The Writer’s Life—Part I

I want to preface my writing, tonight, with the following small disclaimer:  I am a writer—neither good, nor bad, nor somewhere in between.  I am a writer, simply because I write—and for no other reason—and not because I do it well or poorly.  For “being” anything is all about just being, and when such is the case, the labels of good and bad become about as relevant as sparkling clean counter tops are to the provision of a loving and supportive home environment for your children.

Okay…with that said, my actual writing can, though, be either good or bad—or somewhere in between, of course.  Isn't that true?  In fact, you may even be saying to yourself in this moment, Umm, Dave, dude, yeah you're a writer, man, but, might I suggest that you keep your day job?  Actually, I would love it if you said those very words to me.  I say that for the following reasons:  (1) It tells me that you're paying attention to what I'm writing (and I cannot but love that!); and (2) It encourages me to keep working at my craft.  While I have no illusions about becoming the next Tom Clancy (or Henri Nouwen, as one dear friend wrote to me one day last winter), there was a time in Mr. Clancy's life when he used to couldn't even spell or write too good.  So, yeah, I may be no Tom Clancy, but—you know what?—he ain't me either!  :o)

Anyway...To me, the process of working to migrate a piece of writing from bad to good (and, hopefully, not "to worse"!) involves three things (and I don’t think I could ever overemphasize these); they are as follows:

1. Loving and, to a lesser extent, knowing my subject matter;
2. Being me in my writing (letting me come out just as I am in what I’m writing); and
3. Committing to the notion that writing is all about the act of writing itself, and that that the process of writing is one of almost continuous writing, rewriting, revisioning, discarding of current drafts, retrieving previous drafts, and then working into the wee hours of the night only to “abandon” the project to some form of published venue—be it a magazine editor, your 11^th Grade English Teacher (or, for me, my High School Physics Teacher), or your girlfriend or boyfriend.

Okay…so those are a few of my thoughts on the basics of writing and, more importantly, on being a writer.

In my writing of this post, I’ve practiced a little of what I wrote above:  I’ve written a little, revised it slightly (and quickly), and have, in this moment, decided to abandon "my project" to the cyber-stratosphere of blogspot.com.  Most honestly, I’m just hoping that this little piece of writing will be of some benefit to those of you who are writers or who aspire to be writers someday…irrespective of whether it looks as good to me tomorrow as it does tonight.  ;o)

Peace...

Bling

P.S.  Lord-willing, The Writer's Life—Part II, tomorrow...