In 2018, my words dried up. I started that year with Plans—plans for my blog and plans for the novel I started in November 2017. I also started that year with hopes—hopes for connecting with God and myself more deeply through a year-long observance of Advent-waiting and hopes for answers to questions I was still in the process of identifying.
None of that happened.
Clearly, the writing definitely didn’t happen. I posted a couple of times here on the blog at the start of the year, but very quickly all the words dried up, and while there was a lot going on that I could have easily written about, I simply couldn’t find the words to communicate them coherently. They refused to be condensed down into communicable size and form.
I did do a lot of writing, but it was mostly in the form of prayers written in my journal. All other writing was basically nonexistent, except for a couple of specific topics or assignments produced for the online outlets I sometimes contribute to. It was a hard year, though, so while at the time I was frustrated with myself for not being able to produce more, I now look back and have much more grace for my 2018 self. As I’ve posted before, both here and on Instagram, 2018 was a year of being beaten up and metaphorically left for dead by life, so it’s understandable that my mind and heart and spirit and body were too occupied with surviving to spend any energy coming up with any words other than the faltering ones being desperately tossing up to the throne room of Heaven.
Last year started off with a literal kick in the face from life, but life settled down and gave me some breathing room eventually. Enough so that words started returning to me. I could feel the closed-pot simmering that had been happening all the previous year coming to an end, and it was about time to begin dishing up the stew and feasting on it. Ideas were forming, and I was excited! I even put together an impressive list of post ideas for this space. In the end, though, none of it materialized.
But I was writing!
I was writing stories! Mostly I spent the year working on a fanfiction story. It came in fits and spurts, but when I finished it just before Christmas, it was over 40,200 words long! That is book-length, and I am still stunned at the reality that I basically wrote a book in 2019. Or course, it’s unpublishable in any form (print, digital, online, etc.), except on fanfiction forums, because it’s based on something that already exists in the world and that is not owned by me. But who cares?
I wrote a book!!!
And then, just as I was coming to the end of that one, I got an idea for another one. The new one might be a script or it might be a novel—I haven’t decided yet—but ultimately it’s a story I love and want to write, enough so that I am willing to sit down and do the suffering inherent in the act! And that is a really big deal.
In 2019, I also started having ideas again for the novel I started in 2017, which is a fictionalized account of my own healing journey. I started it as part of National Novel Writing Month that year, but when I got to the end of the month, I had completed Part 1 (15,000 words!) but had literally no idea where it went from there. Well, I knew some larger plot points that would happen for the character later on in the book, but there was a large blank canyon standing between where Part 1 ended and the points I knew would come much later, and I had no idea how to connect them. Ultimately, I think that was because there were still large swaths of unexplored territory in my own internal landscape that corresponded to that blankness in the story, which meant I needed to do some more internal work before I would be able to continue. And 2018 ended up being chock full of internal work.
I’d be lying if I claimed that I am now on the other side of that internal work. I’m not. In fact, 2019 was a year of nothing but digging up all the bones that had been dumped in the mass graves in my soul. But those bones were all a jumbled mess, and the work of connecting them to the skeletons of their origins is only just beginning—if it’s begun at all. That is to say, I might still be excavating. It’s really hard to tell at this point.
But the good news is that I’m writing again, one way or the other. Hopefully, some of that writing will land here once again. I certainly have more ideas being added to that list I started in 2019, and I am being more intentional this year about finding words to capture those ideas and bring them down out of the clouds into form and substance that can be considered and digested.
I had to start a new journal this year. I really wanted another novel journal like the Anne of Green Gables journal I’ve been using the last couple of years. I thought about getting the other AoGG journal in the series, but ultimately I landed on the Little Women novel journal, mainly because of the quote on the cover.
” . . . good strong words that mean something.” I want that for myself this year, not just in the stories I write but also in the rest of my living. I have spent the past couple of years feeling lost in a sea of wounds and thought patterns and ideas that felt too big to rise above. I was lucky to keep my head above water; getting out and scaling the surrounding cliffs to look down and see the morass in its entirety felt like an utter impossibility. But it isn’t an impossibility, not with God. So this year I am praying for clarity, for synthesis, for good, strong words to paint the pictures I need to understand and move forward and find a little more healing than existed yesterday.
And so I will write on. Whatever that looks like, I will do it. It might not show up here; I hope it does, and I will try to make sure it does, but I’m not going to force the writing into my own preconceived little boxes. Instead, I will follow where it leads, whatever it’s form or medium, and I’m pretty sure doing so will be one more means of hearing the Spirit whispering in my ear,
“This is the way; walk in it.”
{ punctuate : faith } 