Wednesday, May 12, 2010

On Writing and Age Wrinkles

I love writing and I hate writing. The two feelings are constantly throwing house parties in some emotional apartment my logic is never invited to. Like opposing pistons charging wildly into the same cylinder or two bulls in the same pen. They collide with force and drama and certainty. With writing specifically, as much as God teaches me through it, it's never good enough to show anyone - and so it stays unpublished, entombed and unfinished. It is for me, catharsis and chaos in equal measure.

But maybe writing is more like life, people can forgive an imperfect word or a bad paragraph as long as there's a beauty to the whole. All of our words are like lines and wrinkles drawn into an aging face - they make us, us. Different, weak, broken, strong, but recognized and loved, not in spite of them, but because of them. It's different, how God works, how he stands with stretched arms signaling the beginning of a better story; offering strength and peace in the middle of weakness and chaos.

So our worst days become a kind of necessary punctuation. They link the elements in our stories; pauses in our prose.

And our best days are the secret and soaring poems we only tell to our favorite people.

Our stories are made beautiful because they're written with the stuff of the bad days and the dignity of the good days. And like that, maybe we're supposed to accept the imperfect words because we know that better words are coming, and sometimes, in the best times, they come quicker than we'd hoped. Or sometimes we have to dig and bleed to find them. But we always find them. And always when we need them.

Maybe we are all writers who have already been written into a story full of labored sentences and the right amount of poetry. We just need someone to read it and tell us to keep writing.

So, write it, whatever it is. Write the bad words until the good ones come. Change your life. Start your life. End your old life. Get a better job. Get a better boyfriend. Hit "publish." If we trust that the whole of the story is beautiful a one, we can't really fail. Let the worst of you become a kind of period that doesn't just end a bad sentence, it signals the beginning of a new one, a better one.

Maybe it's time to trust that the words will come. Maybe it's time to let Him write and know that they will.

5 comments:

Otana (aka Theophila) said...

I love this so much.

Seaner said...

Otana, I am your biggest fan. Thank you for always reading, seriously. How's the FB fast going? I honestly don't think I miss it.

Otana (aka Theophila) said...

The Facebook fast is going really well! It's a lovely feeling to not feel compelled to check for notifications every five minutes. While that has more to do with my self control (or lack thereof), I really don't feel like I'm missing anything right now. To be honest, I've been surprised how often the subject has come up in conversation. I suppose I hadn't realized how all-pervasive Facebook has become.

Alexandra DeVelo said...

This totally gave me the motivation to write more, especially with the lack of sleep I've been getting lately. Thanks for the inspiration :)

Angela Moinicken said...

This is a beautiful blog. Well done my friend.