Two Great Articles to Help You Celebrate "National Handwriting Day"--(Yes, there is such a thing)

January 23rd is National Handwriting Day!  I know I'm excited, and I bet you can't wait either!

Truthfully, there is something very cool about receiving a letter or manuscript that is written by hand--it is something to be treasured, and something that is becoming rarer with each passing year.

Below are two links to great stories centered on the handwritten:

1.The Cult of the Moleskine explores why those notebooks are so popular
2. How Twitter Made Handwriting Cool is a great article about all sorts of writing tools--from simple notebooks to the "World's Best Pencil"

Take time this Sunday to handwrite someone a note!

**Update:
A helpful article on listkeeping and Moleskine Here

The Strange Act of Writing, or, in other words, Erasing my Previous Writing

I love to write.

I could spend hours writing.  I do spend hours writing.

It's when I am writing that I best express my thoughts.  Sometimes that is a good thing.  Sometimes it is a great thing.  And sometimes, not so much.

This morning was one of those times.  I wrote a piece comparing working at a Christian Bookstore with working at Baskin Robins.  While I received all positive feedback from it, I kicked myself all day for writing it.  Why?  Because I wrote it when I was experiencing much un-gratitude for something that I should feel and do feel, generally, much gratitude for.  A job.  A job where I get the chance to have interesting conversations with people.  Like the Catholic customer who asked me questions last night, affording me the opportunity to look up in Logos on my phone, the answers to her questions.  And the couple who, for the first time in their lives, were searching for Bibles to purchase and read.  I am grateful.

I am also grateful for my sense of humor.  I agree with Bill Cosby that "You can turn painful situations around through laughter.  If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it."  There is much to laugh about in life.  There is much to laugh about me---I produce enough fodder for jokes and the ridiculous to keep any stand-up comic in business.

However, sometimes my sense of humor takes on the edge of circumstances.  This morning was one of those mornings, that after a short night, my sense of humor "got the best of me".   And thus, born out of that, was a writing that was both, at once, humorous (to me anyway) and ungrateful.

Being the overthinker that I am, I have stewed about my writing the entire day while substitute teaching.  Thus here I am, writing once again.  But this time I'm writing my way through my "stewedupness", trying to make heads or tails out of my love of writing and the way it presents at times.

Of course, I realize none of this may make sense to anyone except for myself. But then, what really is a blog for?  It's pretty self-indulgent actually.  Thus I think I'll be able to go off to work in the next hour now to the Christian Bookstore somewhat assuaged and relieved.

What an odd duck I am.

C.S. Lewis on Writing

Justin Taylor had a fantastic post today full of great quotes from C.S. Lewis on the subject of writing.  You can read his post HERE

or if you don't have time to read what is there, then here is my all-time favorite quote from Lewis on writing (I have lots of favorite quotes from my "Uncle Lewis" on several different subjects):

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.


I happen to LOVE big words, so it is a reminder to me to choose my words wisely when writing.  :)

Quotes by Writers about Writing

Robert Frost:  Poets need not go to Niagara to write about the force of falling water.

Flannery O'Connor:  Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

Robert Benchley:  It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

George Orwell:  In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

Steven Wright:  I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography. 

William S. Burroughs:  In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.

Gustave Flaubert:  The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

Stephen King: I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

Ernest Hemingway:  Write drunk, edit sober.

Hunter S. Thompson:  The only thing to be said this time about Fear & Loathing is that it was fun to write and that's fair, for me at least because I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work.
 
Elmore Leonard:  I try to leave out the parts that people skip.


Isaac Asimov:  If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood.  I'd type a little faster.  

Calvin (not John) on Writing

Mark Twain and the Importance of Words

The August 9th issue of Newsweek, appropriately subtitled "The Books Issue", is filled with excellent articles featuring the literary world.  I am particularly struck by Malcom Jones' writing on Mark Twain, titled "Our Mysterious Stranger."

Twain was, at the same time, both complex and simple.  I suppose that is one of the main reasons I find him fascinating.  But the other reason would be that words and writing were compulsive for him--to find the right word, to record his thoughts, to breathe life into the mundane--this was his essence.

The quotes below I will keep nearby, because they beautifully articulate that which is dear to my soul as well:

"Words were a compulsion with him, and not just any words.  "The difference between the almost right word and the right word," he wrote, "is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightening bug and the lightning."

The last words Twain wrote, were following his daughter's death.  He wrote for three straight days.  Jones has this to say about his need to process via the written word:

"He said it was the last thing he would write and that it would end the autobiography that he had been dictating for several years......Twain meant to impress no one with that essay.  Still, it is worth nothing that, faced with an event that would have paralyzed most people, his first reaction was to reach for his pen and attempt what he had always done so successfully in the past--to write his way out of trouble."

How to Write a Book

In the midst of this insomnia filled night, I came across a fantastic article titled "How to Write a Book".  The author, Rand, has some obvious things to say about writing, but says them in a not-so-obvious way.  To read the article in it's entirety, CLICK HERE.

Below are just a couple of the paragraphs though, that I absolutely loved: [I am going to start using square brackets, his idea for using them is tremendous]

"A blank page. A scribble in a Moleskine. That tweet that captured your thought better than a chapter ever would. Quietly crossing out paragraphs you loved. These are the acts that comprise writing a book, not talking about it, not announcing that you’re going to do it, and certainly not reading an article by a blogger who at this very moment is procrastinating finishing his own book by writing about how you should start yours.

