Getting it Write

Getting It Write

I’m Kelly Eileen Hake, and though it may seem like an unorthodox way to start a guest blog post, I’m going to make a small confession: it would be a whole lot easier to walk The Road Less Traveled if I wasn’t always putting my foot in my mouth!
At least, that’s the sneaking suspicion I’ve never been able to put to the test. For all my good intentions and effort, it doesn’t take long before I flub things up. If saying precisely the wrong thing at exactly the wrong moment could be classified as a skill, I’d rank as a master.
Ah, but writing…now there’s a different story. Whatever story I want to tell, to be exact. Everything that comes out wrong when I’m speaking with people—that sounds harsh or startling or out of place face-to-face—can be finessed in fiction. When I write, I think more carefully than when I’m rushing to be heard over the din of a world that seems to disagree with me on just about everything. I figured out at an early age that words on a page actually reflected my good intentions and effort.
I never stopped to think about whether it was that need to be heard that made me want to write—if that was the seed of God’s calling for me. Nor did I wonder if it were common to most writers, until I picked up an intriguing book by Ralph Keyes entitled, The Courage To Write. Anyone who writes or who has tried to write will understand the appeal of the title, but what grabbed my attention most was a tiny subheading in Chapter Four: Lonely Kids, Lovely Writers.
He starts; “Successful writers rarely emerge from the ranks of the popular.” Once I got past a spurt of indignation to acknowledge that, while an extrovert, I’d never been what I’d honesty call popular, I read on. Keyes’ main point, and one I felt quite well thought out, is that popularity was a liability for an author as it “might be endangered by words…put on paper.” He cites movie director George Cukor as observing popularity as a “serious brake on artistic expression of any kind. If people like you—and you expect them to like you—the risk of doing anything controversial, or saying anything revealing, is profound.”
Keyes believes social awkwardness can be a benefit from a young age because loneliness fosters imagination in children and “puts them in a very strong artistic position.” As adults, he purports that lacking social grace makes it helpful to “summon the necessary courage” to write.
Maybe he’s on to something. Writing is universally acknowledged as a form of expression, and Inspirational authors are expressing so much more than just themselves. For my part, I like the thought that for every time I’ve said the wrong thing in my life, maybe I’ll write something worthwhile.
For now, though, I’ll ally myself with Henry David Thoreau, who once wrote; “You may rely on it you have the best of me in my books, and that I am not worth seeing personally, the stuttering, blundering, clodhopper that I am.”
Unless, of course, you are a fellow clodhopper or have a soft spot for those of us who are muddling along as best we can without a delete key to intervene in real life…If so, feel free to contact me at http://www.kellyeileenhake.com/ any time!