By Terry Carroll
On Saturday May 17, 2025 at St. Thomas Public Library, former St. Thomas Times-Journal reporter (turned adjunct prof at Redeemer University) Thomas Froese said something foolish to Elgin Writers Guild members and interested members of the public: “Your writing group is doing something very valuable by meeting regularly to talk about writing and words … There’s something sacred and holy about working with words and story.”
Say what? Sacred? Holy?
Are you high, Professor Tom?
Good sir, you have to know, or know of, writers who are drunks, weirdos, junkies, freaks … or at the very least obsessive compulsive introverts, control freaks, unreliable parents, liars.
Then again, here’s what Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Marilynne Robinson has a preacher man say in her novel Gilead: “For me, writing has always felt like praying,”
Oddball Presbyterian Church minister Kirk Winslow in his Jesus At 2 AM podcast has a series called “Loving God 101, an introduction to spiritual formation.” In this five-part series, Winslow makes the case that anyone can develop a closer relationship with God by engaging in exercises or practice that originated with St. Benedict.
Here’s a brief summary:
Number One: The first rule of the spiritual life is: Show up. Bring the real you to the real God.
Number Two: Do not despair. Aridity is not foreign to the spiritual path, but do not lose hope.
Number Three: Don’t leave. Plant roots. Build a life. In a place. With people. Don’t bail out.
Number four: Do not expect perfection.
Number five: Examine yourself regularly. Start where you are, not where you wish you could be.
Do those “rules” apply to the writing life? Why, yes, they do.
- Show up. Put bum in chair regularly. You may not be writing well, but it is your writing. Better to write poorly than to write nothing.
- Do not despair. You will often feel like nobody will ever publish what you are writing because it is so godawfully unpublishable. Do not lose hope. All good writing is rewriting.
- Don’t leave. When you become convinced that no sane human would ever publish your rubbish, it will be tempting to abandon the whole enterprise and do something far more profitable and sensible. Instead of bailing out, reorganize your life so you make a living somehow while carving out time to put bum in seat. Regularly. Whatever “regularly” means to you.
- Number Four: Do not expect perfection. Rewriting can be an infinite game. Know when to stop.
- Know thyself. Keep an eye on what you’re good at. And what readers respond to among the muck you eventually show the world. Don’t try to write like Stephen King. Many of the thousands of words he penned are overwritten junk. Not so different from yours.
- What? Six points? Remember Jesus came for spinners of dross and debris and dreck like you. The perfect didn’t need him.
Terry, the president of Elgin Writers Guild, can be reached writing barely publishable dross any day of the week, sometimes even on Sundays. Email: terry@carrollgroup.ca.