Qwertyfied

If you write or aspire to write, there are several things you should be doing constantly: reading, writing, deepening your observation of the world, and searching for more insight on the writing process.

I've concluded that I write better when typing, and I believe I know why. My writing in typeface looks better, because it could be anyone's writing - Elie Wiesel's, Annie Dillard's, Wendell Berry's - and inspiration is unfettered to do it's work. My handwriting is only mine, and it looks very commonplace and homely and vulnerable, full of inconsistent lettering, stricken words, and clumsily constructed sentences that are too much work to change. It lacks the assurance and evenness of digital sentences, and perhaps most importantly, it lacks their inherent literary weight (whenever we experience literature today it is printed).

If I say I want to have literary weight, this only means that I want to write something that is clear, something that is passionate, something that is profound. It means that I want to write something that is useful because it is useless. It means that I want to trade freely with words and observation and thought and develop that singular skill of precisely articulated insight and detail that is the mark of the writer. (This mark, of course, is only an incidental insignia. The point is not to "be a writer" - the point is to write!)

In this endeavor I am perhaps rather vain, but I only want my life to mean something, and this is one thing I can do to give it meaning. When I don't write I feel I am in mortal danger of forgetting who I am, and when I use pen and paper I feel stilted and claustrophobic, as if my handwriting doesn't know enough words. My best writing has always been at a keyboard, and I suspect that will continue to be the case.

Another reason why I prefer typing to writing by hand is that it's hard to write fast enough with pen and paper to keep up with myself. My mental composition is slippery and fleeting, and once I hear the sentence right, I need to get it down quick. You can't beat typing for taking notes on your brain, which I suppose is a silent comment on how great must have been the minds that produced vast and intricate volumes of history or theology in ages past, all handwritten. Even if they used scribes, I am not at all convinced that dictation would be any easier. Chesterton in his Autobiography describes an acquaintance whom he admired for his ability to converse in complex, grammatically accurate, fully-developed sentences. One might think this is hardly worth noting, but I believe a bit of reflection will confirm that it is rare for people to talk in sentences, at least in normal conversation.

Maybe I'll write another post from the other side. Or maybe not.

Land Of My Sojourn

And the coal trucks come runnin'

With their bellies full of coal

And their big wheels a-hummin'

Down this road that lies open

Like the soul of the woman

Who hid the spies who were lookin' for

The land of the milk and the honey

And this road she is a woman

She was made from a rib

Cut from the sides of these mountains

Oh! these great sleeping Adams

Who are lonely even here in paradise

Lonely for somebody to kiss 'em

And I'll sing my song

Yes, I'll sing my song

In the land of my sojourn

Now the lady in the harbor

She still holds her torch out to these

Huddled masses who are

Yearning for the freedom

That still eludes them

The immigrants children see their

Brightest dreams shattered

Here on the New Jersey shoreline

In the greed and the glitter of those

High-Tech casinos but some

Mendicants wander off

Into a cathedral

And they stoop in the silence and there

Their prayers are still whispered

And I'll sing their song

Yes, I'll sing their song

In the land of my sojourn

Nobody tells you

When you get born here

How much you'll come to love it

And how you'll never belong here

So I'll call you my country

And I'll be lonely for my home

I wish that I could take you there with me

And down the brown brick spine

Of some dirty blind alley

All these drainpipes are drippin' out

The last sons of thunder

While off in the distance

The smokestacks are belching back

This city's best answer

And the countryside was pocked

With all of those mailpouch posters

Thrown up on the rotting sideboards

Of these rundown stables

Like the one that Christ was born in

When the old world started dyin'

And the new world started comin' on

And I'll sing His song

Yes, I'll sing His song

In the land of my sojourn

-Rich Mullins

I'm So Positively Encouraged I Can Hardly Stand It

Warning: This post is sarcastic. If you don't like sarcasm, you should stop reading here - ->.

