God the Good Writer

I have lately, as I might have mentioned one or a hundred times, been thinking about writer’s block–the great stumbling stone that trips me up every morning as I go to write, the vast appalling page that gapes at me, mocking me, taunting me.

There are different kinds of reasons that make it difficult to write. The first, and more usual for me, is that you can’t always talk about whatever is really on your mind. Delicacy precludes the total unburdening of the soul at every turn. I might be worried about someone about whom I cannot speak. I might be thinking something that nobody could possibly be interested in. I might be stuck in some kind of circumstance that involves other people. When this is the lay of the land, writing is a dancing, skirting affair. How can I say something interesting, that is true and real, without mentioning at all what is really on my mind? This kind of stumbling stone is inevitable and ordinary. And I’ve found it good hard, rewarding work to try to climb over the trouble and fill up the page No Matter the peculiar circumstances of life.

The second stumbling stone is more devastating. It’s the one I’ve been nicking my shins on lo these many weeks. And that is Happiness.

Writing, to be compelling or interesting at all requires some kind of trouble, some kind of trial that is worked through to somebody’s satisfaction. Click bait is so alluring because right there, in the title, is some kind of troubling outrage. The soul longs to know what bad thing somebody else did.The reader wants to read it, and the writer needs it to keep going. I am forever driven to the page because I am a melancholic person. I prefer to be depressed. It suits me. There is always some misery that my mind is turning over (not one single one, though, lots and lots).

Sadness, heartbreak, trouble–this is the stuff of good writing. Even PG Wodehouse, who can never be accused of bad writing, drives each story forward with a series of terrifyingly (especially if they happened to you) embarrassing situations. His characters are caught in the grip of ridiculous circumstances. Problems have to be solved. The uncle potters around ruining everything.

It has been in this moment of being too settled and happy to write about anything (I entirely and completely blame this house–it is 100% the fault of living somewhere that settles the mind) that it occurred to me that God, the best and most perfect writer, is so good because of his coping with the most devastating problems. He subjects himself to the suffering, the pathos, to all the situations that we try so hard to run away from.

The great tableaux of trouble–pride, rejection, loss, exile, bareness, love, death–these are the center of God’s life with us. If you come at the bible thinking it’s going to be a useful bucket of tips to make your life go along more comfortably, you will probably give up reading after the first few pages, having stubbed your toe on the perilous mountain of the perfect plot.

God creates in beauty and grace. His creation rises up and spits in his face. He, then, begins the long arduous trial of winning back his creation. It’s simple, it’s elegant, it’s page after page of emotion, of God calling out to the one who doesn’t want him. Is there any sorrow worse than that of a rejected lover? A parent whose child has taken his share and walked away into the wild imaginations of lust and selfishness? Of the destruction wrought by pride? This is the stuff of heartbreak, woe. And it makes, if you’re up for it, great reading.