Tuesday, July 03, 2007

On Writing

Nope, not the Stephen King book. (Although it is pretty good. I listened to the audiobook back in 2001, shortly after 9/11. I know when it was because I remember that I flew to a conference in Atlanta only one week after the planes were flying again, and I distinctly remember walking about Atlanta listening to that book.)

No, I've been thinking about writing because I need to be writing. I started this blog, thinking that it would encourage me to write. As the sparsity of the posts witnesses to, that hasn't exactly worked.

I've often bought lovely journals thinking that would encourage me. It just never works. I have many lovely journals with three to five pages used and then, nothing.

Of course, I write a sermon every week. That's something, but they are intended for speaking, not reading. It's just not the same (but I must admit, I'm better at talking through thoughts than sorting them on paper).

I've even talked to one of my mentors about journaling. I recognize there is that hand/mind right-brain connection when one writes longhand that just doesn't seem to exist when typing - a very left-brain activity. But then, to capture it for posterity or at least to use pieces later, it needs to be typed. What to do, what to do? Write and retype? Seems too redundant and subject to editing.

One of my parishioners has kept a journal for 50 years. She says she has never lost an argument because everything is in her journals. She can look up the exact date things occurred because she writes everything down. Even phone numbers and addresses end up in her journals.

Yesterday, I got another idea. When I was a teenager, I used to write long, detailed letters to select friends and relatives cataloguing every little thing going on. Usually these were just a method to combat boredom during the summer months, some of it was pure drivel used only to fill space, but as I think back on them, they did a nice job chronicling my life at the time.

SOOOOOO.... my next experiment is to start writing letters - never to be sent - but to keep a record of my thoughts, feelings, activities. If anything is worth keeping, maybe I'll retype it into the blog, or at least a file.

Now, if I can just find some good paper and a new pen.........



1 comment:

leah said...

Happy Tuesday! Although I love to write, I've never been much into journals, and a couple years ago while feeling I needed to start journaling about things that were happening I talked to a friend (who, incidentally, has spent most of her life teaching English); she told me you absolutely NEED to write in longhand or manuscript - whichever you do more easily - because it has to go from heart to head to hand to paper, then you can do whatever you want with it afterwards--like maybe blogging. But I'm mainly commenting because she advised me to forgot all about those "lovely journals" (I have a lot of them, too), because most people do everything possible to keep their journal entries neat and clean so as not to physically wreck the journal book itself. Since I've long used a series of lined, spiral bound notebooks to keep Commonplace Books, that's what I use to journal. I'm not currently doing it, but during a period of about a year I actually filled 5 or 6 of them!

Oh, blessings on your sermon writing, since your comment on Lectionary Leanings brought me to your blog. I love, Love, LOVE the Amos passage, though I'm not preaching this week.