K-Love is one of those embarrassing cultural representations of Christianity. You can get it all here, from Christian cruises to what the host had for dinner the night before. And if your commute isn't long enough, you can log on to klove.com for more.

Sometimes you get to go "inside the music." Once, accompanied by a bubbly female voice, we went inside the music of Jeremy Camp: "Jeremy Camp is back (!) with a simple message in his new song Jesus Saves." Translation: Jeremy Camp is out of songwriting ideas. But he has a whole new album that you can buy for $12.99.

Certain song themes are sure K-Love crowd-pleasers. One of the best is the "You're-trying-to-look-happy-but-I-know-you're-really-hurting" theme. I hope I never meet a Christian songwriter, because I just don't think I could smile convincingly enough to keep them from guessing that I'm hurting like hell inside.

Another popular theme is "Hold on." Whatever you're doing, wherever you are, just hold on. Keep holding on. Hold on more. Don't let go. Hold on. Don't give up. Keep on holding on. You get the idea.

Sometimes the more avant-garde artists try to branch out into new territory. Unfortunately, the result is usually just bizarre. [Start dance rhythm] "Lift your hands / Move your feet / Get your - get yourself at ease..." Say wha...? Oh, "ease" rhymes with "feet." I get it. (As an aside, if "love" didn't rhyme with "above," I'm convinced CCM would not exist.)

Fund drives are another major event. This is when you get to listen to K-Love ask you for money. Don't worry, God will provide for you - He always does. So give your money to us and watch the world be transformed through the miracle of Christian radio.

Land of the Sioux - Home of the Brave

This week I listened to several Christians lamenting the fact that Carlos Gonzales - an associate professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine with no Wikipedia profile - was invited to give a traditional Native American blessing as an introduction to President Obama's speech memorializing the Tucson shootings.

Time out.

What does "Native American" mean? It means a native of America. It means someone who was here long before the Puritans. That blessing was being spoken over this soil when Valley Forge was just a dim glint in the future. This is not an argument about the rightness or wrongness of anybody's prayer - this is simply to point out a claim that Carlos Gonzales and his people have on this land that most of us seem to have forgotten: precedent.

You probably think Jesus was appalled that a pagan was allowed to speak a blessing at a public event. I think he weeps for joy when things like this happen. That man represents a minority that this country has cheated, oppressed, abused, and trampled on, and we still begrudge him a measly little invocation and a feather. Fill ye up the sins of your fathers.

"I can see a people dispossessed

Broken and brave in the face of so much fear

Driven from their homes by the greed of a nation

Whose treaties were as good as litter along the trail of their tears"

-Rich Mullins, The Howling

Jesus is with the outcast. Jesus is with the dispossessed. And if we want to be where Jesus is, we should be there too. (That's a paraphrase from - no, not Family Force 5 - Bono.)

You can't talk out of both sides of your mouth about the separation of Church and State. Either they are joined, which means no religious freedom, or they are separate, which means your pet church is separate too. There is no special pass. (Really, the sacred/secular divide is somewhat artificial, as the state (because it is operated by people) will inevitably include some spiritual/metaphysical elements and motivations, however small and stunted. So the Christian Right responds by clamoring for the state to separate out every spiritual voice and influence but their own. Snap out of it. You're not in Kansas anymore. This is pluralism, Charlie Brown, and if you can't learn to respect people who are different from you then you shouldn't be preaching Christianity in the first place.)

Glenn Beck - that darling of the free and the brave - in November ridiculed another Native American, this time a Nevada college student, for her decision to sing a traditional tribal song in honor of American veterans and troops instead of the national anthem. He compared it to another incident in Colorado in 2008 where a black woman also sang "the wrong song." (How dare you sing an alternate song when you're supposed to sing the song about freedom?) If you put the Kool-Aid down for a second, it's Beck who sounds like the Nazi.

"That is 'power/knowledge,' not knowledge as power, but having the power to constitute what counts as knowledge."

