by Stephanie Smith

I’m sure you’ve noticed it, too.

Much like fast food or fast fashion, ours is a culture of fast words. With unlimited world knowledge accessible to us 24/7 in the palm of our hand, I think it’s safe to say we are encountering an unprecedented volume of words per day. Get this: the amount of time people spend reading today has roughly tripled since 1980. While I see this as a heartening sign in some ways, as it speaks to heightened personal practice, we can also of course recognize the difference between deep reading and surface screening.

In the fashion industry, “fast” is defined by the speed at which high fashion is converted to accessible price-point retail. Fast fashion cuts costs often by using cheaper materials and using efficient production to get trends to the everyday shopper more expediently. Yet the ethical costs of such a system are well-documented.

Similarly, we are pressed to ask what a steady intake of fast words is costing us. When efficiency over eloquence is rewarded, memes and emojis are outsourced to do the work of emotional expression for us, and TL;DR becomes a cultural attitude, we are wise to inquire: how is this shaping us, and what is the cost to our attention spans?

Our brains are designed to be constantly scanning our surroundings for threats. Yet when everything is presented as essential, un-missable, in the unholy spirit of urgency and scarcity, it creates sensory overload. This overstimulation then backfires: rather than engaging our attentions, it actually callouses our attentions. It inhibits our ability to practice being fully present. This is where we realize a high cost indeed: calloused attention is not only a symptom of content intake, it is nothing short of a condition of the soul.

So how do we practice slow words when fast words are all the fashion today? How do we buck so strong a trend?

Fast words are an industry. They are assembly-line made. So if we want to make way for a slow word movement instead, we’re going to have to jump the track.

If you ask me it’s a two-tiered process: slow your input, slow your output.

Read well and slowly.

First we are invited to slow our input. Who are we to think we have anything meaningful to say if we do not listen first? Take your time with your reading practice. Read well, widely, and slowly. Resist the urge to skim.

Perhaps read with a pen in hand for a more active experience of paying attention. If you’re listening to an audiobook or podcast, try not to multi-task with anything that requires your brain to be working elsewhere (i.e., opt for listening while driving or emptying the dishwasher, rather than paying bills or inbox-cleaning).

Reading is a wonderful way to affirm the limitations of our humanity, because it wholeheartedly affirms we cannot be everywhere, doing everything, all at once [tweet this]. Far more than mere data download, reading is one of the rare activities that requires full immersion, no short-cuts. And in this way it is a marvelous means of practicing presence.

Write reflectively, rather than reactively.

I find most fast words are the result of reactivity. They are an easy outlet for venting, getting an unpleasant emotion off our chest, or pronouncing condemnation in way that often puts others down and props up our gratifying sense of being right. To be clear, there is very much a standing need to renounce what calls for renouncing. But there is a searing distinction between reflective renouncement and un-reflective reactivity [share this].

Reactive writing skips over the creative incubation process: the turning, tending, and tilling over until more durable breakthroughs can be discovered. There’s a name for this get-it-off-the-chest impulse we writers know well: it’s called a rough draft. And we know just as well rough drafts are never meant for the publish button!

We might find it emotionally gratifying to vent our first reactions, but better yet to refine them, to put them through the process of reflection, further reading and examination, to skim off the raw impurities and imperfections, and yield something bright and true instead [tweet this]. Ideas develop best when they’re given time to come of age, rather than rushed through to become market-ready.

Slow input + slow output introduces encounter.

The reactive brain is stuck in survival mode: fight, flight, or freeze. And here we uncover the real driver behind reactivity.

When we pull back the curtain on the rush to be the first-responder, the pressure to publish the hottest hot take, the hustle to write faster, louder, better…we often find fear. Fear is the inevitable fruit of writing from a place of survivalist fight, flight, or freeze [tweet this].

But the reflective brain opens you up to a whole new realm which scientists aptly call focus. This is the deep well from which our strongest creative energies flow. What’s more, focused writing compels focused reading; it invites to the reader into encounter. It invites to reader to receive, rather than to consume.

