Writing For Pints and Discipleship - By Guest Blogger Rohadi Nagassar

It's very exciting to introduce another guest blogger today, new Inscribe member Rohadi Nagassar. Enjoy this very eloquent piece:

What helps you turn dreams and ideas into reality? Which prompts give you fuel to score page after page? Being gluttons for punishment, writers require a certain self-imposed loneliness to transform pen and paper into words. Sometimes those words string together in coherent sentences. Other times they amount to nonsensical riffs. Unless you dictate, the entire enterprise can descend into a quiet routine where whole days slip by without having a single meaningful conversation.

That’s my reality being self-employed, but it wasn’t the quiet that became the problem, it was the ideas—they kept hitting roadblocks. Solitude and silence are powerful tools, but I realized that even the ardent introvert needs to connect, perhaps for the sake of sanity, but certainly for the sake of defusing the tension of stuck ideas. My writing lacked a rhythm that permitted new life to infuse my narratives. Off I went to search for that new rhythm, reading everything I could find about the routines of the greatest writers. It all boiled down to this: set your routine, create like a beast, work hard, and then play hard, just like Lewis and Tolkien musing over pints.

Clearly, my rhythm needed more pints.

I applied the ‘more pints’ to the ‘work hard’ part of the recommended routine, but that quickly proved to be a wasted effort. Instead I tried to locate fellow writers to gather and share their craft. I admit, it’s me, but being an outlier and writing nonfiction doesn’t fit the average writing group (whatever average might be….) But I did know artists, and good friends at that. They were illustrators, of the comic book variety, and although they weren’t writers themselves, they knew their way around narratives and stories. Because we were already friends, sharing dreams and ideas was normal, only now I could open the doors to my vulnerability and share my writings complete with the tension, the stuck, and the ridiculous.

It was they who saw my first draft. They were the ones who heard about the new dreams first. What I received was what I offered: the odd note of feedback, but more importantly, affirmation to stay true to the journey and break free from the ‘resistance’.

What helps me turn dreams and ideas into reality? The sharing of life on life with a trusted few. In essence a kind of discipleship for writing. In fact, why not just call it discipleship? Doing what you love with people you love while the next story unravels.

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You can catch Rohadi at his blog www.rohadi.com discussing topics on church innovation in a post-Christian world. His newest project coming out this Summer is called: Soul Coats. An adult colouring book meandering through Biblical scenes of restoration.