Category Archives: Useful

A writer's motivation, Fear, Inspiration, Keys to Success, Meditations, Mission Statement, Monday Motivations, Spiritual, The Bible, The craft, Things that make you go Hmm..., Useful, Writing

How Jesus Unblocked My Writer’s Block and Freed Me to Write–for Good

03/06/2017 Mick 3 Comments

“We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have – for their usefulness.” – Thomas Merton

All art, writing included, is built on ideas. The size of those ideas can’t be measured, but we know some are very, very big.

I believe there’s one idea I’ve long held that outranks them all in crippling my motivation to do the work required.

Everyone has to work through many wrong ideas. For me, somehow I learned to focus a bit too much on the product of my faith, to value not my work, but my work in the world.

On the surface, it seems a small thing. And there’s clear biblical support for the idea: We don’t look at good intentions, we look at the fruit. We don’t care about what’s on the surface, the heart is what matters.

Biblically, that’s true. But you can see how prioritizing the product over the process–the goal over the journey–is a twisting of this teaching. And intentional or not, as is so often the case, the idea has created a big misunderstanding. The result for me, and I’m convinced many others, has been confusion, frustration, and even death of much art. Art became a utilitarian function, a tool in service to the end result (mainly saving souls, but any such “purpose” of art could have done equal damage).

I could have created this idea from my own pride and desire for acclaim, but I’m here to tell you that any result of our art is not the purpose. Hear me and hope again: this is not a Christ-following artist’s proper focus.

I know this is controversial, but that’s not my goal here. Maybe you’ve struggled with a form of this idea too. The Bible says we are all in a process of being transformed (2 Corin 3:18, among others). Life, like art, is a process. And we can only take part in that as we are able to accept it and abide with Christ in it.

Leaving the complicated theology aside, focusing on the product gets us confused and looking for Jesus out there, somewhere far off in the distance, in the future, in another place, in other people not here, not now, not in us.

Any artist deeply senses this is true. But many of us resist giving it its rightful place in our minds. We focus on getting somewhere, and so many other things too. We want progress, we want a product. Our fear and our misunderstanding blinds us. Jesus offers his help, his rest, his spirit of knowledge and understanding. And yet we don’t even hear him. We will not stop long enough to listen. We rush ahead and deny that we’re hearing anything.

And when it’s pointed out to us, we may even deny that we’re artists at all.

Of course we’d be able to listen to God and hear him if we were real artists! We’re only dabblers, and pretty bad ones at that, after all.

But consider: maybe our assumptions about what it means to be Christian artists are off base. Maybe they’re informed by our culture, by its insistence on measuring product and productivity, and by our own refusal to accept that there is no measurement for the movement of the Inspiring Spirit. It blows wherever it pleases (Jn 3:8).

Can our rational, enlightened minds even wrap themselves around this ancient truth and feel its power again?

If we could only realize, if we could only believe what Jesus says is true about the kingdom of heaven living within all men (Lk 17:21), it would be obvious that believing is all we have to do. Making art is a byproduct of praise, and the product is

Making art is a byproduct of praise, and what we produce is a byproduct of that, and all of that can take care of itself.

Jesus said that accepting the mystery that he is the embodiment of God’s Love within us is our comfort and our assurance (John 14). And this profound mystery is not just beyond us or above us or out there far off somewhere, but actually living within us right now, infusing and enlightening us like beacons, calling and waiting for the world to wake up to it.

The evidence of him is all around us, but more importantly, it’s filling us with life and is alive inside us. Right now, right here. When you believe it, that becomes your new reality. You are ignited, “born anew,” and every day becomes a new chance to see that life is this precious, this sacramental, this holy. Every day, the sacredness is in the very dirt and rocks that hold up our feet and spark our senses to recognize it.

Oh, but we miss it. We’re still deaf, and dumb and blind to it. We only know what little we feel, what tiny parts we sense, and what enormous things we lack. We long for more but we’re all too aware of what stands in the way. And we are never enough aware of God.

Yes, this is the deplorable, depressing human condition. And yet right here is the wide open mission field of the called artist. Do you not see it? Look! These are the fields ripe for harvesting, the sacred purple fruit literally bursting for recognition, longing to be made into fine wine for the world, to be made into its inspired intended purpose, into its perfect product: the glory of the God of all things!

