I had to update the website to include Marcelo in the Real World (due out in March) and I took the opportunity to change the title of this section from Blog to Journal. Why? The simple answer is that ‘journal’ is a word that I am more comfortable with. It makes me feel better. It gives me the sense that I am writing things for myself (as in a journal) except that someone may read them. There was something about calling this a blog that put pressure in me. I felt guilty for not writing in it more frequently, for not commenting on this or that current event. I don’t know, somehow thinking that I was ‘blogging’ made me feel funny. It made me feel kind of pretentious and self-important. It made me feel phony. So now I write the same kind of stuff as before, but I feel better. I feel more honest. Why? I’m not exactly sure. As best as I can figure, writing in a journal (even if it is a public journal) gives me a sense of freedom. Here’s what I am musing on, thinking about, you’re welcome to read it, if you like. I write with a view that what I say may be helpful, interesting to someone and yet I keep a sense of integrity about the process by writing what touches me and affects me, like in a journal.
October 19, 2008
August 27, 2008
The Writing Life
The answer to the question “why do you write” should be the same as the answer to the question “why do you read?”
Here’s a quote from Annie Dillard’s “The Writing Life” that I turn to often when I’m writing: “Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking.”
July 15, 2008
The Fruits of Your Labor
Would you like to be a good writer? Then do this: renounce the fruits of your labor. Actually, that’s the advice given by the Bhagavad Gita, that ancient and beautiful Hindu Scripture, for the achievement of happiness. With respect to writing, renouncing the fruits of your labor means to write without hope of reward. It means that you are able to find merit in the work itself, that you will consider your time well spent even if your writing is not accepted for publication, even if no one reads it. It’s a kind of mental game you play. Of course you write for others. Writing is expression. But as you write enter the world you are creating as much as you can and write as if, once you are done, you will have fulfilled your part of the contract with your Maker. Okay, you put me here to write. Here I am doing it as best I can. I’m writing my heart out for You. Publishing, applause, money, friends, admiration. That wasn’t what I signed up for. I checked. It’s not even in the fine print. Here it is. I’m done. Now it’s up to you to do as you will. I give you my labor. The fruits are yours. The labor is good in its own right.
