Posting again ... Thoughts on the writing process

6/7/2020

Hello?... Anyone home? Is this thing on??

After a 5+ year hiatus, I've felt prompted to be more open in sharing my views and experiences. I hope you find them worth reading.

Writing is difficult for me. It's the form of communication that allows and requires me to think the most. As I write, I have the luxury and burden of testing ideas on the page, and seeing whether I actually believe them or not. Whether by nature or nurture, I recognize I'm a little cynical, OCD, and vain. These character traits combine to make me believe very few of my initial thoughts, fuss over details, and worry about what you readers will think of me. I could try and blame the labor of writing on the fact that ten years of ALS has left me disabled and that I type using a retina-tracking computer, but that wouldn't be honest. Writing's ALWAYS been hard work for me. If anything, ALS has sped up my writing by giving me a sense of urgency, and making me slightly less willing to tolerate my own vanity.

This took me about an hour and a half to write:-)

6/9/2020 addition
Kym, you made me aware I'd written only about the difficulty of writing. I failed to express my love of this difficult process.

Writing, for the reasons written above, is very demanding for me. For these exact reasons, it's also sacred to me. It's how I discover truth.

Writing is the best tool I've found so far to force myself to think through, test, and refine / distill my perceptions into beliefs. It's not unusual for me to labor over a poem, essay, or talk / sermon for weeks (much longer in a couple examples), adding thoughts as they come, deleting or rewriting previously written sentences or reorganizing and reordering paragraphs, until the piece feels complete. It's these pieces that I can come back to and wonder at how the end product is so much bigger than I am. For these reasons, much of what I write, I write only for myself, and, secondarily,  for my kids to read if they wish to know me. I've felt prompted to be less insular though, so am reentering the blogessphere. I'm not sure if I'll get to the point where I'm comfortable enough to open social media accounts (see note above regarding my own vanity).

I've also had a handful of experiences in which the words have poured into my mind and out onto the page, already near completion, as rapidly as i could write them. I'd call this revelation, but hesitate because it's as likely to happen while writing work emails, or silly poems, as it is when ever writing sermons.  Maybe I need to expand my personal perceptions about what's revealed and what's not!