Last week I watched a movie entitled Genius about author, Thomas Wolfe. What caught my attention was the voluminous manuscripts Wolfe brought his editor, Max Perkins, and one scene in particular where Perkins says, “Thomas, put down your pencil.”
Last week I also received feedback from a group of trusted Beta readers who critiqued my memoir about coming of age and coming to God during the Woodstock generation. One reader said, “It took a long time for the plane to get off the runway.” Although worded differently, I believe she was expressing what Perkins said to Wolfe. I too needed to cut many words, in my case, beginning chapters which failed to focus the theme and slowed the story’s take off.
Whether you’re a genius or an ordinary writer, we all have to write lots of chapters that never make the final book. Some deleted chapters may appear in some form in another work. Even those cut and never seen in any volume, I’d argue were worth writing, because there’s value in getting thoughts out of your head and organized on a page.
Some coaches and editors recommend mapping your content before you start writing your book. It’s a great idea to nail down the best route to your destination, so you don’t wander down dead ends or get lost and give up before you get there. This is especially helpful when planning prescriptive non-fiction.
My messy writing process was more like creating a map by first putting dots all over a blank page. Although I was sure of my destination, without even a compass rose, it took me a long time to make out the metaphoric towns, topography, and roads that connected them. Maybe because I was writing a memoir.
Here’s the thing about a memoir, it’s not about your whole life, and yet sometimes, it takes your whole life to understand the aspects of your life that have plagued you for a lifetime. It’s called a memoir because it contains specific memories that shaped you. In my case, it was finding the mile markers that illustrate how desperate I was to belong. Why I was willing to follow friends and lovers who I knew were leading me astray. And why I was willing to betray anybody, even those who loved me best because, although I couldn’t have put it into words at the time, I didn’t think I was worth loving.
All this happened of course in the larger context of being a human on earth. Even as a child, I always felt there was more to existence than met the eye, something, or someone invisible, yet obvious. Something or someone magic expressed in the beauty of the natural world yet somehow above it. In every fiber, yet not of it. Something or someone wonderful I knew was there yet could not name. And as I grew older, there was obviously something wrong with life on earth, and something desperately wrong with me. Why did I do things I knew were bad and not do things I knew were good?
My challenge now, is to weed out the rabbit trails from the interstate that led me to Jesus. I could be discouraged by my circuitous writing process. I don’t have the genius of Thomas Wolfe, or an editor par excellence like Max Perkins. I am an ordinary person writing about my circuitous ordinary life, but I do follow the God who called himself the way, the truth, and the life.
So if you’re another writer like me, or another ordinary person trying to find meaning in your own life, here’s the full quote from Jesus to his disciples who were, at the time, just as confused as we can be.
“Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, and trust also in me. There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am. And you know the way to where I am going.”
John 14:1-7 (NLT)
“No, we don’t know, Lord,” Thomas said. “We have no idea where you are going, so how can we know the way?”
Jesus told him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. If you had really known me, you would know who my Father is. From now on, you do know him and have seen him!”
Thanks for the cover photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash
This is beautiful. For me I have ideas but I procrastinate and am easly distracted.