As many of you saw in this video, I've been writing for almost as long as I can remember. Throughout the various seasons of my life, writing has been for me a hobby, my identity, my anti-drug, and the one social activity I felt most comfortable with. But recently, writing has become that old winter coat you keep in the closet, that has lots of good memories, but for whatever reason--maybe it's too small, maybe the fabric has a weird pattern--you don't like to wear it outside anymore, and when you do, you can't stop thinking about what everyone else must be thinking about your stupid coat.
The metaphor isn't perfect: I still love writing. I can't count the number of books, articles, essays, poems, blog posts, and stories I've read in the past year that have inspired my own creation. I get phrases, characters, scenes, and settings in my head all the time, as I always have, and I know they are just asking me to write them.
It's the sitting down to write them that I dread. Perhaps you've noticed, in reading my blog, that I have a disturbing tendency towards didacticism. I don't like it, and I'm pretty sure most blog readers don't like it, but I can't seem to help it. It's not what the English Department at Calvin College taught me to write, and it's certainly not what I read. And arguably the worst part about my didactic writing is that it's not even good didacticism. It I could pump out an allegory or fable, I would be at least a little impressed. Even essays with well-cited sources, perhaps with charts and pictures, or anything like that to actually support my position would be welcomed at this point. But all I seem to be able to do is write long posts with sort of morals at the end.
And this is true of more than just my blog posts. My NaNoWriMo novels for the past two years have been abysmally moralistic in not-so-subtle and not-so-artistic ways. In 2011, one of my characters was gay and had a mind-numbing soap-box speech about his struggles and how no one is on his side, and in 2012, every artistic choice I made was checked against my desire to have the characters be gender-progressive and good role models for struggling young girls and boys.
Calvin College and its fantastic writing professors taught me art, where to find it, how to find it within myself, how to create it, and how to hone it. But Calvin College's liberal arts core, as well as my education classes and history classes taught me that the world is broken, that there are things terribly wrong with all corners of society, and that the only thing capable of fixing them is the love, the grace, and the justice of God. They also taught me that God works through his people, his "agents of renewal" (kind of a buzz phrase at Calvin...) to bring light to the darkened places, that fighting for social justice is a way that God's people can be conduits of his grace and justice, bringing The Kingdom here on Earth.
Now, technically speaking, good art and effective social justice are not two sides of a coin. They can coexist in this world; they can even be of one energy flowing together. The only problem for me is that I seem to have missed the lessons where smart, talented, and good people taught me how to create that socially just art without boring people to death. So what I've got instead are poor copies of someone else's greater genius that neither emphasize beauty in creation--as art does--nor prompt valuable change--as social justice does.
When I look back at the works I did in high school--the short stories, the poems, and the one novel--I, like most artists looking back at old work, cringe at all the mistakes all the shoddy craftsmanship. But honestly, I wish I could get back to that. I wish I could go back to just writing to write. The artistry might suck, but it would feel better. It would stop being this embarrassment that I stow away in a dark closet somewhere and hope never to have to wear in public. I'm doing nobody any good by writing the way I do now.
If anyone has any suggestions for how to get back into the heart of writing, I'm definitely willing to hear them. What I'm attempting right now is reading fiction, lots of fiction; good fiction, bad fiction, fiction I like, and fiction I don't, in an attempt to jumpstart my desire to create. I've also got a lot of writer's-workshop-type books around my apartment that I'm trying to use. And I've started a writing discipline again, where I write for at least an hour a day for no one at all, maybe on one project, maybe on small one-shot things, or maybe on something that will never see the light of day.
I don't like funks.
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