Writing has never come easy for me. I prefer to preach or teach any time. When I stand before a group of people and preach or teach, I see some results of my work straight away. Your listeners may love you or they may hate you but you have a pretty good idea from their responses, even if it is just their body language. But writing is a lonely vocation. When I write I do not have the privilege of knowing how a reader would respond to what I am writing, at the moment when I writing it. Deprived of the immediacy of real time response, I struggle to write.
I find some comfort in the fact that I have yet to find a published author who finds writing easy. Anne Lamott has this to say about the discipline of writing:
You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on your computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind . . . and you try to quiet your mind so that you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind. (Bird by Bird, New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1994, 6-7)
But writing has also been hard for me because every time I write I give out a piece of my life. My main commitment to writing has been this column that you are reading. I have been writing this weekly column and sending it out via email for close to a decade now. Five hundred essays. Five hundred times I have made a fool of myself.
It is Red Smith who is reported to have said that it is really very easy to be a writer — all you have to do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein. . . Vein-opening writers are putting not just themselves into their books, but themselves at their nakedest and most vulnerable. They are putting their pain and their passion into their books . . . Not all writers do it all the time—even the blood bank recognizes we have only so much blood to give — and many good writers never do it at all either because for one reason or another they don’t choose to or they don’t quite know how to; it takes a certain kind of unguardedness, for one thing, a willingness to run risks, including the risk of making a fool of yourself. (Frederick Buechner, Speak What We Feel, Not What We Ought to Say, San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001, ix – x.)
No wonder I feel exhausted after writing my weekly column. I collapse every time I hit the send button. I have just donated blood. I have just sent out a piece of my life.
I am amazed that I have been doing this for ten years. I am not a patient person. (This who know me may consider the previous statement an understatement.) To commit myself to a weekly discipline for as long as this deserves some explanation. I know this will sound terribly narcissistic and probably breaks any number of rules on writing but when I write my weekly column, I write, first and foremost, for myself.
The title of my first collection of essays is Making Sense. When I write I am trying to make sense of my life. My graduate school for writing was a very difficult period of my life when I lost one wife to cancer, another through divorce, and journeyed for a time through the valley of clinical depression. I had to write. I needed to see some meaning in the stories of my life. And I thought that if I wrote out my stories I could somehow graft them into God’s story and find redemption.
This is an act of faith of course, faith that there is a Divine author, One who will take your stories and put them into His narrative, a narrative with meaning. And a happy ending. When I write about my life I choose to believe that “Deep within history, as it gets itself written down in history books and newspapers, in the letters we write and the dairies we keep, is sacred history, is God’s purposes working itself out in the apparent purposelessness of human history and of our separate histories …” (Buechner, The Sacred Journey, San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1982, 4-5).
You can appreciate why Romans 8:28 is one of the foundational verses of my life: “And we know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose … “(NET). Many a time it kept me sane when despair came calling. Romans 8:28 ran interference for me so that I could keep on living. And keep on writing.
We estimate that about 30,000 people read the column weekly. I just wish more people would tell me why. In the meantime I take comfort in what James M. Houston wrote in the foreword to Travel Mercies, my second collection of essays:
. . . when we speak from our lives personally, we share far more than we realise would ever be appreciated by others. Indeed, when I apologize “this is most intimately Me”, it turns out to be “most universally You!” (Soo-Inn Tan, Travel Mercies, Singapore: Graceworks Pte Ltd, 2005, viii.)
Now excuse me. I need to go lie down for a while.