Writing is Giving Birth

I’ve never given birth, but I’ve seen it a time or two, and it looks hard.

Screaming, pushing with all one’s might, sweat, so much sweat (and that was just mine!).

That’s how I feel about some of my writing.

Sometimes I have something I need to write, but it’s just pushing back so hard against me, that I don’t know if I can get it out.

Why? Is there some limitation with words?

There seems to be, but it also seems like some people don’t suffer from such limitations. Some people seem to be able to express what their soul thinks, and our souls long to hear.

For instance:

C. S. Lewis

“The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them. It was not in them, it only came through them. What came through them was longing.”

Annie Dillard

“What you call your ‘self’ is not a finished thing at all, but an unending story that rushes through you in waves.”

Frederick Buechner

“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Do not be afraid.”

Wendell Berry

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work. When we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.”

Mary Oliver

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Victor Hugo

“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky

“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

“Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

George MacDonald

“To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.”

Man, I get the image of these giants thinking these kinds of thoughts all day, but I bet they didn’t.

I bet they were just like you and me, grunting and groaning to get out a sentence, then crossing it out or even violently crumpling the damn paper (excuse my language).

Here’s what some geniuses had to say about their own inability to produce on paper the goings on of their hearts:

Leo Tolstoy admitted, “I know that my unity is not in reason, that it is not in my mind, but in my heart. Yet words never fully serve the heart. They obey only clumsily.”

Hemingway said, “The first draft of anything is terrible.”

Kafka wrote in his diary, “I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable. To explain something inexplicable. To tell about something I only feel in my bones.”

And Anne Lamott, patron saint of honest writers everywhere, said, “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” In other words, she was slogging just like the rest of us.

So if they fought for every line, why do we imagine it should come easy for us?

Maybe the strain is part of the deal and the reason the words push back is because they carry weight and the frustration that is a sign that something real is trying to be born.

If that’s true, then let’s go into labor! The ache before creation.

Why didn’t I make this post on Tuesday, which is my norm? Because it was a long labor and started over again and again! 

So if you’re sweating, groaning, muttering under your breath, wondering if the thing inside you will ever come out, take heart. Welcome to writing.

We’re standing right alongside all the giants, breathing hard and pushing with everything in us, trusting that eventually the new thing will arrive.

And Jesus, who had a pretty good way with words, said, 

“When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world.” (John 16:21 ESV)

Happy labor…

Jeff 

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