5 Lessons in Writing??

 2025!

I first had an essay published in Notre Dame Magazine in 2020. So, maybe it's an opportunity to reflect, 5 years later on things I think I'd like to learn / am learning / have learned since being given the opportunity to write. What an opportunity! Why don't I try?

1) Sitting with things & having multiple projects at once. 

    I hear writers talk about the discipline of writing, showing up when you don't want to, putting your bottom in the seat, making a commitment to a time and place. Weekend mornings have been that for me. Place - usually bed, and I have a few hours on a weekend morning. What a gift. I Do like following the wisps & whims of inspiration so have found having multiple essays to work on, flit between, has been helpful.

2) One topic for one page. 

    I think I've come to this recently. It's a gift & blessing to be granted One Page! Like a poem! I like poems that exist on One Page. That's a poem. So, too, I think for an essay on 1 Page, 1 topic is likely sufficient. Enough. Not that it can't go somewhere. But probably circling back to the Big Idea. Or staying with the Big Idea and that's enough. People are just waking up. Don't make them too dizzy. Just like when they are just standing. Let them get their bearings.

3) Exact details are funny.

    People like funniness. But oftentimes I think funniness is the truth, when we're willing to look at it. Anne La Mott likes index cards (?) to record things. Brian Doyle likes writing things down immediately. There is a call for immediacy sometimes because otherwise the details slip out, and the details are life! The details! like in a photograph, we can zoom in and see the little things. And writing about it because there are also details of our emotional experience that become smoothed and blurred out later.

4) I have tended to write about things that happen to me 500x rather than 1x.

    Tupperware. Walking in my neighborhood. Thoughts about babies in church. I tend to write about things I can gather data about, and continue gathering data about. A once-in-a-lifetime experience is something worth writing about! And they all are, but experiences that repeat allow me to gather data (details) and develop an emotional response to them. They allow the collecting experience to be ongoing. Also, watching Brian Doyle as a writer, a "normal guy in a normal life,"--to be so prolific, how can you do it? Except to try to capture the everyday.

5) Writing as practice of co-creation.

    I have just written a prayer (start-of). I have considered my art practice a way to show glory to God. Writing? Sometimes I dive in. What about intentionally asking God to help guide it? God is the Creator of the Universe. God is the Word of Life. God creates the things we notice, the receptacles through which we notice. "Martyr" means witness. I consider my art-making as witness-bearing.

In the next 5 years, I pray God may guide, call attention to, help me to bear witness to truth & beauty.

Amen.