F is for Fortune ~ Guest Post by Elizabeth Danna

 

Peter turned and saw following them the disciple whom Jesus loved… When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, “Lord, what about this man?” Jesus said to him, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!” John 21:20–22 RSV

Fortune and Men’s Eyes

Of the 154 sonnets written by William Shakespeare, my favorite is Sonnet 29, “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” (published 1609). The second section of this poem reads, “Wishing me like to one more rich in hope/Featured like him, like him with friends possessed/Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope/With what I most enjoy contented least.” Simply put, the poet wants to be like men he knows who are better-looking or have more friends or more skills. In other words, he’s comparing himself with others, and this is leading him to be discontented. 

I know how easy it is to fall into the trap of comparing oneself with others. But it does us no good. If we compare ourselves with others when we’re doing well, we’re likely to compare ourselves with someone who isn’t doing as well as we are, and we’ll end up feeling superior; if we compare ourselves with others when we aren’t doing well, we’ll probably compare ourselves with someone who’s doing better than we are, and we’ll end up feeling even worse about ourselves than we already do. So the result of our comparison ends up depending on our mood – hardly a reliable standard! 

Comparison is the mistake that Peter made in his last conversation with the risen Jesus. When he asked what would happen to John, Jesus told Peter to focus on his own relationship with Jesus, not John’s. That kind of comparison isn’t what God wants. God made you, not someone else. He gave you a unique combination of characteristics and gifts which makes you uniquely suited to what God has called you to do. He loves you and values you as you are. His opinion of us matters more than anyone else’s. It’s a mistake to jealously want someone else’s characteristics, or to look down on ourselves because we have certain characteristics and not others. Let’s avoid I wish I were as smart as she is, or I wish I had as many friends as he does. This kind of thinking gets our focus onto ourselves instead of God. We honour our Maker when we accept ourselves and the gifts and characteristics that He’s given us. He loves us and values us as we are, so let’s not compare ourselves with others.

Elizabeth Danna, Ph.D., was born and raised near Toronto, where she still lives. She has worked for Crossroads, a large Canadian ministry, for many years. Her hobbies include music and needlework, but her main passion is the Word of God. She is trained in New Testament Studies, and has a desire to help people understand the Word so that they can grow spiritually. She recently published Through the Lens of Faith: Devotions on Life, the Universe, and Everything, from Resource Publications. She has also written two small-group Bible studies, From Gethsemane to Pentecost (2011) and The Stories of Jesus: A Study in the Parables of Jesus (2016) both from Wipf & Stock. 

Fresh Feed by Joylene M Bailey

 

I love spending time with children. They speak with the language they know, without the clichés and idioms common to us grownups. They have a fresh way of seeing, which makes their descriptions captivating and unique.

I once asked my four-year-old grandson what his best friend looked like. He has a long head, was his one and only descriptive reply. At once I imagined a faceless character with a long narrow head that kept him so off-balance he couldn't stop toppling over.

I find that when I've spent time with children, my mind percolates with ideas and dialogue for children's stories. Their way of thinking and speaking informs my child-character's point of view. I'm best at writing for children when I can draw from the bucket of child-interactions I've had. 

When I write for my blog, I often describe things in nature, which requires time spent outdoors, taking in the colours, smells, and sounds of my surroundings. My goal for the blog is to make it a sanctuary for the weary; a place of gentle encouragement; a small restoration of beauty and joy that they can take with them when they head back out into the world. In order to be true to that intention then, I listen to restoring and calming music, read beautiful words, take time to reflect on the beauty of God and His gift of beauty to us. 

It's important to feed the bucket from which I draw so that the writing is fresh and authentic.

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I heard an author of historical fiction once say that she spends the weeks and months it takes to write her book listening to the music from that era. While she is doing the non-writing things--cooking, cleaning house, out and about in her car--she immerses herself in the music of the period in which she is writing. That's how she finds fresh feed for her writing bucket.

Dear fellow writer, I realize that you probably already fill your writing bucket with the fresh feed you need for your work-in-progress. But if not, this is your gentle reminder.

