, and of every image, sound, and word.

I no longer draw a distinction between my spiritual and creative disciplines.

–Carey Wallace

Note: This was posted last week at The Rabbit Room and there were lots of funny comments. If you want to join that conversation, go here (there, I mean).

If you’re a writer, admit it. You have always wanted a “writer’s hut.” According to a source close to me, a writer’s hut is a little structure set apart from the bustle of home life, dedicated to eliminating distractions and focusing the efforts of the writer’s mind on the business of writing. So, it’s a lot like Facebook in that way. The writer’s hut is small, often spartan, and does not, in most cases, include a Wii. It looks much like the micro-machine version of a house. The picture above is George Bernard Shaw’s hut which he called “London.” This was so his staff could, without falsehood, tell annoying callers he was away “in London.” I call my bed “Work” for the same reason.

The idea of a writer’s hut has always been a romantic notion for me, right up there with a fire, a pipe and…oh yeah, I almost forgot…a book in print! (Small details.)

I’m sure if I did have a cool writer’s hut I would transition from failure to success as fast as you can say Henry David Thoreau likes Ralph Waldo Emerson and self-mandated, adult time-outs.

Acclaimed children’s author and hutless coveter Jennifer Trafton pointed out this site which features several famous writer’s huts. She referenced it on Twitter with the statement, “I want one.” She succeeds, no doubt, in producing the selfsame envy in others. ‘You shall not covet your neighbor’s writer’s hut’ means nothing to acclaimed children’s author and hutless coveter Jennifer Trafton. Nothing.

Here’s Roald Dahl’s hut. Spiffy. I assume he spent most of his time in there learning to spell his own name.

Once, at the Rabbit Room, we helped artist Evie Coates name her studio/workshop –”The Hatch”— and then that same studio was featured in famous (and as far as I know, hutless) radio sensation Jason Gray’s video. That was fun.

What would you name your writer’s hut? Not like, if you owned a writer and you kept the writer in a hut –like a kidnapping kind of situation– what would you name the hut. I mean if you were, or are, a writer and you had a hut to write in, what would you name it?

I might buy the house next door. This is not a lie. It has a hut and I might write in it and you might end up having named it. Aaaaaand….I might write the great American novel in there (or a few hundred more Jellybean Highfive shorts) and wouldn’t you feel special if you named it? Yes. Yes, you would.

So, what’s a good name for a writer’s hut?

Arthur?

Do any of you have such huts and can you share pictures and names with us?

(I’m just going to go ahead and say –cough, Aaron Roughton– that Pizza Hut doesn’t count. So don’t even try it.)

“The novelist is required to to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn’t mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater.”

Flannery O’Connor

HT: Jeffrey Overstreet

“Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.”

T. S. Eliot

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“…the delight and pride of Aule is in the deed of making, and in the thing made, and neither in possession nor in his own mastery; wherefore he gives and hoards not, and is free from care, passing ever on to some new work.”

J.R.R. Tolkien

Ron Block, who posted this on FB, calls this, “Advice for creative types from The Silmarillion by J.R.R.T.”

Here’s another one of those “famous authors who get rejected” articles. I love this kind of thing and it never gets old for me. (I wonder why?)

Note: I have actually been told “no thank you” by two publishers. But it feels like more. Insert Native American tear here.

Everyone knows about J.K. Rowling and the many rejections she faced (kids won’t read a book that long!). She went on to sell several copies of long books that several children read for fun. True story. William Shakespeare was actually killed by 17 publishers before finally never being accepted, but went on to win five Oscars for “Best Good Written Thing.”

Here’s a favorite from the article…

“And Rudyard Kipling just kept on scribbling after being informed by an editor at the San Francisco Examiner newspaper that he could not publish one of his stories.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.’”

I guess it’s “Never give up” and all that. Or do…ya know, whatever. One reason I want to be the best author to have ever lived is that my eyebrows are getting kinda crazy and I love staring off at something amazing that I’m really thinking of in my mind because of where I’m such an imaginative writer who is going balder and balder.

HT: Brandywine Books