The Writing Life
A work in progress quickly becomes feral…It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You just visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. —Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Starting a new draft has fears associated with it. Continuing with the one you’ve begun is a different matter. It has its own fears.
Risk it all. That’s when amazing, glorious things happen. — from the October Write Right eLetter
The writing life — and the life of faith — is not a safe life. To play it safe, means to risk little and to accomplish even less. To grow, to become the person God has created me to be, requires risking it all. No cards are held back for safekeeping. Everything is put on the table. Everything is entrusted to the One who dealt the cards in the first place.
The problem with perfectionists, albeit not the only one, is that they make mountains out of mole hills. A failure to rise to the occasion. A moment of stupidity. An error that not even an eighteen-year-old rookie writer should or would have made.
“In the wilderness we’re plunged into an awareness of danger and death; at the very same moment we’re plunged, if we let ourselves be, into an awareness of the great mystery of God and the extraordinary preciousness of life.” —Eugene Peterson, Leap Over a Wall
Going from the known to the unknown is frightening. It’s to walk to the very edge of the cliff face and peer over the edge. You can feel the ground beneath your feet, and it rises toward you, sure and strong. You also can feel the wind currents swirling in front of you and know you’re supposed to step into them. You’re supposed to set yourself free.
If you strike out on your own, if you decide to hit the trail, you’re going to be afraid at times. You know this because you know trails often are deserted and filled with things like bandits and wild animals. If you still decide to continue down that path – your first, courageous step – you’ll see belongings left along the trail and wonder what happened to the owners of said belongings. You’ll contemplate if you could be one of those owners, and you realize, yes, that could be you. You could leave everything, desert this path, and return to safety. You don’t for one reason and one reason alone: you know what the cost of desertion would be. Your body might be safe, but your heart and mind would always wonder “what if.”