The Catholic Writers Guild

We writers have a strange approach/avoidance thing going on with writing, like teenagers with their parents. I find that most young writers want to have written, but few like to write. They’ll find anything else to do, even unpleasant chores, rather than write – do dishes, vacuum the house, take out trash, brush the dog, shop for unnecessary things.

These are often the same folks who complain that they do not have time to write. They DO have the time, but it is taken up by repetitive chores that are good to do but eat up the time better spent writing. Most often, the time is eaten up by watching other peoples’ stories on TV.

(At the same time, we must acknowledge that family comes first and some Catholic writers have large families needing attention. I’m an only child with an only child and cannot address that kind of situation).

Some people are truly energized by the act of writing, true. But others know how energy-demanding it can be, how focused. There is joy once one is in ‘the zone’ and the writer is fully immersed in the fictional world and dreaming while awake. But it is the getting there that is hard. We are desperately afraid of failure and the perfectionists among us barely get a few lines down before they begin to tinker and despair that it will ever turn out right.

First, we must allow ourselves to fail and have messy first drafts. Sometimes the wastebasket is the writer’s best friend. We have to see this as a form of play. Pixils are cheap. We can erase and begin over as much as we like. Things didn’t even go right for God the first time and He had to flood the world and return it to the watery chaos He’d begun with. Talk about revision.

And second, we need to make time to write and put our seat in the seat. Ideas flow in the process of writing. You cannot wait for inspiration to come and then begin to record. It doesn’t happen that way. Ideas come once you drag the pen across the page, once you dance on the keyboard. Even if nothing comes, you have fulfilled your sacred calling for the day. Flannery O’Connor said she often stayed at the desk for her allotted time for weeks and wrote nothing. But she was in the chair, listening.

So make an appointment with yourself to put your seat in the seat. Find your best times and write them in your calendar. It doesn’t need to be every day – it could be Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 5 am, or 8 pm, or Saturdays from 3-5 pm, whatever. Listen, novelists – even if you just write a page a day (on average), you’ll have 300+ pages after a year (allowing for illness, travel etc). But it will happen only if you have the self-discipline, the self-control to put your seat in the seat. You’ll see a stack of papers growing and this will encourage you. When it is done, you can tinker, knowing that no work ever lives up to the writer’s original grand vision.

For me, school is hectic and I cannot write during the semester. But I gather material and do research and doodle with outlines so that after graduation, I can use my summer to full advantage, writing nearly all day. This takes discipline, too – the weather is nice and leisure calls. But writing is work – and it is God’s work – and I need to put my seat in the seat.

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