-John Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? - Kindle Location 1359

Far from being a culture-toppling victory for secular* humanism, this is the type of positive gesture that promotes healing. Affirmation and respect - whether you smear them as mere "political correctness" or not - are still affirmation and respect.

Peace to Carlos Gonzales and the Yaqui.

*Yes, I heard the blessing attacked as "secular." It was secular like the Pope is secular.

Will Christianity Survive the Internet?

Of course it will.

But there are difficulties. I will name three.

#1: The Internet abstracts solidarity into slogans.

#2: The Internet makes possible complete anonymity.

#3: The Internet gives us the illusion of discharging our spiritual duty by "taking a stand."

This is a perfect recipe for presumptuous, self-righteous, unChristian rhetoric in the name of God. We have to internalize - accept in the accusative - the demands of truth. This is what is meant by the log in our own eye. The Christ-ian posture is humility, self-criticism, coming-under-others, believing the best.

It takes discipline and integrity to do this when no one can see you. Posting angry comments on the internet is like tailgating: you can safely send an aggressive message because no one knows who you are. Your engine will not fit in someone else's trunk, any more than your log will fit in someone else's eye. (This metaphor is particularly convicting for me; I don't like it any more than you do.)

Love is not rude; that is our starting premise. Ridicule and incredulity are uncivil - therefore unloving - therefore unJesus. And the rightness of what you say is immaterial if how you say it is wrong.

This goes for interaction with believers and unbelievers. Being Good Samaritans means we serve and affirm people we are culturally distanced from - people we disagree with. According to Jesus, this is the definition of neighborliness.

“If we feel the answers are too obvious to consider, then we have a worldview but we have no idea that others do not share it... What is obvious to us may be ‘a lie from hell’ to our neighbor next door. If we do not recognize that, we are certainly naive and provincial, and we have much to learn about living in today’s world.”

-James Sire, The Universe Next Door, Third Edition (Leicester: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 18

The world is pluralistic. (John Caputo defines postmodernism as "the condition of irreducible pluralism.") People begin from multitudinous starting points in their search for meaning, (they may not even believe in the search for meaning,) and even Christianity is interpreted across a broad spectrum. To communicate effectively with someone you must use a mutually understood language, as well as appreciate the differences between what you take for granted and what they take for granted. It does not work to treat someone who does not share your assumptions as simply mistaken. We must dig underneath to the why together.

Most people are starting to recognize that a mature appreciation for the inherent limitations of internet communication is imperative. This does not mean we are somehow anti-internet, it only means we correctly assess it's capabilities, dangers, and mono-dimensionality.

To be faithful to our Master may require that we hold our beliefs looser and more generously. It may require us to repudiate the shallow, self-serving zeal of dogmatism. We need a zeal to be wrong.

Do Not Explain - Do Not Pass GO

Generally, I feel we have an obligation to use language that will be understood by our audience to mean what we intend it to mean. This seems a basic principle of good communication.

The above generalization, however, must be subjected to the question of motive. Is my purpose for explaining myself merely self-serving, a strategy of self-protection? Or is it truly altruistic, pursuing clarity for the benefit of those on the other side of the dialogue?

In John 2, Jesus issued a challenge to the Pharisees: "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." The text explains that Jesus was speaking of "the temple of his body," but the Pharisees had no way of knowing this; indeed the conversation took place at the temple, the context thus reinforcing the apparent (though incorrect) meaning. What are we to infer when we observe that Jesus does nothing to prevent or remedy this misunderstanding?

We generally take it for granted that it is within our control (and within our duty) to do whatever we can to prevent misunderstandings. Yet there are many instances in the scripture where we see Jesus leaving himself unexplained and open to misinterpretation, such as not correcting ambiguity regarding his birthplace, not defending himself at his trial, and not returning to the Pharisees after the resurrection for a little object lesson about the truth.

Jesus was frequently cryptic, secretive, obscure. He often left the burden of understanding with his audience. What he said only made sense when it was "mixed with faith" on the part of those who heard him.