As writers we're always looking for ways to keep our writing fresh, aren't we? Now it's your turn. What do you do to feed your writing bucket?

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Photo credits:

Child holding bucket - congerdesign from Pixabay

Apples - Jill Wellington from Pixabay

Tulips - Albrecht Fietz from Pixabay

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Joy looks forward to spending an extended period of time with her young grandchildren this summer. Ideas will be percolating! Meanwhile, she's happy to feed her writing bucket in other ways, like visiting with neighbours and guests who come through the country home she shares with The Cowboy, nurturing their fledgling gardens, playing with fabric, and reading beautiful words. Find her at Scraps of Joy. 

F is For Fischler The Maven by Bob Jones

Remember when magazines arrived in the mail? The best moments of the month were the days the postman dropped the Sports Illustrated magazine  into our mailbox. The first article I turned to was written by Stan Fischler.  I thought he was the best sportswriter alive.

 

Fischler is a big deal. He is an Emmy award-winning journalist and broadcaster. His career in hockey coverage spans eight decades. He’s in the US Hockey Hall of Fame, is America’s foremost hockey historian and author or co-author of over 100 books on hockey.

 

He is 90 years old and still writing.

 

Boston Bruins

 

I liked Fischler because he had insight to little-known facts about players and refs. When my Boston Bruins won the Stanley Cup in 1972, he wrote the cover story. Fischler was a Ranger's fan and writer so he wrote from his disappointment when the Bruins beat the Rangers.

 

He told stories in a readable style. From his article in the March 1970 edition,

 

“Chadwick, you bum, you're as blind as a bat!"

For 16 years, from 1939 to 1955, a baker with an upper-register decibel count hurled this specific charge at National Hockey League Referee Bill Chadwick from his seat in the reaches of Madison Square Garden. Each time Chadwick heard the critic yell he would chuckle to himself. Quietly, however, for he was not about to tell that fan—or anyone else if he could help it—that the charge was half true. As an official in one of the world's fastest major sports, Bill Chadwick was burdened with an astonishing handicap—he had vision in only his left eye.”

 

The Maven

 

Stan Fischler’s nickname suits him. His peers call him The Maven. A maven is "a trusted expert in a particular field, who seeks to pass timely and relevant knowledge on to others."

 

His nickname made me think about how writers want to be known. How could we write in such a way that some teenager reading a piece we wrote would look forward to the next time our content was published? What nickname would readers or writers ascribe to you? Or to me?

When I attended the University of Waterloo in the early 70s my dorm mates called me "The Phantom" because I was always in the computer room or library and seldom interacted with anyone. The nickname prompted me to join a rec ball hockey team to make better connections. Three games in I took a high stick, broke a tooth and a teammate drove me to a hospital for stitches. I wonder what Fischler would have written about my hockey experience?

 

If you had a nickname as a writer, what would it be?  Please leave a comment below. Thank you.

 

 

Thank you for reading. Bob writes stories at REVwords.com

He is a pastor at heart, author, coach, and Poppa to 5 grandchildren.

Set the Writing FREE ~ Guest Post by Brenda Leyland

"In every block of marble

I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me,

shaped and perfect in attitude and action.

I have only to hew away the rough walls

that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it

to the other eyes as mine see it."

*

"I saw the angel in the marble

and carved until I set him free."

MICHELANGELO

Quotes found on AZ Quotes

I have been a long-time admirer of Michelangelo’s works of art and often have been inspired by his quotations, including the two above. I see more than a faint parallel between his craft of sculpting and our craft of writing. When I began this post a few weeks ago, I looked forward to exploring why these quotes speak to me so. I imagined asking Michelangelo how he came to decide what to sculpt from a block of marble. He must have been asked that a lot - we still have his answer all these centuries later: ‘I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me… I have only to hew away… and carve until I set him free’.

So, how do we as writers set our writing free? Pondering over Michelangelo's words, I came to see three points as crucial:

✦ We need a FIRST draft. 