As we turn soon into a new year, a new decade, I say we commit ourselves to a slower, more sustainable practice of reading and writing. Fast words make big promises that rarely deliver. Slow words, on the other hand, must be fought for, but I think it’s about time we give up the ghost of the instant epiphany.

Let’s make our move to come by our breakthroughs honestly, practicing reflectiveness over reactivity, and finding the hard-won reward of words that endure.

Stephanie Smith is the associate publisher for Zondervan Books, where she takes great joy in supporting, stretching, and championing authors as they bring the best out of their message. Stephanie lives with her husband in Tennessee, and you can catch her pop-up email newsletter for writers looking to find your angle, write like you mean it, and do it in style at www.slantletter.com.

from “Adorning the Dark” by Andrew Peterson

Being a writer doesn’t just mean writing. It means finishing. I’ve heard it said that a song is never finished, only abandoned. That’s not true for me. To the contrary, I can’t wait to be done with the thing, because only once it’s finished can I raise my hand at the back of the class and say something that will be considered, not ignored, something that might be a blessing to someone. Only then do I begin to take on some flesh and stop haunting the room. Walt Wangerin Jr. said once that art isn’t art until it’s experienced by another.

Praise God, I was reckless enough to try this thing—not because my songs matter all that much, but because I would have possibly gone mad—a madness of self-hatred, self-disdain, self-flagellation. A madness of Self. “Take thy thoughts captive,” I imagine God saying. “Put them to music. Then aim them away from you. Love your neighbor as yourself.” I con- fess, a mighty fear of irrelevance drove me to this vocation, a pressing anxiety that unless you looked back at me with a smile and a nod and said, “Oh, I see you. You exist. You are real to me and to this world and we’re glad you showed up,” I might just wither away and die. That’s not exactly a noble reason to fling your creations into the world, but it’s a decent place to start. After that, the Lord can redeem your impulse for self-preservation by easing you toward love, which is never about self. But if you’re scared, there’s no rush. First you have to do something. You have to climb out from under the bushel and share your light with those around you. You have to believe that you’re precious to the King of Creation, and not just a waste of space.

You and I are anything but irrelevant. Don’t let the Enemy tell you any different. We holy fools all bear God’s image. We’re walking temples of the Spirit, the bashful bride of Christ, living stones in what is going to be a grand house, as holy and precious as anything else in the universe, if not more so. God is making us into a kingdom, a lovely, peaceful one, lit by his love for us flowing toward one another. That’s the best gift you have to give.

***

A few miles from my house there’s an intersection that used to make me happy. It’s since been developed beyond recognition, and I regret to report that the magic is gone. If you ever want to go there, it’s a four-way stop at the intersection of Old Franklin Road and Cane Ridge Road. It wasn’t terribly interesting. It wasn’t a scenic overlook. The houses weren’t gigantic. But it was, for me, a strangely pleasant place. I don’t know why, but I felt rightness every time I pulled up to that intersection. I’d always look around as if I were on the verge of solving some bright mystery—until the driver behind me honked and I was forced to putter up the hill.

I mentioned it to Jamie and the kids, and they agreed. It was a nice spot. To them, it was probably just that. But I would always wonder what made me feel that way. Was it the lie of the land? Was it the fact that the stop sign forced me to pause for a moment and consider my surroundings? Did it remind me of some lovely childhood drive? I can’t put my finger on it.

Psalm 16:6 says, “The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.” I know the psalmist wasn’t thinking of country roads when he wrote this, but I always thought of this verse when I sat at that intersection. “This, surely, is a pleasant place,” I would say to myself. And in some ways, a pleasant place is better than a breathtaking one, isn’t it? I love the Grand Canyon and have hiked into it a handful of times over the years, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Now, I realize of course that if Wendell Berry is right—that there are no unsacred places, only sacred places and desecrated places—then that intersection was just as sacred as the grass on your front lawn. But isn’t it true that some places feel right, just as surely as other places feel wrong?

