Writing as a Vocation

Like prayer and meditation, writing helps make sense of things, to cut through the clutter of life, to find mental clarity and order—both for the writer himself and in turn for the readers. The act of writing helps the writer to know himself and the reader in turn to know himself, to know that he is not alone. Writing can thus be curative or tonic, a source of healing and wonderment for all concerned.

One of the most curious things about human life is how long it takes to get going. What I have in mind is the fact that a human being is not considered to achieve full maturity until twenty years or more. That is a remarkably long period of gestation, not seen, I suppose, in the rest the animal kingdom. Why do childhood and adolescence take up such a large proportion of our lives? Why don’t we simply grow up in five years instead of twenty? I believe there is a divine message in this. Human beings, unlike other animals, are creatures of reason and soul. Our vocation is to learn, to form our souls for eternity. And yes, we are made for eternity and not merely for the span of our earthly years. Our purpose is not merely to perform a professional job on earth—an activity that will take up a relatively small proportion of our lives. We are to be as children before God, ever docile, ever learning at his feet. Our protracted period of growth symbolizes this perfectly.

Another thing childhood and adolescence accomplishes is to allow us to accumulate a storehouse of experiences and insights, to form our imaginations and beliefs and set of values. Any essayist or creative writer will tell you that he produces his material from deep inside of him, from his own life and being.

It was not until I was a good deal past adolescence that I decided to become a writer, although now I can see that everything before was a preparation for it. Growing up I never planned to be a writer as such. It’s true that I always had an intellectual and artistic temperament and was comparatively isolated and introspective. I had no pronounced interest in the world around me (that much hasn’t changed) and was continually lost in the worlds of music, art, nature, history, faith, and the imagination. Although I disliked school, I loved learning and was constantly reading things on my own. I developed a particular taste for critical writing—reviews and essays in which subtleties of taste and aesthetic perception were delineated. My liking for critical prose has habituated me to look at life in a critical way, almost as if the world were a poem or musical composition.

As I passed on to college and finally began to enjoy scholastic learning, I at times took deep pleasure in the papers and assignments I had to write. These exercises gave me valuable practice in the art of assembling words, sentences, and paragraphs in more or less logical sequence. I still did not, however, imagine myself as a professional writer, which seemed to me then a hopelessly remote and rarified thing. I had assumed I would, like most of the people around me, commute to the metropolis to work in an office from nine to five. There was, too, the world of music, which I knew early on would remain an important sideline for me but never the main source of my living.

It was only after several years of further learning, experience, and reflection that I realized that to be a writer was my calling. I won’t detail the process that led up to this; but suffice to say that I came to see in writing a way to put my mind in order, to express ideas that I had about life, and also to project a sense of the aesthetic quality of language. I realized that it wouldn’t do to experience life in passive manner while keeping my thoughts and reflections to myself. I wanted to be actively involved with the world of thought and ideas, and I wanted my own thoughts and reflections to bear fruit rather than remaining within me. I had no choice but to write, and the form my writing took was the essay and at times the review.

The essay is for me the crown jewel of my life as a writer. It gives free rein to personal expression and reflection about the world, history, culture, faith, Western civilization, and other timeless themes. Over time, as I have come to discover what an essay truly is as distinct from a factual article—namely, a personal meditation that “attempts” (essayer) to get at an aspect of truth—I have tried more and more to write “essayistically,” from inside myself, even if this requires a certain self-revelation that I tend to shy away from by nature. Forming a personal style isn’t something you can contrive; it comes naturally as you keep writing and more and more of your true self shines through. It may be that writing is the ultimate profession where you “learn by doing.”

The second category of my writing consists of study guides for what we here like to call Great Books. In writing these guides, I provide some analysis and commentary on literary classics—works of religion, philosophy, and some fiction too—to students and others needing guidance as they wade through challenging texts. This is a job for which I am also very grateful. What I have discovered is that both the writing jobs I have mentioned—that of essayist and that of writer of study guides—feed into and mutually enrich each other. I am constantly inspired by the texts I am reading to write essays on some aspect of them. And writing the guides has been a grand continuing education for me, acquainting me with a wealth of literary and philosophical classics that I never had a chance to read in school. I am grateful, though, that my schooling laid the groundwork of knowledge and appreciation for these works—some of which, like my current project, Samuel Pepys’ Diary, also happen to be entertaining.

