I’ve been thinking lately about vocation, and wondering why I told myself I could become a writer. A writer is, of course, someone who writes, and so when someone like me says: “I want to be a writer,” what he means is that he wants to make a living from his writing. More than that, he probably means that he wants to make a considerable amount of money, and receive widespread accolades, all while creating what he believes constitutes true art. But for shorthand he says: “I want to be a writer.”

One of the surest ways to determine if someone who wants to be a writer can, in fact, become a writer is to examine his output. I know more than a few people who want to be writers, but not so much that they actually write. They think about writing, and talk about it, and perhaps take classes, and occasionally begin a short story, or tap out a blog post. They devote more mental energy to the thought of being writers than to mastering the craft of writing.

But among aspiring writers who actually devote themselves to honing their craft, there is still the distinction between those who make a living at it, and those who do not. This is only tangentially related to talent; Flannery O’Connor noted that if “people can learn to write badly enough, they can make a great deal of money.” It is connected, however, to one’s ability to write in a manner that will attract a paying audience, be they high, low, or middle-brow. Add to this the necessity of attracting a publisher with some marketing muscle, and competing for the decreasing sliver of mental energy devoted to reading, and the would-be writer is by no means assured that his words will ever pay even the interest on his bills.

Why, I have thought more than once, did I think I could make a go at this? It’s a purely selfish question, because I have a job. Insofar as I get paid to write, it’s on freelance gigs. So most days I have more words to set down than minutes to sort them out into paragraphs and scenes and chapters. In my reflective moments I sometimes brood over this reality, and wonder whether I haven’t let a hobby get too big for its britches. So I can turn a phrase every once in a while. Who am I to be a writer?

Perhaps you’ve had a similar period of self-doubt. Maybe you have some skill and passion that you want to pursue, but don’t know if it’s a pipe dream. It was with this in mind that I read the account in Exodus of the building of the tabernacle: “and in the hearts of all who are skillful I have put skill, that they may make all that I have commanded you.” Other translations read: “in the hearts of all who are wise-hearted I have put wisdom.”

What struck me is that God not only gives us skill, He gives us passion. He gives us the desires of our heart. The difficulty is in discerning the difference between our selfishness and His purpose, but these verses tell me not to discount passion. I write because I can’t help it. I write because sometimes, in the midst of it, I feel like I am doing what I was crafted to do. That verse from Exodus, which I’d never noticed before, helps me make sense of that feeling.

The writer by whom I’ve been most inspired, Frederick Buechner, says: “The vocation for you is the one in which your deep gladness and the world’s deep need meet.” At the very least, I’ve got the first half covered. And most days, that’s enough.

Our mistakes here at WMB (grammar, facts, theology, etc.) are never left alone by our thorough and meticulous readers. I just want to say thanks. And I also want to say thanks to the Times, who, at 6:25am (Eastern), allowed a caption on the front page of their website read: “Former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arizona campaigned in the Black River electric co-op in Sumter, S.C. Mr. Huckabee came in third in the Michigan Republican primary.” I have no doubt that someone will be thrown into the East River for this. The image and the caption may have already been changed.

UPDATE! As of 7:15 this morning, Homer woke up.

News of the decline of language has, it seems, been greatly exaggerated. Which is to say, rhetoric - that old timey art of talking and writing - is not dead, not by a longshot. Everybody practices rhetoric every day, in emails, in conversation, in PowerPoint presentations, and on the campaign trail. Obama’s greatest strength is his ability to use language in powerful ways (this author of a new rhetoric book suggests that Bush’s ability to use language is just as powerful), which leads to the question:

Does a great speech make a great politician or leader?

Hillary Rodham Clinton last week pointedly said not necessarily, noting, in a phrase she borrowed from Mario M. Cuomo, “You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.” But [former JFK speechwriter] Mr. Sorensen, who is supporting Mr. Obama, said there was a real link between inspirational oratory and inspirational leadership.

“The most important quality for a president, as Kennedy and Roosevelt demonstrated, is not how many roll call votes he answered sitting in the Senate, but his qualities as a leader who can mobilize people, inspire them, galvanize them, arouse them to action,” he said. “The ability to inspire and excite an audience on the campaign trail is one of the reasons I think Obama will be a success as president.”

Great rhetorical skill is no adjunct to great leadership; it is a part of leadership…because leadership requires persuasion of small and large groups of people, and that’s what rhetoric is all about.