I have been to desecrated places, and have sensed a brooding darkness without knowing why. I have, at times, had to speak aloud what I believe to be true about God’s presence in and around me in order to silence the voices of fear that clamored in my head—I have, in other words, been spooked. I have whistled in the dark. I don’t know how all this works. I only know that we’ve all probably been in houses that felt dark and disquieting, and by contrast there’s a sense of peace that seeps out of the walls of others. I want my house to be a house of peace. I want people to sense God’s presence when they roll up our gravel driveway.

But how?

It’s a matter of dedicating to God the world within our reach. Jamie and I are blessed with two wonderful neighbors, Tommy and Becky. When they built their home, sweet Becky wrote scripture verses on every 2 x 4 she could find. You can’t see them anymore now that the house is finished, and of course they don’t work as charms or anything weird like that; Bible verses on the studs don’t do anything magical. Still, every sacred word that Becky wrote on every sacred plank of wood was a reminder to her that it was not her house, but God’s.

The Christian’s calling, in part, is to proclaim God’s dominion in every corner of the world—in every corner of our hearts, too. It isn’t that we’re fighting a battle in which we must win ground from the forces of evil; the ground is already won. Satan is just an outlaw. And we have the pleasure of declaring God’s kingdom with love, service, and peace in our homes and communities. When you pray, dedicate your home, your yard, your bonus room and dishwasher and bicycle and garden to the King. As surely as you dedicate your heart to him, dedicate your front porch. Daily pledge every cell of every tool at your disposal to his good pleasure. It’s all sacred anyway if old Wendell is right (and I think he is). I wonder if the Holy Spirit is rambling around in the temple of my heart, scribbling promises on every exposed bit of lumber, declaring my sacred- ness so that I will remember that I belong to him. And maybe when I’m old and I cross paths with some weary traveler, they’ll sense a rightness, a pleasantness of place, and will experience a peace that they cannot understand or explain.

Stop a moment and look around. This is our Father’s world. We are sacred, you and I.

Every writer I know who’s worth a damn spends way more time “losing” than “winning” – if success means typing a polished page that lands in print as is. Scriveners tend to arrive at good work through revision. Look at Yeat’s chopped-up fixes in facsimile form, or Ezra Pound’s swashbuckling edits of Eliot’s Waste Land. Without radical overhaul, those works might have sunk like stones.

In fact, after a lifetime of hounding authors for advice, I’ve heard three truths from every mouth: (1) Writing is painful – it’s “fun” only for novices, the very young, and hacks; (2) other than a few instances of luck, good work only comes through revision; (3) the best revisers often have reading habits that stretch back before the current age, which lends them a sense of history and raises their standards for quality.

– from “The Art of Memoir” by Mary Karr

https://www.ivpress.com/carpe-diem-redeemed

We humans dislike being undone. However much we enjoy writing, we find the disorderly process unsettling. We yearn for arrival or permission to quit. The state of incompletion is uncomfortable, as is vulnerability and unknowing. We have an unrelenting urge to wrap things up.

“During deep revision,” poet Mark Doty writes, “the longer we can stay in the state of uncertainty, of unfolding possibility, the better.” As in any prayer or meditation practice, we must learn to love, and stick with, the process. Once, when I was struggling with a prolonged depression in which I felt like I was groping my way down a dark tunnel, my therapist asked if I could see any light. I told her no. “Well, then,” she replied cheerily, “You’re halfway through!” Writers stumble through a lot of darkness before we begin to see our way out. It’s unnerving. It’s easy to despair.

Uncertainty, messiness, the sense of being overwhelmed—these states define creativity; they are signs that we’re in the thick of things. We can welcome them and proceed regardless, harnessing discomfort as a motivating force. 

from “Living Revision: A Writer’s Craft as Spiritual Practice” by @Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew @Skinner House

Sometimes the people who ask the question go on to say they are not sure they can be creative on paper every day. I tell them with all seriousness I am not sure I can be creative on paper each day either. Most of the time, writing a book more closely resembles digging a ditch than participating in some transcendent creative experience.

