I’ve been looking over the goals articulated by the the 100+ writers who have joined the Further Up and Further In Writers’ Consortium. They’re pretty interesting. More than thirty of you hope to finish novels this year. About a dozen of you plan to write memoirs or family histories. A dozen of you are looking to write poems. A whole lot of you have committed to regular blogging (the Lord bless you and keep you…a blog is a hard master).

It was exhilarating to see what many of you hope to bring into the world: fiction for mentally handicapped high schoolers, a concept album based on GK Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, a book about gluttony. Some of you are writing to chronicle or memorialize or work through pain–the pain of cancer, the pain of a hard season of ministry, the pain of watching a mother disappear into Alzheimer’s.

Many of you stated your goals in terms of process rather than end product. You have committed to write every day, or once a week, or one Saturday every month. I admire you commitment to the work and your trust in the process, which can hardly help but yield good things.

I do get the sense that some of you view your process-driven goals as somehow humbler or less ambitious than the product-oriented goals–novels and memoirs and sonnet cycles. This is not true. Those writers with sexier goals will have to commit to the process too: they too will have to say, “I will write X hours on Y days of the week, starting at Z o’clock in the following location.” Those of you who have committed to big, product-oriented goals, take a cue from your process-oriented peers. I will soon be asking you to describe the very mundane routine that you are willing to commit to.

Having said that, I do have a couple of questions for those of you who have defined your goals in terms of process rather than product. First, if you backslide some day or week or month–and you almost certainly will–what can you put in place to ensure that you get your butt back in the chair the next day rather than giving up on your goal (which, technically, you have already failed to accomplish)? If your “Read through the Bible in a Year” plan has ever crashed and burned somewhere around Leviticus 2, you know what I’m talking about. Have a plan that balances no-excuses rigor with a willingness to extend to yourself the same kind of generosity and mercy that you would extend to anybody else you love.

Here’s my second question for those of you whose stated goals are entirely process-driven: are you sure you can get up and write every day (or every week or every month) without having a clear sense of the end product you’re writing toward? I only ask because I know I can’t. I can keep a very rigorous schedule if I’m finishing a chapter or an essay. But if I’m not pushing toward a clearly defined goal, I find the snooze button very tempting. I know there is real value in sitting down every day and keeping the pen moving to the rhythm of whatever is on your mind. Good things come out of that discipline. I’ve just never been able to do it with any consistency. 

So to recap, if you are able to commit to the process without an end product in mind–if you are able, as T.S. Eliot suggests, to “take no thought of the harvest,/ but only of proper sowing,” then good on you. Proceed with my blessing. But you also might find it helpful to commit to an end product. 

In writing, as in may facets of life, it’s important that you do do whatever works best for you–whatever keeps the pen moving across the page. But you should also be open to the possibility that you don’t know what works best for you. 

Next up: I reflect on your reactions to one another’s goals and ponder how we prevent the Further Up and Further In Writers’ Consortium from becoming a shame factory.

3 Comments
  • Dawn Morrow Markley
    2:57 AM, 6 January 2015

    Leviticus 2? People actually get past Exodus?

  • BONNIE BUCKINGHAM
    8:19 PM, 10 January 2015

    I like the very last about what works best for you. Plus life has a way of filling up before opening up time.

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