Big Shoes to Fill

Some of you know that I'm working on a book called Big Shoes to Fill. What you perhaps didn't know is that I had stopped writing for a long time. (By "long time" I mean a few months, huge by my standards, someone who can't not write. I finished the first draft in October and even through that, I had felt a certain need to shrink away from it.) Why I had stopped was not really clear to me. Part of it, of course, was just the time necessary between the first and second draft. Most writers will create the first draft in a rush, as ideas come, not stopping even to check spelling, then leave it "to simmer" so to speak. They will come back to it refreshed a few months later. And sure, some of my reticence to continue working on my book could be traced to the fact that I needed some distance from it to write a new draft and develop it further. But that was not the entire story.

Part of the real reason was the immensity of the task. As a work of Christian non-fiction, not only do I have to be true to my own reality of how I have grown as a result of being a wife and raising my two babies, but also to the fact that none of this is my own doing. God is the one at work and I can only perceive Him in my limited way. Sometimes I clearly see His hand at work, sometimes I have no clue. Sometimes I call to Him for help and I feel completely abandoned, some days seem tailor-made for me. What am I to make of this? How do I fit this into a book? And what if I'm wrong? What if, in a year or two, I realize God had thought of something completely different and, in my inability to understand, I had written something else? Books can't be erased like so many pencil markings; they have a life of their own. Although stamped with a date, they can be timeless. Was I comfortable with the idea of possibly misrepresenting what God was doing in my life? More importantly, could I live with it?

If how to write about such a big subject was my first concern, my second concern was even more metaphysical. Should I write? Everyone has an opinion. Every person on earth has a book inside him, if he just sat down and wrote it. Do I really need to add to the babble? And more importantly, had God indeed called me to write, as I had begun to believe? Was I even meant to write? Wasn't I clearly called to be a mother? To teach my children, to watch and pray? Wasn't that enough? Theologically speaking, what was I here for? To raise my children, right? Was it necessary then to stick my neck out about my beliefs? Because, of course, I could be wrong.

The fear of being wrong can be incredibly debilitating. And if, like me, you have mistakes in your past, regrets you wish you could erase right off, the fear or being wrong can be downright paralyzing. I was paralyzed. Each time I thought about the book, I banished the thought. I moved the first draft document off the desktop and hid it. I prayed about it, handing it to God forever. I convinced myself I didn't know enough theology, I didn't have enough time, (what mother has time to write for goodness' sakes?) enough information, enough piety, enough prayer. I wasn't enough. And I told myself I wasn't going to write until I was enough.

Well, you can guess what happened, can't you? There paraded in front me instance after instance of people who didn't know theology, didn't have information, didn't have time, didn't hold day-long prayer meetings, people who were never, ever "enough" in any sense of the word but were enough for what God had chosen for them. I know I sound incredibly flippant here, but I'm not saying anything Scripture doesn't hasn't already said. Just read 1 Corinthians 1:27: But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.

As regards theology, as soon as I delved into that study, the very first thing the Bible impressed upon me (there's lots, lots more - more than I will ever know!) was man's utter and complete depravity followed closely by man being made in the image of God. Yikes. Talk about a sorry, sad state of affairs! On the one hand, we are made with creativity, with the desire and divine command to rule, to make, to subdue the earth and all that is in it and, on the other, nothing, but nothing we do has ever any hope of being pure or untainted by sin. Wow. Is it any wonder that I stopped writing? Is it any wonder that I simply must write?

I will probably be wrong. A few years down the road, I will probably look at my work and cringe because God's footsteps will be so apparent to me later, so obvious I will slap myself and shake my head that I didn't see them. I will be appalled at how little I knew, how rudimentary my faith seemed. I will, very possibly, make huge leaps in theology that will embarrass me in the future. I will want to blot out entire pages in my book. I will appear naive, stupid, even sometimes a little loony. I will seem overly pious, stupidly moralistic, self-consciously holy, annoying, paradoxical and nothing if not a tad hypocritical. But that is what I must do. It has taken me a while to understand that the desire to write, to create beautiful things, to sing, to run, to take joy in God's blessings and shape and build and create and mold is part of being made in His image. To be overly pious, to sit and pray for hours on end, to refuse to enjoy God's gifts is not. And yet, even as I write this, I worry that I may be wrong. I may well be.

