7/15/2016: Write What You Want

You are not constrained to write anything other than what’s natural to you.

And what’s natural to you can be described as “what you want to write apart from external constraints.”

It’s the same idea as “be yourself.” You don’t want to act like someone else or like some standard or “what you should be.” You want to be authentic.

But what about meeting the standard? You want to actually meet the standard. You don’t just want to put on the standard. Thus you want to be authentic and good. And the goodness comes from God, primarily, and from practice and from learning and failing and starting over and getting back up and from being hurt and healing and all the other things that lead to growth.

Thus I write whatever comes naturally apart from constraint. I write what I want to write. And I accept my lack of goodness, to whatever degree I have it, and I enjoy coming up with stuff even if it sucks for the joy of learning how to come up with stuff better, for the joy of finding new connections, for the joy of playing, for the joy of exploring new territory.

I also need to qualify “external constraints.” I doubt it’s possible to be free from external constraints in this life. I will always be afraid to some degree of something. But like all things, perhaps, if God wills it, I will grow in this area as well.

And that’s one of the primary reasons to write this book. To grow in all the ways that I need to in order to create, to write, to be free to be myself. It’s not to write the perfect book. It’s just to write and to see what happens when I do. It’s to watch God work on me through the process of writing and working through all of the issues that surround being myself.

I am in my first draft in more ways than one. The obvious one, of course, involves my creation of a novel. The second one is my continued exploration of the process of creating a novel, and on top of that, the exploration of my own creative self. I am delving into the reaches of my creative side, which I have never focused on to this degree, with this intensity, with this drive. I seem to be moving toward making my natural self a disciplined natural self, which seems good to me (at this time).

It would be a mistake to forget this in any of the aspects in which I am first drafting, although, I should also expect myself to forget this. After all, this is my first draft. (1/19/2017 And true to form, I have forgotten this and have been reminded of it numerous times)

So yes, there are standards—even the ones that surpass the ones I currently know. And yes, it is good to know the standards and to always reach for them and to find the surpassing ones and learn and then reach for those. But that’s kind of the point. We never arrive. There’s always more for which we can reach. We arrive when Christ arrives (1/31/2017 At least to the degree afforded by our escape from sin; I think we’ll always have more we can learn). Until then, we reach. Sometimes in the dark. Sometimes in the wrong direction.

Moreover, it’s when we’re reaching that we tend to find new things. Hence, we create when creating.