IVP - Behind the Books - January 2008 Archives

A Muse Meant

Please welcome a guest blogger: L. L. Barkat. She is the author of the upcoming InterVarsity Press book Stone Crossings. I asked her to write a blog in response to Dave Zimmerman's "The Sweet Spot." Dave blogged about the long process of editing and then the lovely moment at the end of the road when he was being reminded why he wanted to publish the book in the first place. So here are Barkat's thoughts about what inspires authors. --Cindy Bunch

I remember studying the poets of long ago. For them, a "muse" meant something along the lines of imaginary blonde-haired women who stirred their passions, so they could face impossible tasks like stacking beauty into rhyme and meter. These ethereal blondes seemed to send just the right instructions at just the right time. I’m not sure how they did it. A letter in the poet’s mailbox. Dreams. Or maybe leading their charges, by invisible hand, to the perfect daffodil field on the perfect blue-sky day.

Such muses present challenges to writers who prefer brunettes, who forget to check their mail on a regular basis, and who opt to eat nachos on the couch instead of taking walks. No matter. The Modern Muse Preparatory School is onto this.

At the MMPS (not to be confused with “mumps”), modern writers find exactly who they need to get through the writing process, from soup to nuts. Take me, for instance. Last year, a friend asked if I could tell her about my muse. Up ‘til then, I didn’t even know that the MMPS had assigned me a muse. As it turned out, I was apparently an extra-needy case. Because when I searched through my writing closet, I discovered I had multiple muses—which is sometimes, but not always, as bothersome as having mumps.

Anyway, I told my friend that my muse is the guy who has just now yawned in the middle of a sermon, the young woman who cannot face her abuser, the couple who thinks they should exit their crumbling marriage. I didn’t mention it at the time, but I have other muses too: people who like the clowns that only come out at half-time, anyone who needs an eave to duck under in the rain, maybe even the person who’s forgotten to listen to his dreams.

As it turns out, I also have a blonde-haired muse who sends me mail—of the e-sort—that I check on a regular basis. Being an editor, she has given her life to help writers like me get off the couch and fed me proverbial soup when I was feeling nuts. I’m still trying to decide if this gives her rights to my nachos. But I may just keep them for my personal amusement.

Visit L. L.Barkat's blog Seedlings in Stone.

Slowing Down

I believe that a hallmark of good spiritual writing is that it causes the reader to read slowly. Fine writing has that effect on a reader most of the time. Because the ideas are rich. Because there's a lovely turn of phrase to savor. But there's something more--it's the very tone of the book that slows the pace. It's similar to Christian meditation. We sit and get quiet and let our blood pressure drop.

This is very different from the recent experience many of us had of racing through Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at breakneck speed. That was a great reading experience as well, but it didn't stir up a desire to slow down and savor life. (I was also driven by the need to read fast before another family member grabbed it away from me.)

It is also different from reading, say, Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics.* There we read slowly because of the depth and complexity of the ideas. Our brains need time to process the meanings. It's excellent to have our intellect challenged in this way. The writings of many of the church fathers and saints require this kind of slow careful reading just to get the meaning. But with contemporary spiritual writing it is a different quality I am after.

When I read Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk or Henri Nouwen's Genesee Diary, I read slowly. I'm not trying to race to the end because I'm enjoying the journey so much. I'm rereading sentences not to gain clarity but because I want them to sink deep into my own soul.

Good spiritual writing helps the reader start doing the spiritual work.

*About Church Dogmatics: I am obliged to note that that one of my colleagues does read this as devotional material. Nevertheless, I would say that Barth's work is fairly characterized primarily in the genre of theology.

Spiritual Formation for Authors

This post appeared on this blog in August, and it got spammed off the site over the holidays, so here it is again. Seems like a good post for anyone who's doing a January discernment process.

I find that sometimes people hit a point in their ministry and personal life where they need to write. What they have
learned in their vocational and spiritual life is ready to be offered to others. At that point there may be a lot that wants to come out of an author.

I was talking with Keith Meyer of Church of the Open Door about some different book writing ideas that he has. As
he's being pulled in a number of potential writing directions, he has worked with a spiritual director to outline some key questions for himself to use in deciding what to write. I think these are excellent questions for any author to consider. They are

What do I want?
What does the publisher want?
What do people want?
What does God want me to do?

Most likely, the place where all of those questions converge will be an excellent book.

The Sweet Spot

Maybe it's professional immaturity or personal failing, but when I get too close to something I'm working on, I go a little crazy. I made many a high school student anxious and even scared when I was planning high-school led church services and worship events back in the day. Somewhere along the way I discerned that it would be better for everyone if I kept to myself during any such production process, and so now I spend most of my time in an office by myself.

I spend that time, however, poring over the same manuscripts for nine months to a year, and so most days I'm still going a little crazy--or as I've lovingly labeled it, "going editorial."

