Motives for Writing: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. When You Need Support to Write What You’re Called to Write. Why do you write?

You find yourself on the couch with a laptop on your lap, or at the desk, or wherever you write, and you’re actually typing words one after another into something like a sentence.

Why?

What motivated you?

What made you go from thinking, “I have an idea,” to typing that idea?

Something did, and you may not know what it is.

Then, once you started writing, what was behind what you wrote and how you wrote it?

Something was. Something supported you in the act of writing.

In addition to writing, publishing, and pastoring, I’m a singer and an occasional voice teacher, sometimes teaching lessons at a local university(opens in new tab).

In this capacity, there is a powerful metaphor I’ve thought about for a long time that comes from the world of singing technique.

Support…

If you have ever had voice lessons, you were taught to breath low and to support your tone with the diaphragm muscles as you sing.

This takes some coordination. You are learning to relax your face and neck and everything that goes with it, while transferring all the work down below.

The problem is that you don’t have to support optimally, because you don’t have to sing optimally.

But you cannot not support.

To put it positively. You must support.

“But didn’t you just say you don’t have to support?”

No. I said you don’t have to support optimally.

You cannot phonate (make sound) if you do not support 100%.

But most people, until they are taught the “right” way, will support with jaw, throat, or tongue tension.

To get the right combination of pressure you need to lock up something.

It’s sort of like when you are trying to get more water pressure from a hose. What do you do? You cover it to increase the pressure coming out of the end of the hose. You use your thumb and what comes out comes out faster.

Singing requires something like that. Pressure.

Pressure and air at the vocal cords is what makes the sound.

When pressure is applied with jaw and tongue is going to make a suboptimal sound (less pretty), and cause problems such as the voice getting tired more quickly and sometimes going away for a while. You can even develop nodes on your cords and have to give up singing. It happens to pop stars all the time.

So you have to transfer that pressure to the diaphragm muscle down there around your stomach. Relax everything on top and breathe like heck.

Still here?

Remember I said I was talking about a metaphor?

Let’s assume that you can do nothing without support. Not just singing. Anything. Everything you try to accomplish in life requires some kind of energy and pressure working to produce.

In this case, energy is breath.

Breath and pressure…

Interestingly, the word for “breath” is the word for “spirit.” It is life-giving breath that causes sound in singing (or speaking), and it is breath that animates a human.

That’s an easy metaphor to understand.

But what about pressure?

In good singing, we don’t eliminate pressure; we just transfer to an area of the body that can handle the pressure.

From the neck and jaw to the diaphragm.

In the absence of pressure, we won’t do anything. This is because no matter what we do, we need some reason, even a bad reason, even an unconscious reason, to do it.

Low diaphragmatic singing is conscious singing. Default singing with the support coming from whatever is above the neck is unconscious.

Pressure. Support.

What supports your action?

Just like in singing, there are good supports and bad supports.

Good supports:

Vision

Love

Responsibility

Sense of stewardship

Commitment

Creative impulse

Reliability

Sense of purpose

Logical conclusions about what is best

Commands of God

Community spirit

Bad supports:

Anxiety

Fear

Hate

Shame

People-pleasing

Pride and Ego

Comparison

Inferiority complex

When I’m teaching singers I often tell them that one way to engage good support is to refuse bad support. Often, their body below the neck (and chest) will take over when they relax everything above it.

Refuse the bad supports and just sit there (and breathe) until the good supports take over.

Feeling anxiety driving you to action? Pause. Wait.

Why take that particular action?

Just wait a minute. There may be plenty of good supports for that action. It may very well be what God wants you to do. It may be what your vision and sense of stewardship requires. But if you let anxiety (or ego, or fear, or people-pleasing) drive the action, you will “have received your reward” already (Matthew 6:2(opens in new tab)).

Good support in singing takes time and presence. It’s no different for good support in life.

Slow down. Be present (abide in Christ). Relax the bad supports and wait for the good ones to kick in. And breathe, letting the Holy Spirit be the one in charge.

Hey wait, this is a writing blog!

What’s any of this got to do with writing?

Well, this metaphor can be applied to all things we “do,” including writing.

Apply all the same logic and line of thinking to your writing.

Back to my introductory question. “Why do you write” could also be asked this way:

What has supported the effort to sit down today and write. Consider our list of bad and good supports again.

Bad supports:

Anxiety

Fear

Hate

Shame

People-pleasing

Pride and Ego

Comparison

Inferiority complex

Good supports:

Vision

Love

Responsibility

Sense of stewardship

Commitment

Creative impulse

Reliability

Sense of purpose

Logical conclusions about what is best

Commands of God

Community spirit

There are plenty to choose from on that list of good supports, but I think we could encompass all of them in:

Love and the Glory of God.

What could you write for love and the glory of God today? Let me know when you do, so I can read it.

Jeff B. Miller

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