A Write of Passage

                Earlier today, I came across a Catholic World Report interview of James V. Schall, S.J., my erstwhile political philosophy professor at Georgetown.  Father Schall is a brilliant thinker and a gifted writer, so his interview, entitled “The Creative Catholic: Fr. James V. Schall S.J. on the Art and Vocation of Writing,” quickly caught my eye and my interest.  Thought-provoking as always, Father Schall got me a-thinkin’ about my own writing.  Why do I write?  How do I write?  For me, you could say it’s a “write of passage.”

                Why do I write?  I discovered my love for words and language in second grade in a little book called Maundala.  It was written entirely in an African language (I don’t know which) and it had no translation.  I never knew exactly what it said; I simply discerned its meaning through pictures and patterns of speech.  And I loved it – so much so that once my name filled the library card, my teacher banned me from borrowing it ever again.  Little did she know that I would concentrate my studies on foreign languages in high school and college, where my love for words and languages would grow exponentially through the classic beauty of French, the expressive rhythm of Spanish and the enigmatic strata of Japanese.

Above all, I credit my love of writing to my mother, who read to me and always corrected my grammar, and to three teachers of my native tongue:  Mrs. Gagliano, who taught me to appreciate good grammar; Mrs. Young, who taught me precision in writing and attention to detail; and Mrs. Nadler, who taught me to read what I like and to write what I think.  Together, they taught me that words are powerful, and that I had something worth saying.[1] 

   

How do I write?  Writing, for me, always starts with reading.  Books, news, articles, essays, fiction, non-fiction, I read a lot.  My problem is that I’m a very slow reader because my mind swirls with questions, thoughts, memories and ideas while I read.  As a result, I never read as much as I’d like, but I get lots of ideas of things to write about. 

Once I have an idea, I let it percolate; I tease it out; I research it; I hone my message; and I try to find ways to express what I really want to say.  If it’s a good idea (at least in my mind), it won’t go away, it keeps coming back to me.  Sometimes this process can take a matter of minutes, sometimes days.  If I allow the process to run its due course, putting my ideas to paper usually turns out to be relatively quick and easy.  If not, not so much.  That said, it normally takes me 12 to 15 hours to prepare a homily and 2 to 3 hours to write a blog post (like this one).  I’m a slow writer, too, largely because I agonize over every word and sentence.  The upside to my agony is that I tend to have few edits when I’m finished.

          The greatest challenge for me in writing is the vulnerability of it.  As Father Schall so aptly admits in his interview, “Writing is an act of blind faith that out there, somewhere, someone will read and enjoy, understand, what an author wants to say.”  Every time I put something out there, I’m vulnerable; I open myself to criticism – or worse yet, to silence.  For sensitive types like me, delivering a homily or publishing a blog post can be pretty unnerving.  But they’re also opportunities for me to learn and to grow.  I grow from my mistakes and from the questions, comments and criticism that my writing may provoke.  Writing challenges me to grow.  In that respect, you could say that writing, for me, is a “write of passage.”

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[1] I’ve long fretted that one of my English teachers would read this blog and be disappointed with my decidedly-colloquial writing style.  For the record, I write my homilies and blog postings colloquially because I want to engage my (few) listeners/readers conversationally.  That said, I never use contractions, begin sentences with conjunctions or end sentences with prepositions in my professional or formal writing, I swear!