Mick Silva Editing

Do most writers start writing because they want to teach readers something? I think I did.

Then when I realized writing is So Very Hard, I shifted to hoping I might merely bring some people hope.

But I started to realize no one without hope really reads books. So eventually, I think maybe I was only writing for myself, as a natural response to the world around me. Not to teach, or even bring hope, but to live receptive to the work.

Had I finally grown up enough to write for the right reasons?

It’s not that I’d become selfish–I think I started out that way and became less so I continued. But I think one can write for himself and still be aiming to inspire, educate and bring hope. It’s the wanting to do all that that seems to have made it, well, sort of agenda-driven.

Many books have an agenda, no doubt and sometimes I suppose that’s fine. But I get so tired of it. And it takes time to get real and drop the act, the false beliefs that tell us life can be simplified and boiled down into its basic parts. Anyone can write something and ship it out without taking the time it needs to be refined into the subtle, balanced flavors it needs to represent real life and stand up to the questions and valid arguments against its acceptance.

_{(Of course, those who need to hear that most are too busy publishing junk to listen…but never mind.)}

Flannery O’Connor said that to expect too much from our writing is sentimentality, and such softness eventually leads to bitterness. I tend to think she was right. Optimism about teaching readers something or about people’s warm embrace of our refined work will not lead to warm cheeriness. Nevertheless, despite the garbage some readers and writers prefer to gulp down whole, O’Connor’s realism helped her accept that it’s hard, and with one eye squinted she said she was able to take it as a blessing.

That sounds a bit Ecclesiastical to me: “Thus I considered all my activities which my hands had done and the labor which I had exerted, and behold all was vanity and striving after wind and there was no profit under the sun.” (Eccl. 2:11)

Embracing that we can’t do a darn thing about much of reality may seem like pessimism on the surface. But it’s true and the truth doesn’t change according to our ability to stomach it (O’Connor again). What’s more, people won’t start reading the books they should simply by believing they should or by some Pollyanna positivity.

 

Only if we look at our work honestly and give it the time it needs to mature can we embrace reality, and have an influence in changing it.

So toward that end, I offer some inspiring thoughts for you to take into your work week and mull over. These are from my own grappling with reality, clutching onto many things, and eventually letting them go again…

When I reveal what a reader needs to figure out himself, it ruins the mystery and cheapens my story.

Of course editing is subjective. But until I     consider  the many ways to say one thing, I don’t know the best way to say just what I mean.

Every writer has the right, the privilege, the duty not to explain everything. It is a writer’s core value that identifies which things are which.

This dedication to the refined truth, the veiled beauty, the carefully obscured mysteries to be discovered, it’s what keeps me writing. I wonder if maybe it’s what keeps us all writing, after all. And removing all that stands in its way, and committing all we have and are to remaining attuned to the Inspirer, isn’t this the great, all-important reason to write after all?

If I can only dedicate to the “lifestyle of invitation” in all of my life, to receive like the trees and the plants that turn their leaves up to prepare for the sun, waiting in that posture regardless of rain, clouds or storms…

If only I can be ready for the searching, for the waiting, to capture all the blessing that’s given… Isn’t that balance worth a lifetime of service? Wouldn’t that be the passion matured that I want in all things I love, open and prepared to speak the beauty, the truth, the justice to life, and to right the wrongs with the words….

“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.” ― Flannery O’Connor