Approval
Last Wednesday night at my writing group I wrote a piece that was as satisfying and - if I may boast - as good as anything I have written there previously. I am seriously considering using it as the basis of my Zone Note next week, the piece of writing I send out most weeks to an audience that has grown to something over 550 readers.
Here's the issue: it is not only revealing but it has some salty language, liberal use of what we now refer to as the F word.
But it works. The F word belongs in the piece and the revelations are hardly prurient, just, well, revealing.
My most recent book - God Knows; It's Not About Us - is far more revealing really. But there is something about a book that provides more distance than a piece of writing that goes straight into people's mail boxes when I press the send button. When I travel around hawking the book, I am sometimes asked about the parts that are somewhat raw - mentioning body parts and feelings about them and people in general. I take the fiction option. The book is a novel, I say. And it is, because even though much of the book - not all by a large measure - is taken from my own life and would be recognized by those who know me, I felt free to take that experience and do with it as I please. Thus creating that genre - the fiction memoir - that annoys so many who feel writing should stick to the proven categories and not cross boundaries.
But the piece I am considering sending out with the press of a button next week has many dimensions that give me pause. I already get bounce messages from some systems that refuse mail that goes to more than some fixed number of recipients. And maybe the F word will clog many more filters.
But the worst part is wondering what readers will think of me. Probably a third of those who receive these notes are people I don't know. People write and ask me to put their friend or relative on, someone to whom they have been forwarding them and who would like to receive them directly. But I feel more safe distance from them than from those I do know.
You see I used to be a parish pastor. My role saved me from being seen clearly for who I am. I am no more profane or sensationalist now than I was in my 30 years as a pastor, bt I no longer have that heavy role through which people filtered me in their own minds. Because they assumed I must be pious, they heard what I said and read what I wrote as pious.
I never once used the F word in a sermon.
Maybe that's why the past 10 years, writing as the spirit moves me rather than as I think a congregation can tolerate, has felt like such freedom.
Look for the Zone Note.
Here's the issue: it is not only revealing but it has some salty language, liberal use of what we now refer to as the F word.
But it works. The F word belongs in the piece and the revelations are hardly prurient, just, well, revealing.
My most recent book - God Knows; It's Not About Us - is far more revealing really. But there is something about a book that provides more distance than a piece of writing that goes straight into people's mail boxes when I press the send button. When I travel around hawking the book, I am sometimes asked about the parts that are somewhat raw - mentioning body parts and feelings about them and people in general. I take the fiction option. The book is a novel, I say. And it is, because even though much of the book - not all by a large measure - is taken from my own life and would be recognized by those who know me, I felt free to take that experience and do with it as I please. Thus creating that genre - the fiction memoir - that annoys so many who feel writing should stick to the proven categories and not cross boundaries.
But the piece I am considering sending out with the press of a button next week has many dimensions that give me pause. I already get bounce messages from some systems that refuse mail that goes to more than some fixed number of recipients. And maybe the F word will clog many more filters.
But the worst part is wondering what readers will think of me. Probably a third of those who receive these notes are people I don't know. People write and ask me to put their friend or relative on, someone to whom they have been forwarding them and who would like to receive them directly. But I feel more safe distance from them than from those I do know.
You see I used to be a parish pastor. My role saved me from being seen clearly for who I am. I am no more profane or sensationalist now than I was in my 30 years as a pastor, bt I no longer have that heavy role through which people filtered me in their own minds. Because they assumed I must be pious, they heard what I said and read what I wrote as pious.
I never once used the F word in a sermon.
Maybe that's why the past 10 years, writing as the spirit moves me rather than as I think a congregation can tolerate, has felt like such freedom.
Look for the Zone Note.
posted by Blayney at 1:20 PM
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