There are times when I feel carving a marble statue might be easier than writing a novel, memoir, essay, or even a simple blog post. At least the sculptor has a chunk of marble in front of him, unlike the writer who faces a blank screen while her mind scurries to find ideas that are fresh and alive with truth and beauty. There can be no hewing of words until there’s a block of them in front of her. In the writing world, we know it as the garbage first draft.

For me, it’s usually a dumped-out collection of thoughts and impressions of what I want to write about. It might be a quote that sparks an idea. At this embryonic stage, it's barely coherent. We might have a beginning, but we can’t see how it ends. Or we might know where we want to end up but have no idea how to get there from here. And there’s no getting anywhere until we fill the blank screen, or page, with that first block of words. Then, and only then, can we begin hewing away what doesn’t belong. Chipping paragraphs that don't convey what we mean, chiseling off ill-fitting words, shaping sentences to describe the indescribable.

✦ We need FRESH vision.

Michelangelo was able to envision what he wanted to sculpt. He saw his figures as plain as if they stood in front of him. He deftly used his imagination. Like him, we must have eyes to see what is not yet there physically. We need a vision of what we want to accomplish with our words. We use the imagination God gave us to see the novel, memoir, song that’s imprisoned within our faltering first draft(s). American author Amy Tan once said that when she sees a visual image in her mind, she tries to capture it in words, making constant revisions to capture it more and more clearly. In the words of another, we write the vision and make it plain. 

✦ We need FAITHFUL perseverance.

In the early days of my writing life, I believed that writing a first draft should come out almost like the polished magazine articles and books I'd read. Sure, I knew that it couldn’t be perfectly perfect the first-time round, but something in me thought it should not be so hard. If it was that hard, I wasn’t really a writer. Not understanding that all writers start with their awful first drafts, even New York Times bestselling authors. I had no trouble believing that sculpting a statue from marble would take weeks, months, even years of intense, hard work. When I finally came to understand that creating a polished manuscript takes no less effort, time, or creative patience, I was able to relax and just do the work. And quit worrying about whether I was a ‘real’ writer. On those impossible days, I put my head down and by the grace of God stay with it.... sculpting, sculpting my word pile into something lovely and true.

*

The other day, I came across an article by author/editor Nils Parker. Here was another writer who not only saw a parallel between sculptors and writers, but he learned Michelangelo himself made such a connection in a letter dated 1547. Parks wrote, "Michelangelo not only summed up the critical distinction between sculpture and painting, but he pinpointed the essence of the editing process in the context of the written word. Sculpture, like editing, is about chiseling away at the unnecessary, at the external, in pursuit of the truth and beauty within. Painting, like writing, is the process of adding layer upon layer to a flat surface until there is something where before there was nothing." [emphasis added]

I look at Michelangelo's beautiful angel and long to touch the smooth marble surface. What a gift God gave that man. That he could envision such beauty inside a hunk of earthen marble and be so skilled, so committed, to sculpt, chisel, and shape until the ‘apparition’ was set free.

That's our job as writers: to envision what we want to say; to acquire the skills needed to make something lovely from that block of text in our draft; to learn the art of faithful stick-to-itiveness, persevering until our writing, too, is set FREE for this world to see and enjoy.

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(Top) Photo credit: Angel (1494) by Michelangelo on the Shrine of Saint Dominic, Basilica of Saint Dominic, Bologna, Italy. By James Steakley - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, httpscommons.wikimedia.orgwindex.phpcurid=5442648

* Nils Parker, "The Angel in the Marble, Modern Life Lessons from History's Greatest Sculptor". Link to article HERE.

Inspired by the beauty of God's world around her, Brenda Leyland writes from her home in northerly Alberta, Canada. She writes on her blog It's A Beautiful Life and occasionally posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Her writing has appeared in FellowScript as a former columnist and contributor as well as in InScribe's Christmas anthology. Passionate about books, Brenda's favourite sport is reading and is always up for sprints, 100-metre dashes, and marathon reads. When she doesn't have her nose in a book, Brenda also enjoys her flowers, walking, being in nature, and having afternoon tea in the garden.