Going editorial means reaching the breaking point where you've deleted one too many obviously errant commas, you've read one too many times the same sentence that you've pleaded with an author to change, you've sent the same contract or cover design or manuscript proposal through the same gauntlet of approval one too many times. The cyclical nature of business can get downright Sisyphean:

read the proposal
acquire the proposal
read the chapters
recommend revisions
read the whole manuscript
recommend revisions
read the revised manuscript
remind the author of the recommended revisions that were overlooked
read the second revision
read the copyeditor's remarks
advocate for the copyeditor to the author
review the author's responses to the copyeditor
commisserate with the author about the copyeditor's shortcomings
review the page proofs
review the author's reaction to the page proofs
review the proofreader's review of the page proofs
review the corrected page proofs
review the printer's preliminary work
review the final product
receive the critical reviews and the gleeful reader notifications of spelling or grammatical errors
rinse
repeat

But every now and then--and it probably happens at least once with every project--you hit that sweet spot. After a brief reprieve from the steady exposure to a manuscript (maybe the author's been revising it, maybe the proofreader's been proofing it, maybe the printer's been printing it), you see the thing again, and you notice one of those things that first endeared you to it, one of those insights or turns of phrases that made you however many months ago say "I simply must spend a good chunk of the next nine months to a year of my life watching this thing become a book."

That's the sweet spot, and in moments such as this I find myself at peace, and everybody in the office finds me a bit more tolerable.

I hit the sweet spot just this morning, in fact. I was flipping through a manuscript before approving it for the printer and turned the page to an idea that I can't wait to share with the leadership at my church. This book--this book that's been a burr in my brain for months now--has the potential to change things in all kinds of churches for the better. And that's enough to compel me to keep pushing.

So here's to the sweet spot. May your tribe increase. And don't bother asking what book I'm talking about; it might as well be any of them, really.

I Got Nothing

We're closing in on one month since our last Behind the Books post, which anyone will tell you is a cardinal sin of blogging and an outright scandal for a multiple-contributor blog such as this one. But when you have nothing to say, what can you do?

I'll tell you what you can do. You can raid the archives.

InterVarsity Press is a "backlist" publisher, which means that we publish for the ages. Or, if you want to state it in less visionary, more practical terms, we rely on books selling well beyond their first year to keep our program running. That's led to our IVP Classics series and fiftieth-anniversary editions of more than one of our publications, among other things, but it also affects our outlook more generally. We seek input from our forebears as we project forward with our publishing program; we recommend books from decades past to speak truth into contemporary concerns.

In that spirit, I hereby buy us a few more weeks by reposting an entry from our sister blog, Strangely Dim, originally posted in spring of 2004. Enjoy!

***

It was bound to happen. You write five hundred words a week and eventually you’ll run out of things to write. I’ll call it writer’s block, demon oppression, whatever, but I’ve got nothing, and I’ve got 464 more words to go telling you about it.

You come to regard yourself as a deep thinker when you spend as much time as I do putting your thoughts on paper—or more accurately, committing them to digitized memory. (Nice move—eight fewer words I have to write.) And so, when you can’t think of anything, you come to pretty much an identity crisis: If I don’t have this, what do I have? If I can’t do this, what can I do?

When I first toyed with the idea of a weekly column, I was on fire. I kicked out four months’ worth of mini-essays in a couple of weeks. Several months later I started posting them online, and the thrill of that new horizon spurred even more frantic typing on my PC and scribbling of graffiti script on my PDA. But several months after that, I find myself struggling to move beyond a witty headline. Even this confession buys me only a measly seven days—then I’m back to scratching my head and doubting my calling.

They tell you to always write something, to keep writing no matter how frustrating or exhausting or absurd the experience or the end product is. The newness of writing wears off dreadfully quickly, and when your dash becomes a walk, you either keep walking or you get nowhere. Strangely Dim is my exodus, I’m coming to discover. Inevitably, it seems, it has become pretty much a long walk.

I could carry the analogy forward, but I can’t figure out what the golden calf would be. What’s the quick payoff that would make giving up on Strangely Dim when I run short of ideas sound like a reasonable thing to do? Even the golden calf cost something, after all. Gold doesn’t come cheap, and before the Israelites had a calf to worship, they had to throw all their gold in the fire. What could be worth my doing something stupid like that?

I guess it boils down to three possibilities: (1) I’m stroking my ego by maintaining Strangely Dim, and I ought to take advantage of my lapse of imagination to walk away and not look back; (2) I’m trying to protect my fragile ego by using this lapse of imagination as an excuse to quit, and I need to suck it up and keep going; (3) my ego has nothing to do with this, and there’s really little consequence to whether I keep writing Strangely Dim or stop doing it, so I might as well do what I really want—which is to keep writing and keep posting. Strangely Dim, for all the work it’s caused me, has always been a gift, a luxury item I could never have acquired without someone else’s generosity (like the gold the Israelites carried into the desert), and one I can hardly see myself casting aside so frivolously.

Hey, look at that: I made it past the five-hundred-word mark! See you next week.