Maybe we explain too much.

Boulder Dam

Milton turned off the road and hopped the fence. He had always liked this spot, partly because it was north-facing and cool, and partly because it commanded such a sweeping view of the gorge. He sat down and unwrapped a sandwich. It was a bright fall day, and the place was solitary. Cloud shadows floated on the canyon walls.

The first time he went to the overlook it had been gray and gloomy. He had turned in his application that morning and was feeling downright scared. The place was simply crawling with hopeful unemployed strangers and there were more arriving by the minute. He had been gold-fevered; he had been a fool.

Eight days later he got his work I.D., against the odds, as it seemed to him. It was printed on honey-colored paper and laminated.

Milton Landers C-Class Detonator

DOB:12/9/1904 Sex:M Height:5-11 Weight:175

SIX COMPANIES, INC.

There was no picture; not even a fingerprint. A child of nine could have forged it, but so what. He had a job.

It was 1932. Mohandas Gandhi was staging a hunger strike, the Sydney Harbor Bridge was newly completed, Bolivia and Paraguay had gone to war, the Mars Bar was introduced, and Josef Stalin’s second wife was found dead in her home with a revolver next to her subordinate hand. Back at home, unemployment had reached 33% and Herbert Hoover was packing to leave the Oval Office.
Hoover had reviewed preliminary plans for the dam 10 years ago as Secretary of Commerce. Congress authorized the project in 1928, awarding a contract for nearly $50 million to build a structure capable of holding back a new 250-square-mile lake and generating 4.2 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year.

For the next three and a half years, this was home for Milton. It was a parallel universe - filled with the din of machinery and the acrid smell of spent explosives And there was the dust. In Michigan, dust was something that you swept up off the floor every third day or so. In Nevada, dust was a food group. On windy days it was usually better, though not always. Working up on the cliffs was actually one of the more desirable places to be. This was the province of the high-scalers - men who rappelled off the canyon rim and worked with jackhammers and dynamite to bring the canyon walls down to bedrock. While other men were getting carbon monoxide poisoning in the stifling diversion tunnels, the high-scalers hung suspended in the free air, reveling in the intoxicating self-sufficiency that men feel who work closely with nature and rope.

It took about a week to get used to the exposure. The job quickly became a source of pride, even identity. As your personality shapes your career, so your career, in turn, begins to shape your personality. A man’s profession eventually shows on his face, sometimes in his walk. Within a few months, you could tell the high-scalers on the streets simply by the way they grinned and swaggered. They were, deservedly or undeservedly, the project’s heroes, as they played the most dramatic and therefore the most visible role.

Keeping his eyes on the river, Milton pulled an apple from his coat pocket. He bit it slowly. Even with all that, high-scaling wasn’t just a swashbuckling showcase for the ladies. In his time on the ropes he had seen a man killed, and heard of several others. Fatal falls were rare; the greater danger was being struck by falling rock. It was Chick who first took his cloth cap and dipped it upside-down in tar, letting it harden into a stiff shell. These came to be known as Hard-Boiled Hats, and were quickly in widespread use among the high-scalers.

It was also Chick who caught the Government inspector who managed to fall under the safety rope. Chick saw him sliding, let out a quick, fluid rappel, traversed a swift arc along the cliff, intercepted the tumbling uniform just before the cliff edge, secured the man to himself with a long prussik, and then swung back out so he could be hauled up. The whole rescue took about sixteen seconds. Politics was already a sore spot around the dam site, and the incident didn’t favorably influence the workers’ opinion of their bureaucratic visitors, falling into a canyon being generally regarded as undignified.

