Remember when I had jury duty? I do, perhaps too well. On my lunch break the first day I bought a legal pad, in which I planned to write while waiting. The combination made sense to me: legal pad/jury duty.
I did not have to wait nearly as much as I expected, so I left with a nearly empty pad. I've now been writing in that legal pad quite a bit - blog post drafts, poetry, mental meanderings, and the like. Now I find the legal pad filling. This is a beautiful sensation, as I haven't filled a notebook in several years.
You see, I find a full notebook to be quite encouraging: it's a finished task, a veritable rhetorical collected-them-all of pleonasms*. An unfilled notebook, on the other hand, reminds me of my artistic shortcomings, a space to be filled with something I have been unable to create or realize.
What I do realize is the ridiculousness of this concept: my goal in writing is to honor God, not to fill notebooks. If my goal is quantity, why not just write the ABCs repeatedly? Don't get me wrong - I want to be a prolific writer. This simply cannot be my goal, as it is only a means of achieving that goal. It's about Jesus, not word count.
This is really just a note to self.
*The phrase "veritable rhetorical collected-them-all of pleonasms" reveals two things: (1) I'm using a thesaurus; (2) I'm reading Tom Wolfe. Both are of course true.
Remember when I had jury duty? I do, perhaps too well. On my lunch break the first day I bought a legal pad, in which I planned to write while waiting. The combination made sense to me: legal pad/jury duty.
I did not have to wait nearly as much as I expected, so I left with a nearly empty pad. I've now been writing in that legal pad quite a bit - blog post drafts, poetry, mental meanderings, and the like. Now I find the legal pad filling. This is a beautiful sensation, as I haven't filled a notebook in several years.
You see, I find a full notebook to be quite encouraging: it's a finished task, a veritable rhetorical collected-them-all of pleonasms*. An unfilled notebook, on the other hand, reminds me of my artistic shortcomings, a space to be filled with something I have been unable to create or realize.
What I do realize is the ridiculousness of this concept: my goal in writing is to honor God, not to fill notebooks. If my goal is quantity, why not just write the ABCs repeatedly? Don't get me wrong - I want to be a prolific writer. This simply cannot be my goal, as it is only a means of achieving that goal. It's about Jesus, not word count.
This is really just a note to self.
*The phrase "veritable rhetorical collected-them-all of pleonasms" reveals two things: (1) I'm using a thesaurus; (2) I'm reading Tom Wolfe. Both are of course true.
Legal pad. Bachelor pad. Legal tender. Tender bachelor. Long title.
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