Everybody wants to write a novel or a screenplay.  If you don’t, you’re lying to yourself.  And if you lie to yourself, you might just make a great writer.  People often resolve to write Something Grand right around this time of year, and so, now that we’re well into January, this is right about the time you forgot about wanting to write the Next Great Novel/Movie.  I’ve read too many good books on the writing life, writing stories, writing essays, writing plays and novels and poems and speeches.  This article by George Singleton may be the most practical, helpful How-To I’ve ever read on writing fiction.  And it may be the only How-To-Write-Fiction article ever to include an exercise in recycling aluminum cans.  Here’s part of what Singleton suggests on Day One:

Wake up early and sit in front of the computer, or open up a nice Mead composition notebook. It doesn’t matter. I will assume that you know what a short story is - basically a five thousand word piece of fiction with a recognizable beginning, middle, and end that involves a protagonist trying to best an antagonist. There will be rising action, and conflict, and dialogue, and maybe even a beautiful lyrical passage shoved somewhere in the middle when you’re not quite sure where the story’s headed […] Anyway, write one thousand words on the first day.

Great advice, and so hard to do.

This weekend, for a Christmas party, we were asked to bring white elephant-slash-gag gifts for a nice round of Dirty Santa.  My wife wrapped two frames we’d gotten as wedding presents and never used.  I wrapped a leather journal, making sure to rip out the three used pages before wrapping it.  I am a writer, but I am no writer of diaries.  As you might expect, my gift was snatched by two different people, one of whom was sure that he would fill the nice journal with all kinds of wisdom.  I’m sure he won’t. 

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My instructions are to write a 700-word column for WORLD but I have never once done that in nine years. I have dipped to 680 and more often pushed the upper limit to 740. Come on, writing isn’t factory widget-making, that we should get it to the 1/10,000 of an inch.

I tinker, I tease, I jettison with ease; I compact and compress and my druthers suppress. I “kill the little darlings” and adverbs evict, all in attempts at a precision fit. But still no seven hundred sweet spot.

One day I asked my friend Bubba, a Christian inmate in Texas, to write a letter I could pass to my son Jae, an inmate in Ohio. I gave no instructions other than that. Bubba came through but when I tried to relay the communiqué, it got returned from Ohio stamped “Refused: Prison to Prison Mail.” I wrote to Bubba: “Sorry, we lost, brother.” Bubba wrote back, “No weapon forged against you will prosper.”

I said, “Alright, alright,” and got an idea. I started typing “Hello Jae” into a Word document, and when I got to the end, “Bubba,” I clicked on “word count”: 700. Bingo. I sent it off to WORLD. No prison law says I can’t send my son a magazine article.

The blog statement “Jesus hates religion” is going to get you somewhere with one reader and nowhere with another. (Like the statement “Charles Spurgeon was a world class navel-gazer.”)

So you think about it a minute before hitting “Send.” You consider a fuller, pie-in-the-face-resistant description: “Jesus hates the empty and ritualistic cultic observances falsely called religion.” Even Attila the Hun would be fine with that. But you veto it for its sheer weight.

There is ever the Triangle to keep in mind: the Normative of Scripture truth; the Situational of the reader’s sensibilities; the Existential of one’s conscience.

You remember that Jesus sometimes said relative things in absolute terms, for effect: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). It’s a common enough pedagogical device.

I recently interviewed a seminary professor and asked how he would define “Reformed” to a five year old. He said, “That it’s God who saves us and not ourselves.” Then he hastened to tack on: “Of course, then I would elaborate.”

I knew what he was doing and I told him so, and he smiled and called me perceptive. Then he confided that one is more liable to have one’s words twisted when exactly quoted than when one is paraphrased, because people will take you out of context.

It’s a risk you always take.

A few years ago, after the actor Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn in “The Lord of the Rings”) made some mindless comments on The Charlie Rose Show, I took him to task on my blog. What I didn’t know was that a passel of neo-Nazis are big Viggo fans. Not long after, I discovered from the Web traffic coming to my blog (because I’m vain that way) that the neo-Nazis were having a debate, on their own website, about whether I was a Jew. They’d even posted a picture of me holding my son, so they could examine the shapes of our heads.

You can’t make stuff like this up.

Anyway, I was shocked, and incensed, and so I wrote what I thought would be a biting and hilarious post about it. Well, before long there was a wide-ranging debate in the Comments section of my blog, with a handful of the neo-Nazis weighing in about race and religion, and several of my regular readers arguing with them, and me jumping into the fray from time to time myself.

What sticks with me is that the neo-Nazis, despite their paranoia and the wickedness of their worldview, displayed more civility and logic than some people who post here.

