This is my 1000th Sharp Edges column. At around 50 columns a year, that’s almost 20 years of writing a weekly column!
“How do you find something to write about every week?” people ask me.
That’s easy – by paying attention. To the world around me. To my own reactions. To what other people are saying.
Given the number of issues in the news each week, the problem is not finding a topic, but selecting which topic to focus on.
But there is a second step. If a local story grabs my attention, how does it connect to a larger topic? If an international story, how does it relate to life here in the Okanagan Valley. Or closer still, in little Lake Country. Or even in my own home.
There’s no point in raging about Donald the Dump – or lobbying for an endangered salamander in the Congo – if it isn’t relevant in some way to life here and now.
Macro and micro, universal and particular, belong in the same picture. I don’t care whether I zoom out or zoom in; the big picture and the small picture belong together.
Writer’s block?
“But how do you go about writing it?”
The easy answer is, start writing.
The excuses I often hear for not writing are just that – excuses. If you want to write, you have to write. And then write some more.
There’s no such thing as “Writer’s Block.” Writer’s block is simply two words for procrastination.
Don’t be put off by a blank page. Or a blank screen. Or a blank mind, for that matter. Start writing, and keep writing. Keep writing until you discover you’re actually saying something.
If necessary, pretend you’re unloading your feelings to a personal friend. (Or an enemy.) Write the smart retort you couldn’t think of earlier.
But always write TO someone. Writing to everyone means writing to no one. When you write to someone specific, all kinds of people will believe you were writing just to them.
Tips to keep going
Forgive me, please, for indulging in my pet topic. Writing is my business, after all.
When you write, don’t stop to correct your spelling and grammar. Don’t pause to look up a word in your dictionary or a fact in Wikipedia; just insert a note to yourself to check this later.
And don’t ask your spouse or partner for the name of that person, you know, the one who…. You knew why you needed that information. The name won’t make any difference to what you wanted to say next. But if you break your flow of thought, by the time you start again you’ve forgotten what your next thought was going to be.
So get it out. Get it into words. Get them down. Because until you fix those words in print, you can’t start to improve them.
Along the way, you may discover what you actually wanted to say.
I find that writing my thoughts out, as inflexible and unforgiving black marks on white paper, forces me to clarify my thoughts.
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Editing yourself
“And that’s all there is to it?”
Hardly. Now the hard work starts. You have to make your ramblings publishable. You have to learn to be utterly ruthless with your inspired words.
Check every fact, every name, every spelling. I’ve learned that lesson the hard way – whenever I rely on my memory, I’m likely to make a mistake. A mistake in personal conversation is embarrassing; a mistake displayed to a thousand readers is humiliating.
Be willing to re-organize. Find the most catching, compelling, attention-grabbing item in your text. Move it to the beginning.
Find the point you’re trying to make. If you can’t say it in one sentence, rewrite until you can. Move that sentence to the end.
Now rewrite everything in between to fit your new opening and closing. Throw out every word that doesn’t relate to the point you want to make. Especially your cleverest lines. The only person who cares about your genius is you. Treat yourself as harshly as an uninterested reader would.
Once upon a time, rewriting meant physically retyping pages. Over, and over. Computers now let me move paragraphs with ease. But I still have to re-read every word to make sure I haven’t shuffled my cards out of order.
Typically, I go through three or four revisions before I submit a column.
There. Another one done. Wasn’t that easy?
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Copyright © 2018 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
To send comments, to subscribe, or to unsubscribe, write jimt@quixotic.ca
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YOUR TURN
It’s purely coincidence – after I wrote last week’s column on scams and scammers, CBC TV did a series of broadcasts about the source of the fake Canada Revenue Agency calls. Fortunately, their research mostly confirms what I was saying.
Tom Watson commented, “Most of us -- whether we're dealing with an individual or a corporation, and maybe also a politician -- start out from a position of trust. But then when we find our trust was misplaced that slow erosion begins towards the point where we hardly trust anyone. It's important to safeguard ourselves, so as not to fall prey to those who would take advantage of our vulnerability, but operating from an automatic mistrust of everyone is not, I don't think, healthy for ourselves as individuals nor for society as a whole...and your concluding line suggests you don't want to go there either.”
Isabel Gibson agreed: “The clumsy scams are merely annoying. The sophisticated ones are scary.
“You say that ‘our society used to run on trust.’ That made sense when we knew the members of our society. But now, when we're dealing with folks we've never met, blind trust doesn't make sense. I don't believe that most people are out to take advantage: I believe that it's a small percentage. But it's a small percentage of a big number . . .”
Robert Caughell: “In a cartoon called Pickles, the man answers the phone saying ‘Police department, fraud division’. The caller hangs up. Maybe we should all answer the phone like this when we do not recognize the number?”
JT: I have occasionally used the line, “This call is being recorded for monitoring purposes…” It often results in the caller hanging up.
Sheila Carey wrote that she “didn't think I had anything to add to this sad state of affairs. Then this morning I got an email from PayPal that looks absolutely legitimate. The right logos, good English. No immediate charge, transaction details, etc., like the one you received. Just one small problem -- I don't have a PayPal account. So, like banks I don't deal with, it’s an obvious scam. But if I had a PayPal account I can see where it would be worrying.
“I'm going with [the policy that] if it looks the least suspicious it gets trashed.”
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. (This is to circumvent filters that think too many links constitute spam.)
Ralph Milton’s latest project is a kind of Festival of Faith, a retelling of key biblical stories by skilled storytellers like Linnea Good and Donald Schmidt, designed to get people talking about their own faith experience. It’s a series of videos available on Youtube. I suggest you start with his introductory section: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u6qRclYAa8
Ralph’s “Sing Hallelujah” -- the world’s first video hymnal -- is still available. It consists of 100 popular hymns, both new and old, on five DVDs that can be played using a standard DVD player and TV screen, for use in congregations who lack skilled musicians to play piano or organ. More details at wwwDOTsinghallelujahDOTca
Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. <http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca>
I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom
Alva Wood’s satiric stories about incompetent bureaucrats and prejudiced attitudes in a small town -- not particularly religious, but fun; alvawoodATgmailDOTcom to get onto her mailing list.
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom or twatsonATsentexDOTnet