We could be transformed if we’d just stop trying to figure it all out. Stop trying to improve on this today. Give up the work and be still. Pay attention. And be loved.

You are not alone! We all waver and doubt. We all wait and grow sick with the rot of the dream within us, the dream planted by His Spirit when he energized us and gave us sight. We all grow weary waiting for the day our product will go out and do its work. And we all are tempted constantly to give up. And right here we could be transformed if we’d just stop focusing on what we think is the point. We don’t have it all figured out. And we never will.

Stop trying to improve. Give up the goal of the work and be still. The work will come from that. And if the world is to be changed, it will only be by that.

Pay attention to what really matters. Step down into the stream of the Spirit. The water flowing around your feet is a metaphor of the water flowing within and out of you every day. It will feed the fruit of your work if you will just stop and feel it and then express what you feel. Give yourself to it today. IT IS FOR YOUR LIFE!

Do you hear the song within it? And will you give yourself to that song? If you will, you will have produced something worthy of framing. And you can let praise be your product.

For the higher purpose, today and always,

Mick

A writer's motivation, Books, Current Affairs, Fear, Inspiration, Mission Statement, Monday Motivations, One Thousand Gifts, Spiritual, The Broken Way, The craft, Things that make you go Hmm..., Useful, Writing

A Word for Writers on Healthy Integration (or More Accurately, the First Word of Likely Many More).

11/07/2016 Mick 9 Comments

“It’s always the vulnerable heart that breaks broken hearts free.”

I read a new book recently and it changed me. It helped me realize something I hadn’t before.

Books often do that, of course, but not in a quite so fundamentally altering way. You know how when new information comes, there’s always that period of instability before you can even recognize what’s happened? And then comes an undetermined time of processing it before you can assimilate and actually use that new fact or element of knowledge from your newly expanded and solidified position?

Yeah, that happened recently. And I realized I don’t think about that enough. I’m guessing you probably don’t either, or at least not consciously, with intention to do something about it. I assume you already know we all face the requirement to assimilate new info, whether or not we always do it. After all, that’s sort of the whole point of this walking-around-upright-and-aspiring-to-social-respectability-for-doing-something-useful-with-these-opposable-thumbs gift of consciousness, isn’t it?

So, because integration is a hidden process, it’s underappreciated. But I think it’s one of the more important processes to explore for how vitally essential it is to our lives, our minds, our hearts, our strength and our souls.

Because my postulate is that to love God well in all those areas absolutely requires good integration (vs. bad or simply lacking).

So one of the takeaways of this book is that integration is really all about consistency. That is, you can’t be well integrated in life and able to use your newly gained knowledge, abilities and wisdom without consistently doing the work to integrate new knowledge, abilities and wisdom.

Right? I know–it’s neuron-stretching. But when you realize this, you see why with all this new information continually coming at you, and faster today than ever before, the sheer effort to synthesize it with your existing life is overwhelming. We resent, resist and actively fight against the onslaught every day. But how many of us realize this invisible duty to take it in and deal with the anxiety that causes? And isn’t it even fewer people who actually think of ways to pursue better integration of their expanding understanding, and then follow through on what that new awareness dictates?

Is this important? Do you agree? For years I’ve believed that what we need most are strong examples of people doing this and making the effort, so we can see the positive change and the new intentions and how they play out in someone’s life. If we could watch a “good integrator” working to apply his or her learning in their life and see what the results are, wouldn’t that be of priceless value in our info-choked lives?

I wonder what could be more needed–of course, such a personal story would be one of the hardest things to write, to say nothing of ensuring the picture was vulnerable and honest enough to appeal in today’s culture. Clearly, an exemplary integrator would have to struggle to be authentic and laid bare. She’d need to care little about the judgment that would follow when her experiment in allowing change by an invisible hand to grow her awareness was misunderstood, maligned and even denounced.

But that’d be the cost, and it’s ultimately why I’ve grown to love inspirational memoir. Because it’s instructive in the ways I need it to be most–to see it, feel it and experience it for myself. Who can’t identify with this deep need to live more “wholistically?” You don’t have to be a writer to know this training is among our primary needs for survival now, since we’ve become largely safe and comfortable in our modern world. The great danger we face as humans isn’t physical or even ultimately intellectual–it’s spiritual. It has always been thus; we just haven’t been so capable of focusing so much attention on it before.