But not all dam politics were that simple. On weekends Milton would go to The Silver Spigot in Boulder City where he often found himself defending Hoover, who was continually being posthumously maligned. Hoover, Milton felt, was a man’s man. He had worked internationally as a mining engineer, spoke fluent Mandarin, and when the battle of Tientsin trapped him and his wife in Tianjin during the Boxer Rebellion, he personally guided U.S. marines to the front line. He was surprised at how many people didn’t know these things. He was also surprised at the number of people who expected the president to change the destiny of a nation in four years and faulted him personally when he didn’t. Perhaps the president was really nothing more than an effigy for the country to burn. The idea disgusted him.

Now here he was, back at his overlook with some savings and confidence in his pocket. The dam was built - a giant solemn gate to a still-empty lake - and Hoover wasn’t even present at the ceremony. What father is not invited to his son’s baptism? Politics certainly looked like a rough ride sometimes. But time erodes pretension, and greed and greatness will both haunt a man. Truth is like a cactus; it’s hard to uproot and carry around with you.

Milton threw his apple core into the canyon and knelt to cinch up his boots. The day was wearing. He flailed his jacket against the fence three or four times and put it on. Crunching sagebrush, he made his way back to the road and stuck out his thumb.

An Amazing Piece of Writing

These are possibly two of the most evocative paragraphs on the desert ever written.

"The newcomers had been shown about the land by the family renting it to them and toward the end of the first day felt they had taken possession of it with all their senses. They had welcomed into their nostrils a rich assault of barnyard and plant odors, they had tramped the amply watered earth, fingering its bounty of vines laden with Mission grapes, they had knelt at the edge of a ditch and passed their hands through the water. Just beyond the vineyard was nature in a more armored, truculent mood: a vast solemn plain dotted with cactus and scrub, steeped in silence. They gazed out at the deep-blue sky and, as the sun hovered nearer and nearer the mountain's crest, feeling the need to absorb in quiet their surfeit of new impressions, with no more forethought than precedes sinking into a chair and staring at the ceiling or taking off for a stroll in a leafy park, they drifted apart, and one by one wandered into the desert

"No landscape, not even the swampy jungle of the Isthmus of Panama, had struck any of them as this awesomely strange. And they were not being borne through it, receiving it as a view, but walking in it, on it, for it was all pale surface, the sky so lofty and the ground so level, and they had never felt so erect, as vertical, their skin brushed by the hot Santa Ana wind, their ears lulled by the oddly intrusive sound of their own footfalls. Pausing, they could hear the hiss of skinny desert-colored creatures scurrying along the pebbly surface. Slithery fanged creatures (a snake!), but down there, speeding off. Hardly anything is near anything here: those slouching braided sentinels, the yucca trees, and bouquets of drooping spears, the agaves, and the squat clusters of prickly pears, all so widely spaced, so unresembling - and nothing had to do with anything else. Each alone, each separate. The sense of jeopardy that couldn't altogether be stifled (was that a scorpion?) quickened their pace for a while, as if they thought they might soon be arriving somewhere. In the clear air the mountains looked deceptively near. And how small, when they turned around for a moment to see how far they'd gone, their little green world. They walked on, lost in the brightness of their sensations, walked and walked: the mountains came no closer. Their fears had long since subsided. The purity of the vista, its uncompromising bleakness, seemed first like a menace, then an excitement, then a numbing, then a different arousal. Their real initiation into the seductive nihilism of the desert had begun. The soundless, odorless, monochrome landscape, so drastically untenanted, had the same effect on everyone: and intoxicating impression of aloneness, which gradually gave way to a more active assent to the experience of solitude. All were visited by a yearning something like Maryna's - to be alone, really alone (what if I, what if she, what if he...?) - and allowed themselves to imagine the disappearance, without drama, without guilt, of those nearest to them, somewhere out here, too. And isn't to imagine to desire? The surrender to the desiccating of feeling was swift but it palled almost as rapidly, as something, a deeper fear, made them pull away from it, purged, chastened, and then it was time to turn around and walk back to dampened land and their moist lives."

-Susan Sontag, In America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), 154-155

Neologisms

Writing Exercise #87: Make up a new word and use it in a sentence.

