Writing: Follow Your Passion?

We see a lot of advice these days about following your passion. Determine what your passion is, pursue it, and you will find happiness. Huffington Post even has a whole section on the subject. It’s a subject usually but not always associated with “Gen Y” or millennials – those who were born roughly between 1980 and 1995. Yet I’ve heard Gen X-rs and Baby Boomers embrace the same idea. It’s usually tied in with the idea of quitting your existing job and pursing that desire or dream that’s been rattling around in your head. 

However the idea got started, the inevitable pushback has followed. “Follow Your Passion is Not a Career Plan,” says Business Week. George Washington University professor Cal Newport says it’s bad advice. Mashable reposted the Cal Newport video and then elaborated on why it’s bad advice. So did the Minimalists. So did Fast Company. (That Cal Newport fellow has had a considerable influence.)

To continue reading, please see my post today at Christian Poets & Writers.

Inspired by a Horror: Because It Matters

Grant’s Trail, a biking-walking-jogging-rollerblading trail in St. Louis some 10 miles long, begins about a mile-and-a-half from my house in Kirkwood, officially the oldest incorporated suburb of St. Louis. The trail is a converted railroad track bed, and I’ve been biking it for years now. Counting the round trip and an occasional side meander, it’s a good 20-mile ride.

Just before the trail begins, there’s a brick apartment complex of some 40 to 50 units in five or six buildings. Rather nondescript, it’s neither at the luxury end of residential living nor the housing-of-last-resort end. Nondescript, and rather anonymous, sufficiently describes it.

Each time I’d go to Grant’s Trail, I’d bike past the complex, barely giving it a thought except to watch for doors suddenly opening from cars parked on the street (bikers have to watch for these things). But it wasn’t the kind of building or complex that you’d pay much attention to.

Until January of 2007.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Christian Poets & Writers.

Why Publish? Why Write?

My head’s swirling. I’m editing, rewriting, drafting, doing other projects, maintaining a rather hectic if not torrid pace when I’m suddenly stopped cold by a question.

Why do I want to publish?

I have three novels and a non-fiction book published. A fourth novel and a collection of stories are in the works. 

Why?

It’s not as if the novels have been so wildly successful that I can live off the royalties. So why am I doing this again, when each novel has turned out to be far more of a wrestling match than I expected?

To continue reading, please see my post at Christian Poets & Writers.

"He Wants to See You. Now."

The phone rang. Focused on the words on my computer screen, I absentmindedly picked up the phone.

“He wants to see you.” 

“Now?” I asked.

“Now.”

I grabbed my suit coat (that’s what we wore in those days), made a mad dash down my building’s back stairs to the tunnel connecting all of the buildings on our campus. I surfaced in the executive building next store – a place of granite, art work, and polished wood bathed in toney silence. 

In corporate communication circles, I occupied one of the high positions – the CEO’s speechwriter. I had written for CEOs before him, and I would write for CEOs after him. But no one had the reputation this CEO did.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Christian Poets & Writers.

Can Poetry Help You Understand the Bible?

In 2010, I attended a writer’s retreat at Laity Lodge in the Hill Country of Texas. I was part of the poetry seminar, led by poet and professor Scott Cairns. Our overnight assignment was to write a poem about a Bible passage we found troublesome.

I chose Joshua 5-12.

One of the main themes in that section is herem, a Hebrew word meaning destruction of essentially everything. In that section, before a number of battles, God tells Joshua and the Israelites to commit herem when they defeat the foe. That means killing every living thing – men, women, children, domestic animals and livestock. 

The command is given several times, and the Israelites obey (one tries to hold on to some treasure and gets death for him and his family as a result). At Jericho, only the prostitute Rahab and her family are spared, because she had protected the spies. Every other living thing in the city is put to the sword.

The passage is clear. God told the Israelites to do it. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Christian Poets & Writers.

Photograph by Watari by Unsplash. Used with permission.

Making the Time for Writing - and Honoring It

In On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, Ann Kroeker and Charity Craig ask this question: To what extant have you arranged your space and time to honor your writing?

I joke with my wife that only three poets in the United States make a living from writing poetry, and two of them are Billy Collins.

Expanding from poetry to writing in general, how many novelists actually support themselves by strictly writing? Likely more than you find in poetry, but it’s equally likely that the number can be counted – it’s not huge. James Patterson. Stephen King. Some romance writers. 

The number is finite and knowable.

For the rest of us, we likely write whenever we can cram in a minute or 30 minutes or an hour. I write whenever I find a moment to write.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Christian Poets & Writers.

I Know My Platform Holds at Least 2 or 3 People

The year 2013 was not the easiest for me or my family. 

My mother had to be moved from her home of 58 years to a retirement home, which meant the “breaking up” of her house and the breaking up of where her three sons had spent most of their formative years. 

Work, normally a state a barely controlled chaos, dropped the “barely controlled” and went through severe regime change and was rather suddenly “under new management.” Work demands on my time escalated, and sharply.

I was trying to get a book manuscript completed (what was eventually published as Poetry at Work) and I know I was driving the editor frantic (on a good day) and off the cliff (on a bad day) as we struggled, or I struggled, to get it done. I was also trying to promote my second novel, A Light Shining, published right at the end of 2012. That was three books published in two years. 

I wasn’t thinking a lot about marketing and promotion.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Christian Poets & Writers. 

Writing: The Right Reason

I was at a writer’s conference, carrying with me my selection of a work in progress like hundreds of others, scheduled for a meeting with both an editor and an agent. Like most of the people there, when not in a general session or a seminar, I spent a lot of time milling about, looking at the writers’ books for sale, talking to a few people, trying to understand what I was even doing there.

At one of the luncheons, a woman sat next to me, her arms full of books, papers, notebooks, purse, briefcase, and water bottle. She smiled expansively at the rest of us at the table and announced, “I am a writer.” Loudly. Loud enough so that the people at the next table turned their heads. 

She went on to tell us, knowing we were all phenomenally interested, that she was in her positive affirmation mode. Declaring herself to be a writer meant, as night followed day, that she was one. And she went on to explain what that meant.

To continue reading, please see my post at Christian Poets & Writers. 

The Writer at Rest

I’ve invented a word: “misculturalized.” It describes being born, raised and living in one culture when you’re probably better adapted to another culture. And the culture I should have been raised in? The one that celebrates naps. Spain. Mexico. Argentina.

How could I have been born in United States, the country that hates – hates – naps? Think of everything we miss when we succumb to temptation and take a nap: getting work done; staying busy, looking like we’re staying busy; and rest.

Rest.

To continue read, please see my post today at Christian Poets & Writers.