A pen and a keyboard and paper and ink are nothing more or less than the tools of a writer. They are to be regarded the way a construction worker regards a well-worn set of boots and a well loved shovel. The tools simply remind the worker to get up each day and go back to work no matter how much or little progress was made the day before. I became better at the craft of writing sentences on the day I finally understood I was engaged in a construction project as much as an artistic pursuit.

Writing a book is nowhere near as easy as it looks and heaven knows not as easy as some claim. Writing a book is seldom easy, even for those who have written some of them.

– Robert Benson – “Dancing on the Head of a Pen”

– by Leona Choy

Here’s the long and the short of it.

Let’s personify an IDEA as if it were a person. When writers get a heads-up that an idea is approaching, they would do well to deliberate wisely what to clothe it in appropriately, since it appears stark naked! One size of trousers doesn’t fit all, and there are many styles from which to choose.

You can expedite your attire decision by whittling down your idea to a couple of concise, descriptive sentences. That will stand you in good stead and save you time and grief by not selecting proper clothing.

Problems arise when the writer tries to convince the idea to wear long pants when short pants are more suitable. A writer may try to force an idea to become a book when it would be much better dressed in shorts—an article in a magazine, a short story, a guest post, an editorial, newspaper column or a blog post. Perhaps it would do better as many pairs of shorts of different colors and styles slanted to various publications. It’s important to realize whether an idea has enough substance to carry you through an entire book and whether there is a market for it.

Or the other hand, while in the process of clothing your idea in shorts, the writer may discover that several short articles are beginning to bond and could be morphed into chapters of a book. One’s own E pluribus unum, (out of many, one). One book of many chapters may come forth from what were previously separate or short stories, if the right adhesive is applied by a creative writer to bind them together.

Throughout my ten years as a blogger, I wrote a considerable number of posts on related themes each with a fresh hook and slant. For several of my recently published inspirational books, I stitched the “shorts” together with a compatible theme. With considerable editing, of course, I assembled them into full length books. The more abbreviated ideas appeared in long designer jeans.

In another of my books I used an interview format in each of the twenty-four chapters imagining dialogue with prominent religious persons of the past century. I based the interviews on their writings and bound them together under a common theme. Each chapter was dressed in shorts. After the book was published, one of the persons (chapters) began to “speak out” and ask for a change of clothing—it demanded, as it were, long trousers instead of abbreviated shorts.  During my research I accumulated more than enough fascinating material to propose a new book project to a publisher devoted to the person that chapter was about. The single short chapter turned into an extensive biography of Dr. Andrew Murray, a missionary statesman of the nineteenth century. In fact, I became his “authorized biographer.” After wearing shorts, this idea changed clothes and wore long trousers.

My original, productive over-researching led me to discover in library archives several out-of-print books Murray wrote which were unknown to modern readers. I proposed to another editor that I would be available to “contemporize” them into a more user-friendly edition since they were now in common domain. Three more long trouser books came from that proposal. What was originally only a short chapter in a book multiplied into an entire wardrobe which has since been translated into six foreign languages.

Writers don’t always know in the beginning how to clothe an idea when it comes strolling into the edges of our minds.  It’s critical to success in writing to know when to go long or short with the material and be open to change or exchange its attire as time goes by. We should even muster up the courage to discard the idea entirely and move on. Sometimes an idea that we think is grandiose turns out not to be suitable either for book length or a short article. It might simply be happy to wear a pair of short-shorts—like a poem?

THE GENESIS OF IDEATION

In the beginning I had a bright idea,

and the idea bounced around in my head

without form and void

of structure or organization.

Should I let it live or die?

Is it meant to swim or fly?

Should I let it soar? How high?

Does God’s Spirit brood over it

and breathe into it the breath of life?

Or was it a thoughtless notion,

a product of my own concept or emotion?

Is it simply my ephemeral opinion,

sentiment, persuasion, or view,

inclination or speculation?

Should I tenderly nurture it?

Let it simmer or bring to a boil?

Or jettison it to the circular file?

Is it worthwhile marketing?

Will an editor smile?

Lord, give me wisdom to discern.