Which is why we’ll rip apart at the seams if we don’t get clear on how to do this mental work real quick.

Anyone coming to this work of demonstrating healthy integration, i.e. spiritual growth, will pay a price. Family and friends will oppose your efforts, see them as variously selfish, self-immolating, demanding, unreasonable, or even unhinged. There’s no easy response to why you’d choose to pursue this. Many won’t see it as growing our ability to identify with Christ’s wounds, yet isn’t it ultimately just that? To see more of the real world and experience the only real way to break our prejudices and privileges, and finally feel what another feels?

The connections there aren’t immediately obvious, but that’s why I’m compelled to commend this book to you. What I aspire to with Higher Purpose Writers is exemplified in Ann Voskamp’s new memoir, The Broken Way. Her example has shown me we need more Christ-followers willing to follow, to leave comfort and seek to know what we tend to miss as disintegrated, disembodied members of the body. So many members of the body are being dismembered and must be reminded, that is, re-membered. So many are being distracted and so many haven’t been given “the easy setting” like us. And what we need is more people willing to show the struggle to suffer in solidarity with them, without judging or arguing with their politics, or believing falsehoods to sidestep our mandate from God.

Simply, we are to love our neighbors and enemies as ourselves. And we need to integrate this knowledge to get involved in saving lives.

This book is the reason I began feeling disintegrated and stopped posting several weeks ago. As with One Thousand Gifts, The Broken Way forced me to recognize it and do something about it. After writing about writing for over 20 years, one of my main takeaways is clear: writing can create an eddy to remove you from where the river of creative flow is taking you. Without attention to integrating your spiritual knowledge, it can prevent you from facing your deeper fears and producing more good work of a higher purpose.

The Broken Way revealed to me I hadn’t yet integrated my knowledge about God with my own living of life. And that’s the opposite of being truly helpful to anyone in the real world. Maybe it’s not uncommon and we all experience such disintegration every day. We all know it’s incredibly hard to do the work of waiting and gathering and then considering all the factors of an issue, let alone to integrate the new awareness that arises slowly without being distracted and derailed. We grow too complacent, disinterested and convinced it’s unproductive navel-gazing. Maybe we also grow too afraid of inspiring others to conjure white padded rooms for us as we slip into self-important delusional behavior. But we can’t allow our fears to win. We can’t give in to our doubts that acquiring a fairly complete picture of our true work in this world, and integrating it, is possible.

Our hearts and everyone we’ll ever meet must follow this process of being transformed by the renewing of our minds. And it feels to me today on the cusp of another election (God help us) and the dawning of a dark and dangerous day for the west, it’s time to own my disintegration and get living again.

So for the next few weeks (possibly months), amidst myriad other tasks, factors and worthy and unworthy colluding distractions, I plan to follow what promises to be an epic interior journey, one I’ve never really embarked on before.

It may be only my fellow God-haunted nerds and misfits who see it and feel this excitement, but oh, my fellow Inspired aspirants, it will be epic…

More certainly to come. Will you join me?

For the higher purpose,

Mick

P.S. Please do check out my friend Ann’s book. It’s sure to sell well anyway, but as my favorite of 2016, at the very least it’s helped to make the year far less disappointing on balance.

A writer's motivation, Fear, How I got here, Monday Motivations, Useful

My #1 Tool for Productive Writers, Part 1

09/13/2015 Mick 22 Comments

“There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open up a vein.”

– Walter Wellesley Smith

For a long time, I believed the hype about being a more productive writer. I thought the usual advice about setting goals, getting on a schedule and visualizing was right on. But I think for some of us it’s not enough. There are deeper issues that keep us from achieving our high-minded goals.

It may only seem worth the effort if you’ve tried many of the tools and tips and been unable to keep it up. Initially I found those tools and tips helpful but because they couldn’t deal with the root of my problem, I felt inadequate, embarrassed. Maybe I was just lazy. I wanted to write. So why didn’t I do it?

Turns out my struggles were soul deep, and no matter how simple the steps appeared, nothing else worked for me before this.