That came to mind Friday, when I decided I was neither going to participate in, nor read, the WORLD webzine comments any more. I don’t have time to spend correcting people who deliberately assume the worst about my motivations, I told myself. I have a PhD in political science, and I worked in Washington, went the internal, preening monologue in my head, and these people want to lecture me about politics?

I got closer to the truth when I admitted that it feels like a wound, to try to make a point in good faith, and to be beset by what seem to be niggling remarks, and sarcastic one-liners, and diatribes about my hypocrisy or ignorance. It takes too much emotional energy, I reasoned. I have to preserve that for the parts of my life where it’s really needed.

Of course that wasn’t really the truth, either. The plain truth of it is that I want to look good to others. I want people to read what I’ve written, hold it up to the light, and celebrate its shimmering brilliance. So while there have been times I felt wronged — believed that a commenter wrongly assessed me as a person, or misread my words, or said something untrue and then failed to apologize when corrected — my indignation still springs from a sinful place, which is my desire to be admired.

Cross it with the fact that I want to see this website become something important, and I have a dilemma. To pull away from comments completely is to forego an opportunity to help make WORLD’s webzine a place where significant and thoughtful discussion — and therefore valuable learning — occurs. But to read them is to end up fuming, because of this nagging self-obsession that I have.

So I prayed about it, and discussed it with my wife. As I grow with her, I am discovering that helpmate means so much more than: someone who will cook your food. She gently confirmed my own suspicions about the matter, which is that I need to get over it, and participate where I think engaging someone might be worthwhile, and not let vanity put me on a path of “setting straight” every person who misperceives or misrepresents what I write, or who is simply mean-spirited.

This wise counsel, in turn, led me to formulate these rules of engagement, which I was going to keep to myself, until some reflection led me to think perhaps some of you might benefit from them as well. At the very least, you’ll know why I ignore some comments and not others.

WOODLIEF’S RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
I will endeavor to exhibit, and will only engage in discourse with those who exhibit, the following qualities:

Civility: Just to be clear, I appreciate an articulate evisceration (Mark Twain’s devastating and hilarious essay on James Fenimore Cooper, for example) and believe that, beneath the right pen, a lampoon or critical essay is a work of art. One usually finds such things written about public figures, who have afforded the critic a sizeable body of words and actions from which to draw conclusions about their motivations, personal qualities, and so on. I think in a Comments forum, however, which endeavors to be something like a roundtable discussion, and where the participants know relatively little about one another’s lives, I ought not to attribute motives, ridicule someone’s point of view, or speak in a generally combative or mean-spirited manner. Civility doesn’t require that I refrain from disagreeing with someone. It means that I begin with the assumptions that: 1) I may be the only Christ someone meets today; 2) the person I’m addressing has good motives; and 3) my responsibility is to make a valuable point, not to score points.

Logic: The Almighty Creator, in his infinite wisdom, bestowed us with a world governed by rules, and with brains designed to grasp those rules. In short: A ain’t B, and there’s not much point in tussling with someone who doesn’t see that.

Humility: If the goal of our discourse is to be understood, we have to be willing to understand, which means we have to — truly, in the deepest part of ourselves — be willing to be wrong. Perhaps it’s possible that one or two of us are never wrong, but the funny thing about such people is that they are indistinguishable from the arrogant errants; there’s no point in talking to members of either group. We should just let them hold forth, and then move on with the discussion.

So there you have it. Feel free to peruse my blog or other published work, find something I’ve written that violates what I’ve said here, and call me a hypocrite. (If you have trouble finding something like that, email me and I’ll point you in the right direction.) Or give me a Bible quote (King James version, please!) that reveals the unrighteousness in one of my proposed rules. Or just call me a big fat stupid doofus, with sugar on top.

But don’t expect a reply.

(PS: I wrote that last sentence with a cheerful countenance. If you don’t believe me, look at my little avatar.)

One Hollywood writer says the writers are about to go on strike, and it’s not because of a bad contract.  It’s because we, America, have let them down.  The Kingdom, Rendition, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, In the Valley of Elah, Redacted - political films all, and ones supposed to be relevant in the most precious way - are not doing so well at the box office.

It’s so sad: Here we were, on a roll, with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in command of Congress, the Clinton Restoration practically a fait accompli, and Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize to use as a doorstop alongside his Oscar - and this is the thanks we get.

Are Americans tired of politics on film, or are these just bad movies, or is there a difference between those two options?

Grammar.  It makes people angry.  The people who love it, the people who hate it.  All of them get angry.  Our president is no master of it, and neither are our cultural prophets (like Flavor-Flave, boyeee).

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