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| By Mark Connelly |
Before I started writing a book, I wrote magazine features and essays, nothing more than 1800 words. Assignments came and went, and when they were gone I never thought of them again.
I recently finished writing a book that was five years in the making. Through the process I discovered what it is to have something that ties everything in life together. I have come to understand what it means to have a deep abiding faith.
It means sitting down in front of your computer, your typewriter, your notepad, every morning and letting go. It means sitting down on days when you are tired and don’t feel like it, days you wish you had decided to write a book about something else. Something easier. It means sitting down to brussel sprouts for the four hundredth time in a row. Some days it means coming up with nothing at all, or coming up with total crap. Or having the most creatively victorious day of your life. But it means sitting down either way. Either way you keep your appointment with yourself, with the writing. You recommit every morning to finding out more about the world, even if it is only the part of the world you can discover while rewriting a single sentence. You discover the pleasure in the simplest things, in how the fate of the universe can hinge on a comma. Slowly you begin to put faith not in yourself, but in the process of writing. You begin to see how the writing is an extension of the force that runs through and around and over everything. You begin to see that writing, like the most important decisions in your life, will come to you if you let it. Mostly, it doesn’t need your help. It needs you to sit down every morning and be a witness. It needs you to understand that the victories and the crap are all part of it, that if you have faith, if you show up everyday, everything you need to know will be revealed to you.