Neologisms are a way we burrow deeper into the language in our quest to signify meaning. When we truncate, combine, reorder, or otherwise modify words, we are creating space for meaning between the voids in the vocabulary. These voids will always be there, and good communicators will continue to exploit them.

Most neologisms are not truly "new words." They contain post-consumer content. A neologism usually borrows meaning from the word(s) it is crafted from. (Occasionally we do have truly new words introduced through avenues like technology or literature. In these cases the word is explained and given exterior context.)

Some neologisms are intended to contain several meanings, such as the neologism which serves as the title for this blog. Others pose provocative contradictions. All arrest the reader's attention; a new word is vastly more interesting than a word you merely don't know.

The language is full of unexplored possibilities. If you can't find the lightning-right word, maybe you can invent it.

Truthful Writing

Writing is having something to say. It may be prior or it may be discovered in-process, but it shows up at some point. Good writing is stating what you have to say - not just saying what sounds impressive. Readers can tell the difference, and smart writers will respect them for it.

Maybe these rules will help us understand the writing-editing process:

1. Identify What You Have To Say.

2. Say it.

3. Do not say other fancy stuff that is unrelated to What You Have To Say.

Now this is of course oversimplified, but I hope the point is clear. Most writers do not need encouragement to decorate their writing; they need encouragement to pare it down. Aspiring wordsmiths tend to treat writing like a parade competition: the float with the most streamers wins. Developing a sense of taste takes time and discipline.

This is also true in music. Less accomplished musicians are likely to play right up to the edge of their skill, whether it sounds good or not. We've all heard people like that. Mature musicians subject their skill to serve the aural experience of their audience. They've learned it's the music that matters, which means people enjoy listening to them, which means they are respected as musicians. When you lose your life, you find it.

Whether we are playing music or writing essays, simplicity is a form of honesty - a form of telling the truth.

Best Books of 2010

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke

Watership Down - Richard Adams

The Fidelity of Betrayal - Peter Rollins

For The Time Being - Annie Dillard

Mere Churchianity - Michael Spencer

Everywhere Like Such As Stories

Everywhere Like Such As Stories is a new literary tourniquet that is being developed by postmortem authors. It is popular to read and they are new.

Instead of being limited to settings and like objects and characters that are part of your story, you can use like any setting or object or character you wanted, whether is part of your story or whatever. This is liberating and helps with the education. No one should ever be forced to write coherent stories because it is un-American, such as hard. Stories that are made up on the spot are better because stories that are edited are unable to do so. Mark Twain said this when he was Pope.

I wrote a story today about three lemons that hated cats; both lemons were pink. The story was to raise awareness about lemons, and cats who are abused by lemons, before it's too late. Hatbands help to spread the word about dolphins - I mean cats - who take lemons to prevent scurvy when climbing trees in Nicaragua. You can get them from the Society of the Profession of Cruelty to Lemons, located in the Russia. They also have kitty mood-rings, available in all colors, such as emotional. All sorts of like the Batman wear mood rings. Na-na-na-na-na!

As you can see, the possibilities of Everywhere Like Such As stories are like islands that are everywhere. You can write many stories every day, and many people who will read them cannot afford maps, because they are unable to do so.

Herman Melville on Worship

Prior to the voyage, Queequeg invites Ishmael to join him in worshiping his small wood idol.

"I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in worshiping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth - pagans and all included - can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship? - to do the will of God - THAT is worship. And what is the will of God? - to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me - THAT is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator. So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg; salamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences and all the world."

Timing and Success

Everyone wants to make the next thing, anticipate the curve, set the trend. It's a brave idea, but it may be more like lining up three cherry 7's than playing Stratego.

In a book I recently read about cultural and technological change, the author wrote that "YouTube came along at the perfect time." I think he has it backwards. Really, the perfect time came along when YouTube did, and that's why it was successful. When there are enough random people out there with video content to upload and enough people willing to watch the uploaded content from said random people, someone is going to build a video upload site. The interest was there, as was the infrastructure. All you had to do was tie the knot.