The third genre in which I write is entertaining by nature, and it came as a complete surprise to me: screenplays. While I never planned to be a writer, much less did I ever think I would write movie scripts, or indeed anything that involved making up fictional stories. Yet the screenplays, like the essaying, flowed out of my desire to express ideas—aesthetic, moral, and spiritual ideas. It just so happened that these ideas took visual and narrative form and had to be embodied on a movie screen. With the help of a friend from my parish, I took up learning how to write in the screenplay format. It turned out to be an immense joy and adventure.

My first conception concerned young boy of the 1950s whose life is transformed by winning an audition for a television family comedy. This is in part a nostalgic hommage to the old sitcoms, but in a larger sense a family drama and an overall celebration of the joy of life. My second script dramatized the life of early American author Washington Irving, something never before done. The screenplay genre has offered me new opportunities and new scope for expression. However, a script is only a blueprint; it is not complete, does not really exist, until it is realized on the screen. That is why I am elated that my scripts are now, thanks be to God, in development, and I have high hopes that they will see light someday not too far in the future.

In one of his essays for this journal, Father Dwight Longenecker has quoted a scriptwriter who said: “I want to move the audience so much that they leave the cinema thinking.” This is what I am at least making a stab at, using the sacramental, the incarnational dimension of visual storytelling.

My days all resemble each other in certain basic respects: study, reading, music listening and playing (principally on violin), spiritual activities, and time taken out for physical exercise. Out of my reading comes my writing, sometimes with struggle and difficulty. I would like nothing so much as to be a facile writer, but alas, I am not. I piece together my pieces slowly and painstakingly—sometimes painfully—and I need a strong stimulus in order to write anything at all. Usually, this stimulus comes from reading something that another, more seasoned author has written (The Imaginative Conservative is great for this purpose). I am mindful that I stand on the shoulders of giants, adding in my very modest way to a grand tradition particularly as regards conservative philosophy.

I have found too that my various activities in life form a circle of interests that mutually enrich and turn upon each other and that meet in the arena of writing. I am constantly putting myself in contact with ideas and thoughts of the past. Thus, I make myself constantly susceptible to the spark of inspiration, if and when it strikes. For a writer, the world is his oyster, the whole universe his subject. There’s nothing about which one can’t write. Throughout my life I have been very close to the arts, and especially classical music, both listening and playing. I draw sustenance as a writer from my love for beauty and art, as well as from the deep questions of faith. The transcendentals of truth and beauty constantly intertwine in my life and daily activities, and they all meet in my writing. (Incidentally, “writing” for me always implies the use of the aid of that modern friend the word processor, although I do use pen and paper for note-taking and brainstorming. To my way of thinking the means one uses to write are not so important as the result.)

I am not an academic nor am I affiliated with any institution. I am simply a private independent individual who writes. As such, I feel I have achieved a happy life for myself. There is nothing more pleasurable, it seems to me, than a life of thinking, learning, and sharing what one has found. I should note in passing that a writer—at least this writer—needs and thrives on solitude and on a quiet and ordered lifestyle. For me to think at all requires that I keep my mind calm and undisturbed, and thus I find myself deliberately avoiding certain news or information that may upset me. A certain detachment is the necessary price to pay for following this way of life.

The writing life allows one to float above the banalities of life pretty well. I can imagine no greater adventure of the mind than to develop ideas against the great Western tradition. I also try, in what I write, to shine a light on nooks and crannies of the history of culture or express an angle of vision that is I fancy novel or unique. One major perk is that my work allows me to stay at home, where everyone belongs, surely. I’ve reached a point where I can no longer imagine myself reporting to work at an office other than my own home study.

While the writing life is not as easy as it may seem, it is a glorious life. It is certainly never boring. After finishing a piece, a writer feels an extraordinarily deep satisfaction, a pride (of the good kind), a catharsis of self-expression, and a sense that he has fulfilled an aesthetic form. Like prayer and meditation, writing helps make sense of things, to cut through the clutter of life, to find mental clarity and order—both for the writer himself and in turn for the readers. The act of writing helps the writer to know himself and the reader in turn to know himself, to know that he is not alone. Writing can thus be curative or tonic, a source of healing and wonderment for all concerned.

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The featured image is “Sir Francis Laking and Sir Frederick Treves,” oil painting by Harry Herman Salomon after a photograph. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.