Whether my topic is relevant as inspiration for regular writing tasks, I will let others decide. I haven’t had a lot of such tasks recently, posts for Word being about the only writing assignments currently on my desk. And the problem with getting these written hasn’t been a lack of inspiration! Rather, my problem as a writer would appear to be over-stimulation and lack of focus.
Life in a Kaleidoscope
If you’re like me, you might notice how life often feels like living in a kaleidoscope with constantly shifting patterns and colors and people and stories coloring our days. As a writer, while fascinated by these compositions, I tend to grow dizzy at times, and I need to pull back from them. I need to be able to capture life in individual frames.
Snapshots
I hope it’s not a hash of metaphors to liken this capture to taking snapshots. When we pull out our cameras to take a real photo, aren’t we trying to capture a moment, an impression, and image? Later we come back to these for inspiration, to relive a time to which there is no return. In a sense, we are assembling, in each picture we take, the present as it slips into the past. It’s like that in writing, too. There is no way to write down every significant detail of life as it whizzes by like the country side seen from the window of a speeding train. But we can snap verbal “photos” of what we see and hear and smell and taste and feel throughout our days. And I can store these, as my creative writing instructor said, in my writer’s warehouse for inclusion in some later project.
Focusing the Fiction Mind
In their discussion of reading as a tool for writers, Hallie and Whit Burnett in their Fiction Writer’s Handbook, offer this: “It is by reading that we learn first to focus the fiction mind, framing incidents and characters and places into the particular shape of imagery and economy that makes a short story, a play, or a book. A photographer has his own way of shutting off what he does not wish to see, moving his camera through many angles until he finds the one that suits him best—but this is after he has learned the limits of his medium.”
Focusing the Poetic Mind
Although the Burnetts speak of focusing the fiction mind, the technique they suggest also applies to the poetic mind. Reading good poetry that abounds in sensuous imagery is like viewing exhibits of well-composed photos. In turning to the poets, we can see the world through the poignant lenses of the Romantics, the Moderns, the Imagists. We return to our own experiences with re-sensitized vision to perceive the wonder around us, and like William Blake, “see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.”
Focusing the Spiritual Mind
Undoubtedly, the most significant aspect of writing for a Christian is maintaining spiritual focus, which we must do by continuously ingesting the Word. As my pastor has said, reading the Bible is thinking God’s thoughts after Him. Reading the Word is somewhat like perusing an extensive photo album of God’s family. We can see what faith and other virtues look like, not in abstraction, but in stories, snapshots and portraits, of living, breathing human beings like ourselves, especially in the person who was the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ.
Putting It All in Perspective
Ingesting the Word involves more than merely reading it, although reading is important. We need to write about the ways we experience the Word in our daily lives. Where does God’s grace interrupt the chaos and cacophony? How do we fit into God’s story? For me, the snapshot method of writing is a way to first perceive and then capture the grace-infused moments of my life. It is in this place and this time to which Jesus comes to teach us about Himself. He uses the familiar to reveal the mysteries of His kingdom: “Therefore, every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (Matt. 13:52, ESV).
Get the picture?
Jesus wasn’t the only one to use the mundane to illustrate the profound. Every scribe trained in the kingdom of heaven pulls from the resources he has stored up. Look. Listen. Live. Read. Write. We’ll never be able to capture every aspect of life in infinite detail. The kaleidoscope will keep shifting. But we can give the world snapshots from our lives that have been illuminated by the grace and goodness of God.
Photo collage: Quote: Cesare Pavese, Quotable Cards. Painting: Edgar Degas' Mary Cassatt at the Louvre
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