Just now I’m straddled between two novels: still on call to my publisher for edits to The Feast of Saint Bertie, and also putting together ideas and outlines for novel #3, which I’ve titled Honey, Bea & Sky. It’s a nice place to be, this between-place, a wide open field full of possibilities. A good place to consider what’s right about my fiction, and what could use some work. A space to fine tune my philosophy of writing.

If I ever get it all worked out, I’m sure I’ll end up writing a really spacey how-to about writing, one that says, go read this, this and this great book to hone your craft – but when you sit down to the keyboard, this is how you write something worth honing.

Then, whatever I end up saying about that, I think it will have everything to do with faith.

In 2006, on Mick Silva’s blog, in a sort of chicken/egg discussion about the sort of writing that best glorifies God, Susan Meissner made this comment:

We’ve (myself included) allowed the message to mess with the mechanics ’cause we think it’s “the message” that makes the book Christian. Why can’t it be the other way around? Why can’t it be astounding literary style that points to an astoundingly creative God?

To which I certainly agreed. “Astounding literary style.” Great. But “astounding” is a big word. It could send one screaming back to something easy, like “the message.”

But J. Mark Bertrand took it 57 light years higher, when he put in:

“The heavens declare the glory of God, and if we aspire to something remotely similar for our work, we could learn something from how the heavens do this (and don’t).”

To which I mumbled, “Yes, go on…”

And he did go on. He rose to the challenge and created an unforgettable blog post that was so true and beautiful that, well, I never forgot it:

They are speaking, but you don’t know how to repeat what they’ve said. You hear it, though — not so much with your ears as with your nerve endings. They lead you to suspect so much, but they also humble you. They make you wonder if you know anything at all, or ever can. And yet, you do know something…

Because I never forgot what he wrote, and because I wanted to share it with you, I recently asked Mark to re-post it. And he did. (You can read the whole thing here.)

Not that Mark had made the whole “astounding literary style” thing any less intimidating. Quite the opposite, but through the power of his own style, and the beauty he described, he certainly made me want to try.

Still, the stars can make me feel pretty small … and so can a blank page.

But countless times, because of a promise made, I have squinted my eyes and started typing, and found that what came out on the computer screen was better stuff than I could write, and wiser than I have ever been in my life. It’s easy for me to believe that God intervenes someplace between my brain and my fingertips.

Sometimes I read a strangled bit of writing that just seems to be missing something – like oxygen, perhaps. I ask myself what the problem is and the answer that comes to me is “lack of faith.” The writer doesn’t trust that if he let go and wrote the wild, crazy things that come to him, that it would be good, no – amazing stuff that he himself could not actually have written. The writer doesn’t trust God.

So it pleased me recently to read this from a new, favorite, very funny, very wise blogger, John Shore:

Your normal, everyday brain is great for doing taxes, returning videos on time, and remembering why you shouldn’t attack your boss in an elevator with a stapler. It’s generally useless, though, when it comes to creative work. For creative work, you’ve got to get down and give it up for the source of all creativity.

I believe, Lord. Please help my unbelief.

(Thanks to Peter Roffey for the picture.)