I suppose I really do have big shoes to fill. My feet will always be two sizes too small, the shoes always two sizes too big. They will always bite. And yet, fill them I must.

What Makes Good Writing?

Why the seemingly philosophical question? I picked up Mary Karr's Lit from the library a few days ago for my weekend reading. I had wanted to read it for a while now and was expectantly waiting for it to be Friday so I could put the kids down for the night and read, read, read. Unfortunately, it seemed like the excitement was misplaced - I went to bed a little miffed because it all seemed like a big letdown.

It took me getting about a third of the way into the book to even begin to warm to it and, while I would like to say that she redeems herself in the end, I can't quite say that. Some parts of the book are truly poignant, heartbreaking and make me want to linger over the pages, but sadly, in the end, the book is only passable. Nothing that would make me want to grab the person next to me to say, Read this!


Now I'll admit Mary Carr is a much more accomplished writer (read "published" writer) than me, so she really should not care what I have to say and she's got a great readership following her. I also have not read her earlier works The Liar's Club or Cherry and after this memoir I don't know if I will, although readers have noted distinct voice differences, so I may venture that way, albeit with trepidation.

So, what makes good writing?

The short answer is very short: it's something I enjoy - emphasis on I. The long answer is that writers and readers have been wondering the very same thing for a long time and will probably never answer it. Nevertheless, here's my attempt.

Usually, good writing to me is writing that gets out of the way of experience of reading what's on the page. It's almost invisible. The only good metaphors are the ones that fit and don't remind me that I'm looking at the world through someone else's eyes.

When I first started writing, my husband would read my work. Honestly, I don't know what I'm doing with a degree in Fiction Writing since I seem to enjoy writing (and reading) non-fiction so much more. One of the things he mentioned was that the central character needs to do something other than write. In other words, there has to be a world somewhere in the book that is real. The main character needs to have hard edges, a body, a life outside of his mind. As a writer, this is sometimes hard to accomplish because we can only write what we know and if you've spent all your life in a college or at home or in a classroom having done little else you don't have life experience on which to base your writing. I see that as an insurmountable problem.

Also, writing about writing, unless it's adding to the plot in a meaningful way gets tiresome and self-indulgent. Ms. Karr does this in Lit so many times, I want to reach into the page and smack her. I don't care what you're reading, I want to say, just get on and tell me your story! Writing about writing weakens the author's voice and perhaps that is one thing I struggled with the most in this memoir. She is so careful not to offend her critics it seems that for all the liberal cursing employed in the book, the true bravado it takes to write about faith in God that she does begin to develop later is enveloped in the cotton wool of rationalizations. Look, I'm not really crazy, she seems to say to the unbelievers, I see your point. See, I believe you as well. Please don't stop reading. This tendency to explain too much, say too little, escape into too many worlds at once and showcase the writing instead of the experience comes across as over-thought, over-wrought and just plain tiring.

Truly good writing is brave, I think. Truly good writing leaps off the page and says, Here I am. No explanations, no one backing me up. This is the way it is. This is my truth, my reality. I am making no apologies. Here is my perspective - my story - in all its naked honesty. I revere writing like that. I devoured Augusten Burrough's Dry, a memoir that deals with alcohol addiction as well, because it made no apologies and offered few explanations, if any.

I can see how brave, good writing is hard. Just look what we did to the writers of the gospels. Look at what happened to Apostle Paul. And if we're talking about speaking courageously about faith and God, consider the earthly ministry of Jesus and how much He was reviled for what He said. Words have power. Not just because they're strung together to sound pretty or because someone else agrees with them. Although a well placed turn of phrase excites me when it's perfectly situated in a sentence, unless a writer is willing to be brave, I could care less about the beauty of his phraseology.

If you're writing non-fiction, tell me the truth. Tell it fully. Tell it bravely. And, for goodness' sakes, are publishers charging for quotation marks or are they still free?