The Pace of the Heart Is the Pace of the Writer

The problem with writing about writing (just to let Mike know) is that sometimes I SUCK at writing. My apologies, dear readers, but right now might be one of those times.

I’ve always loved the idea of a clean journal, a pen that wrote crisply. Drop me off in the wilderness with an iced tea and a journal and its not a survival assignment, it’s the perfect vacation. So there’s part of me that does look at writing as a craft, as a natural extension of loving good literature.

But writing is more than just that. It is an act of sanity. It’s a personal growth exercise, a call to mature, to sort out confusion, to wrestle belief onto paper. It’s the chance to find the words deep in your soul, the things you want and have to say. And to assemble those thoughts perfectly, in exactly the way you want to present them.


Writing gives you the grace to go back, to revise and rewrite until it captures everything—all your heart and all your intellect. It provides a luxury that real life doesn’t offer me as often as I’d like: the gift of feeling like I got my point across and that I was understood.


This is why my first book was about angst with organized religion and my second, Picking Dandelions, which will be released in February, is about the importance of ongoing change. Because these were the messes going on in my soul that needed to be sorted out. And when I was writing, the accountability of publication helped me inch toward responsibility in real life. My mantra became, I won’t invent a conclusion. I’ll work toward a conclusion in life and then I’ll just tell people whatever I discover in the process.


The problem with this sort of writing is that it can also be used as a yardstick with which to measure your own hypocrisy.  As in, I still carry some angst—a lot less, but some—about the way faith systems operate. And, there’s no hiding it, I still change far less than I should. On paper, I believe “followers of God can’t afford the luxury of unchanged living.” Sometimes, though, having the statement written in a notebook is the closest it gets to my soul.


This brings me to my current conundrum. I know what my next book will be about. The theme has been rolling around inside me for a while now. The title is even taking shape, toying with potential subtitles like a presidential candidate entertains possible runningmates. Unlike the jump from my first book to the second one, which leaps to newness—new topics and voice and genre—book three will more closely follow book two.  It will be about recovering the bonds God intended for humanity, just like the second one is about finding the goodness of Eden in the setting of our lives.


The problem is, I’ve always been a pretty bonded person. Someone who loves easily with a love that sticks. And lately, things have not been that clean cut on all fronts. There are some relational wrenches in play, which makes me queasy about even getting started writing a book about the subject.


I want to believe in what I write. And I want to believe I’ve earned my right to say it. But I’m just not there right now. But I will be. Hang tight, fabulous readers. I will be.
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