By Mark Azzara
My Dear Friend,
Sorry to disappoint you but the book-signing tour won’t happen for a while.
After I wrote my letter last week about the irresistible desire to write a novel I think I may have left the false impression that I am now a “writer.” That would be the wrong conclusion to draw.
An author, whose name I don’t know, once said that someone who doesn’t write every day isn’t a writer, he’s a typist. Well, if that’s the label he wants to stick on me, I’m fine with that. I have nothing to prove to that guy. I hope I don’t have anything to prove to you.
In my own fits-and-starts kind of way I am writing what I hope will turn out to be a novel. But there are no guarantees that I will achieve this objective. I cannot even know, at this moment, whether I will have a novel when I finish, or just one more computer file worthy of deletion. I only know that I don’t need to know. At some point I have to stop thinking about this, do it and find out where it all goes.
If you’re “pulling for me” to write the next best-seller I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t. I don’t need the pressure. I enjoy writing. It’s an end in itself. That’s why I love writing this weekly letter to you. There’s just something about the activity of writing that is fulfilling for reasons I cannot fully explain.
I say things when writing that I would never think to say in normal conversation because I have time to think about what I’m writing and have just written. I love the work of editing what I’ve written because, as I said last week, I want to get it perfect. I refuse to settle for less. Sure, I hope that some publisher will be sufficiently impressed with my finished work to put it into book form. But the real joy is writing it as well as I can.
Earlier this week I got some confirmation about this line of thinking from an unusual source: A Celebrity Cipher cryptogram quote from famed author Kurt Vonnegut. I looked it up on the Web and it’s longer than the puzzle version. “The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. … Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
Last week I said I saw a parallel between the dying and rising of my fiction dreams and the dying and rising of Christ. Now I see another parallel with the divine: The ability to create something out of nothing. What I’m trying to create may look hideous to other people, but the joy is in creating, not in whether other people like what you or I create. Yes, you, too.
I think all human beings are meant to create. This is one of the ways through which we realize that we are created in the Creator’s image. It may not be a book, a song, a painting or anything tangible. We all create an image of ourselves in the eyes of others. It’s who we are. We aren’t just meant to vegetate on this planet but to “bear fruit,” as Jesus said.
That takes time and work, both of which are important to God. In Revelation 14:13, the Spirit says that those who are saved will “find rest from their labors, for their works will accompany them.” The good works we create in this life — the love, joy, hope, peace, forgiveness, patience, etc. — will be known in heaven.
Paul, in 1 Corinthians 3, says that God will test the quality of our works, and reminds us that each of us is the temple of God in whom his Spirit dwells. But the Spirit isn’t inside us to sit idle. He is meant to guide the use of our talents and the development of new ones so that the quality of our work will please God.
Years ago I got a new vision of who I am. I see myself as someone who is writing the story of his life, a story meant for just one reader – God. But if I don’t submit to the one editor who knows exactly what this audience of one wants to read then my work will be thrown in the fire.
As I write my novel I’m actually creating another chapter in the book of my life. I don’t know how it will turn out, but I can’t wait to read it.
