Chapter One, In Which Rebecca Contemplates the Writer's Role

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe)…

But this is all sounding rather familiar, isn’t it? Charles Dickens, you say? Oh, right. It’s David Copperfield. And I am Rebecca Newton, twenty-something Apostolic, recently minted B.A. in English with a propensity for plagiarism and a host of other sins, including but not limited to, doubt, envy, and despair. I am also the most recent inductee of Word.

When Kent invited me to join the “merry wordsmiths” of this group, I felt hope spring up, as if I, being but a timid serf, had been summoned to join the band in Sherwood on a mission for their absent lord and king. I’ve lurked around the margins of Word for years—five perhaps?—seldom commenting on the posts by these writers but consistently challenged by their commitment to the Word of God and to their vocation. And while in more modern terms, we could call it “networking” I have been guilty of stalking these people because they fit my idea of good company, which as Jane Austen would say, is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation. I shan’t enumerate the times and locations off the blog when I have been guilty of such behavior...

Word is just the kind of writers’ colony I should wish to join, if such a thing exists in time and space. And though I must heartily concur with Kent’s point that we shouldn’t use lack of community as an excuse not to produce good writing, I must also posit that community is essential to developing good writers--writers who aim for the mark and consistently hit it. We need the accountability and the challenge of each other, but we also need the courage to develop our skills as marksmen on an individual basis. Can I call it one of the paradoxes that lies at the heart of a truth?

And it is the Truth we’re about, isn’t it? We’re gathered here at Word as Christians and as writers because of the Word who was made flesh and dwelt and suffered among us so that we might know the fullness of His life, even while He has gone away. We are gathered in the shadow of Calvary, in the light of the empty tomb, and beneath the flames of Pentecost. As witnesses of His continuing work in our lives, we seek a context for relating it. We experience community with fellow believers in Christ, the living Word. We hold that writing matters because language is somehow bound up in the very nature of God, and words spoken in love and truth invoke creative and restorative power in the lives of the hearers. Writing is, too, as Ron Hansen puts it, “a stay against confusion,” a tool of faith and a means of grace that enables us to grasp more fully who we are as people of the Word.

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show…”

Soli Deo Gloria.

*Publication of which, it must be noted, was delayed by an onslaught of technical difficulties, procrastination not being one of them