The tools and tips about apps or methods can become useful after you sort out the deeper challenges. But for me, there was a psychological tool I needed that freed me to pursue the practical advice about how to be productive.

It was permission.

Basically, I needed permission to stop focusing on productivity. If you want to be productive, often you have to stop focusing on it, and start seeing where you’re sabotaging yourself.

Despite my best efforts to write, I’d always end up rebelling. I’d eventually resent the work and go on a word-spending spree, numbing out on surrogate thrills in all kinds of ways.

And here’s where a different writing coach might recommend getting a separate computer for writing or using Pomodoros or setting goals and rewards. They just never worked for me. I’d try and fail, then, wracked with guilt, lament my hopeless situation yet again and wish by Thor’s hammer there was some lasting method for finding infinite flow and recapturing optimum productivity in life.

Whatever.

But now, after well over 10 years of on-and-off-again writing this novel, I may finally have my answer. It’s a deceptively simple method that effectively removes what I produce as the end goal of the work.

And that’s it. If you’re a strong-willed over-achiever like me, it may solve your problem of low productivity forever and remove the guilt to stop focusing on productivity.

That’s right. Instead, focus on the process, i.e. just getting the cup of whatever, sitting down, opening the document and reading some of it.

If this isn’t you, I know this might sound crazy, but the only way to get a stubborn donkey to move is to stop pushing it. Showing up and opening the document and staring at it for a while, sure it takes some effort, but it doesn’t require trying a bunch of things that only complicate your process.

And, best of all, you have complete permission not to write a word.

If you struggle with productivity, make it your new intention to shift your thinking to not writing new words but simply reading the old ones. It’s nothing fancy; it’s just reassigning your effort to restrict what you’re paying attention to.

Outsmart your inner rebel.

Believe me, before I did this, I’d always find a way to get out of writing. And what changed for me was that I realized I was continually hampered in my writing because I was my own worst enemy. While I wanted to produce good work and be diligent, something else inside, something deeper, wanted easy comfort and relief from long-held pain. And I knew I could find it (at least quick fixes) in myriad other places.

And until I stopped and realized that pain was legitimate and deserved to be heard and comforted, I only kept trying to muscle my way to a specific word count, using will-power to try and stay “on task” even as I knew it would be short-lived and probably not produce any meaningful writing. And becoming distracted all the time.

Next time I want to talk about a practical trick I’ve used to reward myself for sitting down to read (not to write) every day. Because it’s been quite a rewarding journey these past few weeks already…

I’m not completely out of the woods yet—I could still stumble and fall down. But I’m confident that my focus on this simple process frees me to face ever more dragons guarding my cave, whether or not I eventually win out over all of them. Just showing up, I have less chance of forgetting that this is how writing life-changing books is done, whatever it may look like to anyone else, day in, day out.

One healed piece at a time.

“I have experienced healing through other writers’ poetry, but there’s no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I’ll write a bad poem.”

– Marilyn Hacker

Mick

Editing, The craft, Useful, Writing

How to Be a Great Edit

08/20/2015 Mick 1 Comment

I know it’ll come as a shock to some of you, but as much as the writing process is about staying in the work until you’ve said everything you need to say, the editing process is all about staying in the posture of listening.

Once again, I’m stealing advice from Donald M. Murray’s excellent essay on the practice and teaching of writing, Teach Writing as a Process Not Product.

“How do you motivate your student…? First by shutting up.”

This is the part many writing teachers get wrong. They endlessly go on about the importance of editing and refining and how to do it and why it’s so vital (insert ironic laughter here). And, guilty. Even editors forget communication is a two-way street. And because we’re selfish human children who forget the world isn’t all about us and our needs, we could all use the reminder that no good book (or conversation) happens with just one person speaking.

So obviously, getting the readers’ interests and questions into your work doesn’t happen automatically. You’ve got to be willing to quit pushing the river and listen for them. And that’s where a well-trained editor can help.

Then, once you’ve heard the readers’ concerns from a more objective voice, it’s time to get to work.

“You don’t learn a process by talking about it, but by doing it.”

I think for too long I saw my job as editor as pointing out the assignments and telling writers where to focus and what to do and how to say it, and according to Murray, “thereby cheat[ing] your student of the opportunity to learn the process of discovery we call writing.”

