Writer’s Cramp
I have no idea if you want to read this, but I want to write it.
My mom spent the last week with us. She helped get the girls off to school and was here when they got home, so I got a lot of extra time to write. Even so, I’m finding that producing essays for the book is challenging.
There’s something different about writing for immediate consumption on the blog and writing for a book. I don’t understand what the difference is yet, but I know that I reached the place where I hated the piece I was working on. Hated it.
I sent, “Call Me Israel and I Will Proclaim the Day of the Lord” to Eerdmans, but I couldn’t tell you if it’s any good. I just couldn’t look at it anymore. I think I mentioned the phenomenon of not being able to hear your own writing, but this was more than that. I literally hated the site of it. I never want to read it again.
I have no explanation for this.
The day after I sent the essay to Chuck, I sat down and started three new ones. I couldn’t get interested in any of them, and I started getting a little scared. It was like I was losing my words. I couldn’t do it.
This is the challenge of writing. You have to be very emotionally engaged in what you’re doing, or it comes out flat. You can’t fake your way through this.
Then the weirdest thing happened. I sat down and wrote a story in the third person. I made up a name for the main character, even though it is my story...sort of. The separation felt nice. I tried writing in a bare style, not explaining why things happened, but using simple and stark descriptions of how they happened. Like the gospel of Mark.
It ended up being almost three times as long as my usual stuff, and I was totally engaged in it. It was a waste of time in the sense that I don’t think it fits the book, but it got me over and that's what I needed.
I worked on it a lot yesterday, but put it aside today. I’ll probably clean it up and post it when I’m done writing for the book.
I took a deep breath this morning and pulled out my notes from the night I was with the family when their premature baby died. And suddenly I was there again. There was nothing in the world but me and my keyboard. Only God knows how much I love that feeling.
I am being changed by this process. I don’t know what is happening to me, but I like it.
And I can’t wait to get these book essays done so I can start writing for the blog again. I am so far behind. My notebook is full of new ideas, and I don’t like the feeling of not being current.
rlp
9:35:39 PM 
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