How About a Writing Conversation?
So many of us bloggers are people who love to write and always dreamed of being writers, whatever "being a writer" means. If you are serious about writing, you are a writer as far as I’m concerned.
I’ve thought a lot about writing during the fifteen months that I’ve been engaged with "Real Live Preacher." I began this blog because I wanted to write. That was the only reason. Some people have said that Real Live Preacher has become a ministry or a community of sorts. Maybe it has; your guess is as good as mine. I try not to think about that. I'm trying my best to say what seems true to me. I'm not writing with a secondary set of motives, hoping something specific will happen because of what I've written.
I feel it. I think it. I get excited about it. I write it. That’s all.
The blogging community is full of wonderful writers. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to open up a conversation on writing just to see what these people would say?
Now conversations are funny things. They either get started or they don’t. So I’ll get things going, and we’ll see what happens. If this proves interesting, I’ll post conversation starters on a regular basis and gather all the entries into one location with a link on the right.
Or maybe this will go nowhere. Who knows?
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A lot of people want to be good writers. I’ve noticed that a good many of them concentrate on the mechanics of writing, the grammar, the vocabulary, the word choices. For these people, writing is about words and paper, specifically getting fancy words onto the paper.
You can spot this kind of writing because it draws attention to itself. Paragraphs take on the feel of Gothic cathedrals, full of impressive vocabulary and stunning metaphors. You want to stand and clap, but in the middle of the applause, you realize you can't remember what she was talking about.
Writing is communication. Good writing cannot happen unless you have something wonderful and interesting and new to say. So writing begins and ends with LIVING. You must live "The Writing Life,” to steal an idea from my beloved Annie Dillard. You have to live a life that fills you up.
Forget about writing and live. Become like a child and learn to see again. You must be curious, fascinated, inquisitive, searching, and childish in your ability to be delighted. I don't have a clue about how you learn to live this way. I think some people are born to see the world with a writer's eyes. I suppose the writing life can be courted, like true love, and I suppose, also like true love, the writing life is very elusive.
I think I learned this lesson as a preacher. If you preach in one church for ten years, you eventually learn that you must always be filling your cup until it overflows. The preaching comes out of the overflow.
If living does not come first for you, you’ll eventually find yourself staring at the computer screen while you tap your pencil on the tabletop. What is writer’s block, if it isn't wanting to write and having nothing to say?
If nothing is coming in, nothing will be going out.
rlp
5:23:05 AM 
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