The Journey is the Book"

"My other momentum move involves the [square brackets]. The writing zone is a tenuous one and sometimes the thought just can’t be expressed in words, yet. Rather than getting lost in a single sentence, I put my best effort in [square brackets]:

• [Something about writing being hard]
• [You can say this better]
• [Blah blah blah I can’t be eloquent in a chair where my feet touch the floor].

[Square brackets] get those niggling thoughts out of your head and onto the paper so you can focus on moving forward."

No Words

How I wanted to be able to post something amazing, something magnificent and uplifting and inspiring, here a week after my husband has been sentenced to prison.  I know that the right thing to do is to pour out my gratitude that My God has given me peace and a hope, that He has settled my mind and I am now eagerly facing the future, breathlessly awaiting to see what miraculous things He is going to do in my life and the life of my family.

And yet.....

Those are not the words I wish to write.  They are not the words that are just behind the ability to speak or write at all.  They are not the words that are crowding behind the irrational pull to scream, to throw and break stemware in the woods.  Yet no such actions would do a thing.  They would not produce a sense of God's presence in my soul.  They would not change anything.  They would not make the scripture work that I attempt to do every morning and most nights any more or less real.

Until this week, I've felt strong, even healthy, proud, arrogant.  But right now I am sad.  I am tired.  I am paralyzed.  I am terrified.  I am alone and I don't sense God, nor direction for my family.  Not saying He is not truth or that He is not real.  Just saying that I wish for His peace, that he would still this mind somehow, and that he would grant sleep, that He would say "Shhhh" to me, in Psalms, in Jonah, in 1 Thess 3:8-10, Exodus 33, Mark 5, John 20, "Shhh" through any of those passages that mean so much to me.

Finding the Humor in All Things

Some would say that I have an incredibly strange sense of humor.  That is truth.  I think I was born with it. My mom was a very, very funny person.  She lead a difficult life, her life circumstances were wearisome.  And she battled cancer for many years, eventually losing.

But she could be so very, very funny.  I wish I could remember more of the the funny things she did.  I do remember her starting a food fight at my grandmother's house one thanksgiving, by throwing a spoonful of mashed potatoes onto my Uncle.  My grandmother was not a funny or a nice person.  But my grandpa was an amazing man, and I remember even at that age, looking at him, watching her wreck havoc, watching both my grandmother, my father and my aunt disapproving as we cousins joined into the frey.  I remember he was trying to not laugh.  I think he was proud.

But it is important to find things that are funny, in every situation.  And it seems that either my life is much funnier than the average person's, or I am just stupid enough that I do things that end up creating impossibly funny situations.

Who goes to visit their husband in prison, only to have the electricity go out and thus having to be escorted out by a guard with a flashlight while the rest of the prison goes into lockdown??  Who has someone arrested with a gun, in the woods next to their house, at 1:30 in the morning, while they stand there watching in all, disappointed because none of the cops want to take their statement?  Who runs out of gas behind Target, happens to have $100 bill in their pocket and hands it to an old guy and asks him to go get gas and bring me the change, while sitting in the car with ripped out pants on?

Me.

But I think that my children have inherited my sense of humor.  Is a sense of humor something that is genetic or learned?  I'm not sure.  But my oldest daughter is beyond hysterical.

And my smalls.....they make me laugh so hard.

They were just now outside playing frisbee.  A police car, York County's finest, went ZOOMING down our road with sirens and lights.

A few minutes later, my smalls both came in, cracking up.  Here is what they said:

"Mom--did you hear that police car?  We were just thinking, what if it there was a riot at the jail? (My youngest has been worried about this since the electricity failure last night, so that is why it is on their minds).  So mom, we were thinking, what if we heard the police car, and then we got a call from Dad at a pay phone?  But then we thought, Dad wouldn't be at a payphone if the prison walls were knocked down--He'd be standing there with his big Bible preaching like Paul and Silas and telling everyone 'You can't leave, you can't leave', and then if they did, he would use his Big Bible to hit them over the head to make them stay!"  And they were cracking up, laughing so hard.

Some may read this story and think, how inappropriate.  But not me.  I am proud of them. I received my revised divorce papers today, not a very funny thing.  And I have been struggling for days, so much to find words to write what is in my mind, and all I'm coming up with is a string of blank documents in my Logos Bible Software.  But I am grateful to find the words to write about humore tonight, to write about anything tonight.  Sometimes laughing is what keeps us, keeps me, sane in the insanity of everything, even if what we see as hysterical, no one else does.

The Hysterical Slaughtering of Analogies and Metaphors as a Writing Technique

Teachers from across the country submit their collections of entries
done for the student version of the Bulwer-Lytton Bad Writing Contest which included analogies and metaphors as well as opening lines. These excerpts are published each year to the amusement of teachers across the U.S.

His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances
like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog 

makes just before it throws up.

Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.

The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.

McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag
filled with vegetable soup.

From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an
eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.

The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when
you fry them in hot grease.

Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

 Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

 The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not
eating for a while.

He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either,
but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender
leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around
with power tools.

John Piper Shares about his writing plans for 2010

My 2010 Writing Leave: What? and Why? :: Desiring God Christian Resource Library

John Piper provides a preview of what he plans to work on during his annual writing leave this year. But what I particularly find interesting is his list of 6 reasons or explanations as to why he writes.