This is not to discredit the genius of Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, but only to point out that an equal genius could also have launched a video-sharing site and simply been a day early or a day late.

Increasingly, this may be how the fates of authors, musicians, and technology developers are decided. Are people ready for what you have to offer? Are they bored with it? Too bad.

"In the Society, real wealth is the ability to say 'I have an idea' and have people agree to work to support it. The rarest coin of the realm is when other people give you chunks of their leisure time.

Losing the confidence that others have in you, that you can make things fun for them, is... bankruptcy."

Mark Schuldenfrei, via David D. Friedman

You need to have enough fans to lift your painting or your book out of the murky depths of obscurity at the perfect moment so more people can see it. Yes, it's a catch-22. And the freight train has grown too big and is moving too fast for anyone to control it now. So keep throwing your penny on the tracks and hope people like it. You might get lucky.

A Week of eReading

I used to think readers and book-lovers were the same people. They're not.

Last week I took my family to Wisconsin to visit relatives. (Wisconsin is where they play football. It's cold there.) All of my reading for the trip - four flights, three quiet houses, and several long drives - was done on a new e-reader. I brought no "books."

The fate of the word "book" is akin to that of the word "church" - the skin is mistaken for the substance. That's what differentiates readers and book-lovers. Readers read. Book lovers love books. Of course, one can be a reader and still be a book-lover, and vice versa. All I mean is that it is quite possible to be one and not the other.

Dedicated e-readers use a technology called e-ink that almost eliminates glare. The following technical explanation - found on Wikipedia - is worth quoting at length:

"The principal components of electronic ink are millions of tiny microcapsules, about the diameter of a human hair. In one incarnation, each microcapsule contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When a negative electric field is applied, the white particles move to the top of the microcapsule to become visible to the reader. This makes the surface appear white at that location. At the same time, an opposite electric field pulls the black particles to the bottom of the microcapsules where they are hidden. By reversing this process, the black particles appear at the top of the capsule, which now makes the surface appear dark at that location."

E-readers are excellent for travel, being small, lightweight, and versatile - three things paper books are not. Adjust the text size, search, highlight, lookup a word, or switch to reading something else entirely. A progress bar at the bottom of the screen shows you your position since you can't look at the book on end to see how far you have to go. Page turn buttons are located on both sides so the device can be read with either hand.

Sampling new books for free is an especially useful feature, as it saves me from spending money on books that are badly written, urbane, or simply over my head. (For some reason we feel smarter when we are filling our shopping cart, like we feel hungrier when we are filling our plate.)

In addition to sampling new books, there are millions of complete out-of-copyright books available for free in digital editions. Eliot, Pascal, Tolstoy, Melville, Chesterton: bring it.

The potential sterility of electronic reading was a concern of mine, and still is. For centuries books have been both intellectually and tactually unique. Like LP's or CD's, the medium of books created an opportunity for tactual and visual expression that was lost when the content was digitized. And so we cry all the way to the store.

Writing a Story is Hard

Let us have no delusions. Writing a story is very hard.

Writing down a story is one thing. You already know what happens, what the setting looks like, and who the characters are. Your task is straightforward: relay the story to your audience as interestingly and convincingly as you can.

But what if you want to tell a new story? What then?

You can write from an outline, systematically fleshing out a predetermined plan.

You can write from a conglomerate pile of scenes and ideas, like a patchwork quilt.

Or you can just write blindly, starting with an object, a place, or a color, and then following headlong wherever it takes you.

I generally like to know where I’m going ahead of time. The problem is I don't possess or haven't developed the raw creative imagination to map that out. I may need to depend for the short-term on a hybridized approach that follows a sort of creative intuition looking for signposts that point me where I want to go.

Maybe this isn’t so bad.

