What I Learned from Being a Writer

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 30, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Being edited, rejected, praised, criticized, inspired, and uninspired; I’ll create circumstances in which you have to just keep your head down and write anyway.

Call to Worship
Navajo Tradition

Beauty is before me,
and beauty behind me
Above me and below me
hover the beautiful.
I am surrounded by it,
I am immersed in it.

In my youth I am aware of it
and in my old age I shall walk quietly
the beautiful trail.
In beauty it is begun
and in beauty it is ended.

Reading
Kathleen McTigue

May the light around us guide our footsteps and hold us fast to the best and most rightous that we seek. May the darkness around us nurture our dreams and give us rest so that we may give ourselves to the work of our world. Let us seek to remember the wholeness in our lives, the weaving of light and shadow in this great and astonishing dance in which we move.

Sermon

Think about your life, and ask yourself what your art is. Do you garden? Paint? Theater? Actions? Do you make music? Are you a dancer? Do you make businesses, do you teach, do you write? As I’m talking about being a writer, I invite you to think about your art form and how the things I’m talking about pertain to what you do.

The book I’m using for this sermon is called Art and Fear. It’s a small book, but it packs a lot of wisdom, and I notice new things each time I read it over.

I’m going to speak in broad brush strokes here. I may say something like “everybody struggles with fears as they create.” You may think “I bet Mozart didn’t. He was a genius.” We’ll get to that. Is your art going to be like Mozart? No. Ok, let’s get on with it.

We’ll talk about genius for a moment. There are some, no doubt. They are not most of us. Let’ s talk about talent. Malcom Gladwell says maybe talent is made up of interest or focus. It doesn’t make you good at something by itself. What makes you good at something is spending ten thousand hours at it. Whatever you spend ten thousand hours on, you will be good at. Putting in the time is what makes good art.

Some people have a picture of an artist, a writer, a dancer, a business starter-upper, who has a flash of inspiration, goes to the studio or the office, works feverishly for a few days, and brilliant things are born. There are flashes of inspiration, for sure. Many people have a great idea for a garden, a painting, a book, a business, but if they don’t have the training, the tools, the craft, the muscles, the experience, they can’t make that idea happen. The art of art is a mystery, intangible, but art is mostly made up of craft. Craft is what gets you the farthest. That’s not true. Keeping going is what gets you the farthest.

There are so many things that make you want to stop. Whereas art happens in some times and places as part of community, in our culture mostly it happens when individuals are working alone, without feedback or support, not knowing whether they are any good. It used to be that the community needed you to paint that bison on the wall of the cave, or the king needed the music for his party, or the tribe or clan needed the bard to write the song that told the history of the people, or the church commissioned you to paint the ceiling. Now a lot of people work alone. The questions and fears can make you stop. “Am I any good? Will I be a success? What does that mean? Is this going to mean anything to anyone? Are people going to be angry with me? Will I be misunderstood? What is the point of this? Is it just self-expression? Is that selfish? Is it going to be helpful to anyone?”

I started writing in journals, combing through my thoughts. I lucked into a gig writing commentaries for the local WNC NPR station. They said “Make it 600 words, make it deep, and make it funny.” I did one every three weeks for years. I wrote them with little kids running around scattering legos, I wrote while they asked what was for dinner. I wrote when I was sick and when I was well. When my inspiration ran dry I had to write about when your inspiration runs dry, because I had a piece due. The same thing with sermons. I need to have something to talk to you all about on a Sunday morning. That’s a serious deadline. No extentions.

What this book says is to wonder whether you’re any good, whether you’re going to be successful, whether you are better than that other artist over there, and do you art anyway.

It’s the most Buddhist thing ever. In order to write, you have to write. You don’t have to build a writing shed, clean off a desk, clean the house, water the garden, you just write. Ruthlessly. If you wait for inspiration you’re lost. Many artists quit because there is so much business involved, paperwork, fund raising, taking things to the post office, looking up writing guidelines to figure out whether they want one inch margins or one and a half inch margins. One successful artist figured he actually painted about 6 full days a month, even though he was working on it full time.

Many artists quit because they don’t realize how much doing nothing is involved in creating. Your brain has to get into that part of it that is the daydreamer. You can’t go straight from the decision-making planning brain to creating, usually. You need to spend some time doing nothing. That’s why I need Fridays and Saturdays to write a sermon. There is the reading to be done, of course, but there is a lot of wondering. “What would I want to hear about if I were in the pew for a sermon about this? How can I not bore people to slobber? Why did I ever think I could write anything about this? It’s too complicated, too multi layered. Maybe it’s just going to be meaningful for me and no one else. Let me watch one episode of this BBC detective series. Maybe one more.” Then there is the time when you put everything together and it’s sixteen pages when it needs to be five. Then there is time when you just let it cook for a while. Then you have to have time to panic. Then you write.

The main thing is to feel afraid and to write anyway. What will people think? Wonder that and do you art anyway. Keep putting in your hours. In the book is the story of the ceramics teacher. He announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

You learn to do your art by doing it. A lot of it. Stephen King, in his great book “On Writing,” talks about doing the “closed door” draft of the book, the one only you will see. Natalie Goldberg talks about the bad first draft.

Everyone talks about that. If you get stuck trying to make the first paragraph brilliant, the first version of the painting brilliant, if you try to put the garden in all at once, you are setting yourself up for frustration. Some thing just slip right out as if they were channeled, and other things have to come out messy first.

I think doing church is a kind of art. The same rules apply. You have to just keep doing it. There are 20 days of team meetings to 10 days of hands on justice in a month, 20 days of planning and shopping and talking to 10 days of hands on teaching, fellowship parties, amazing music and other experiences that hold within them the possibility of nourishment and transformation.

We have our eyes on the goal of Beloved Community, but we must learn to love the process, the cleaning of the brushes, the trips to San Antonio, the relationship building with other churches and organizations. This is the way things grow and change. A church will create the skills in the people to do community well by doing it clumsily at times. You celebrate your triumphs, while always feeling that divine discontent artists talk about, never being satisfied, still following the vision. Building the Beloved Community by doing church, dancing, parties, painting, speaking, writing, singing, moving money around, knocking on doors, registering people to vote, teaching, voting, getting good at love and compassion in the midst of our efforts – it’s a process we’ll be engaged with for decades. We are making a lot of art so that some of it will be brilliant. We keep going, because that is what all veteran artists have in common. They didn’t quit.

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