I’ve had to accept this is my own ego, my selfishness, just like it’s the writer’s ego and selfishness that cheats readers out of discovering the story instead of stepping back and being willing to learn to replace your instinctual habit to talk with quietness.

To trade speaking for listening, to consider your response, and become not the initiator or the motivator, but the reader, the recipient, this is how to be a great edit for your editor. The waiting can be agonizing, but an editor can’t help you learn the process if you won’t practice patience.

And I had to do it, so now you get to. :)

“[R]espect the student, not for his product…but for the search for truth in which he is engaged.”

The editor listens for your voice, the truth you’re after, even if both are mere potentials yet.

But this is the work, and you can do much of it before you seek an outside editor. Focus not on what is but what it could be. Look deeper and let it change and grow if it can. Look for the potential for more inspired suggestions, more implied connections. This is what your editor will do, take what you’ve got and consider what with more time and insight, could be great.

You can get ahead of the game and make your editor really happy by spending time first considering the reader’s questions and expectations before turning it in.

The same way an editor does this for a writer, the writer can do this for a reader. It’s like good customer service: serve your editor by making your reader the center of your attention.

Ask, Will they feel served? Is everything clear and as precise as it can be to prevent trip-ups and confusion?

Do that and you can rest assured you’re going to be a GREAT edit.

“Seeing into” is the vital work of the editing process, to recognize what the reader feels and needs next.

So practically, what does this look like? Of course, you won’t simply answer every question, thereby ruining the mystery and romance of the read. But you do want to make readers aware that you are aware of their questions by giving them a character to identify with who’s also confused, usually the hero.

If you practiced this perfectly, you could get away with a lot of mystery, create great tension and have a very engaging story. But with practice you’ll see where in the story you told too much, too many things readers should figure out on their own. And you’ll also see where you told too little, not explaining what’s needed to understand the basic plot or theme.

Again, if you did this before your editor had to, you’d have much better material to fine tune with him or her. Of course, I know it’s hard and laborious and you have wine to drink, but read through your work out loud (wait, one sec—where’s caps lock?) OUT LOUD! That way you will hear the problems your brain is skipping over. If you want to know if something sounds okay or your dialogue sounds authentic, have someone else read it to you in monotone—this removes the way you’re hearing it in your head and you’ll know if it translates.

I know–ugh! Hard work!

But you can do it. You need to do it.

In nonfiction, when you share an illustration, remove things like “as this illustration makes clear…” It’s unneeded. You might as well say, “As this phrase makes clear, I didn’t edit.”

And overall, use fewer words to increase interest. This applies to fiction in dialogue and descriptions, and to nonfiction in explanations of things that the reader can and should be allowed to assume or connect themselves. Presume some reader familiarity and reduce your pandering, didacticism, extraneous, long-winded spelling-everything-out as much as possible. Spotting these things becomes easier with practice, but the key is always to focus on interest and how you can increase it.

Ask yourself, Does this [phrase, sentence, paragraph, chapter, illustration, character, story, example, sidebar, backstory, footnote, piece of dialogue] add to the reader’s interest or steal it by removing the tension, mystery or excitement of discovery?

With patient practice and attention to listening over sharing, you can be a great edit and reap the rich rewards of a careful, considered editing process.

And that should make everybody happy.

A writer's motivation, Fear, Inspiration, Some writing reality checks, Useful, Writing

Doubts and Distresses be Damned

04/15/2015 Mick 11 Comments

The difficulty of consistency in writing is greatly exacerbated by authors fearing that the situations and characters in their heads aren’t quite unique enough or imaginative enough. And this angst can effectively kill an author’s enjoyment of the daily work.

The mountain of their vision seems too high to climb.

Yet let them close their eyes to the hill and simply take in the next step–the single situation before them to be captured–and I would be willing to say there is no longer a problem.

No situation an author faces is any more difficult than this. And no scene is trite in itself, just as no author or story is uninteresting; there are only dull, unimaginative, and uncommitted authors.

No dilemma an author can write could possibly leave readers unmoved if it is fully and imaginatively presented.

And if an author has delighted readers once, she can do it again, doubts and distresses be damned.

– adapted from Becoming a Writer by Dorthea Brande.