In solving a crossword puzzle, we work on what we know and then use that information as stepping stones into what we don’t know. In rock climbing, we use the holds we can see and move upwards, looking for new opportunities. You don’t know the answer to the puzzle or where the top of the route is, but you know you want to find it. Perhaps creativity trusts vision more than perseverance does, and requires more focus.

Writing, especially fiction, is a vulnerable undertaking. The reward of being understood comes with the risk of being rejected, and I'm just me.

The world of literature looks intimidating from the outside - self-contained, buttressed, unassailable. The classics seem inevitable, like they simply wrote themselves. It is all very discouraging.

It is clear we must take a different view. Every classic began with someone who decided to tell a story and then told it. They had to make decisions, edit, modify characters, and sometimes just put one word in front of another. (No doubt this all seems very basic, but it is necessary. Fear must have nowhere to hide.)

What if there were 4 musketeers? Or 105 dalmatians? What if the Big Bad Wolf was the Big Bad Hyena? What if The Little Engine That Could was red and Miss Riding Hood blue? Of course it is impossible now, but it was possible at one time, and that is the point we must understand.

Turn your attention back to your own work, which has been looking rather insecure and one-dimensional. People in your head are saying “It’s too much like so-and-so; it’s not original.” Stop it. As long as you focus on that danger you may succumb to it, just like you may steer into a passing truck if you watch it too long. Look where you are going, for Pete’s sake, and just tell us what happens.

We spend too much time thinking about art and not enough time thinking about life. Originality is not as important as honesty. When we look at life honestly and creatively, art is the result.

A Warning

Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn't stop at being interested in paint... They sink lower - become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations.

-C. S. Lewis

Learning From Natural History

Over the past couple of years I've developed a taste for reading Natural History. For those who don't know, Natural History (sometimes called Nature Writing) is descriptive writing about the physical world - sometimes historical, sometimes geological, sometimes practical. Everything is fair game - from the matrimonial traditions of geese, to river journeys down abandoned canyons, to the way the edge of the forest looks before a storm.

Natural History authors tend to prefer an essay or journal form that lends itself to description and reflection. The writing tends to be deliciously straightforward and contagiously enthusiastic. Something the writer has observed or experienced in nature has sparked something within them, and their goal is to communicate that spark as purely as possible. If they are successful, then the writer and the reader can together make something meaningful out of a chickadee, or a sand dune, or an elm. We are drawn in to wonder, to learn, to celebrate.

Most creative writing depends heavily on the exotic for its appeal. Everyone loves crime, lust, strange customs and faraway places. Natural History writers spurn this approach and deliberately choose what is present and local. It takes immense skill to write strong enough to create interest in what most people accept as familiar, and it is for this reason that I believe Natural History stands in the gap between fiction and non-fiction. The best nature writers completely disappear, leaving you sitting motionless on a dark bridge watching for muskrats, or scratching for shellfish on the eastern seaboard at low tide. This is a remarkable feat, for it means expanding a mere account (I went there and then I saw this and then I thought that and then I felt such-and-such) into an experience for the reader through sheer force of prose.

Photographer's work at developing their eye, and nature writer's work at developing all of their senses - so they can describe with nuance and conviction. There are no fixed rules for how to write knock-down drag-out descriptions, but as Susan Sontag says, it always begins with paying attention to the world.

Anyone aspiring to write would do well to make a pilgrimage to Tinker Creek, listening to the birds, getting some blisters, and honing the power to describe.

The Writer's Task

This blog is about writing. Writing means expression, developing ideas, thinking in sentences. Writing means learning, touching, understanding. Writing means offending some people, boring others, and constantly making mistakes.

(Because this blog is about writing, it is also about everything else. Good writing means coherent traffic with external minds, and that requires a broad working knowledge of the world.)

Writing also means resistance. Composing sentences is an entropy-defying creative act. Human nature abhors a vacuum, evidenced every day as blank walls fill up with murals and graffiti and blank pages fill up with words. All negative space is an opportunity and a battleground, which means opportunities and battles are plentiful.