I first got into writing because I loved books. I loved narrative. I loved the journey of narrative. I loved words. I loved how words would shape a world—the world of a novel. I loved getting absorbed by it all. I wanted to imitate it. When I first started to write, my attempts were but poor reflections of my favourite authors (think Enid Blyton crossed with Lucy Maud Montgomery and a bit of fairy tales thrown in). I wrote my first “book” when I was 10; my second when I was 13; my third when I was 15 (all of these disasters are too embarrassing to ever see the light of a publishing hour). I biographed my life at 14. I waxed (and waned) poetic at 16. And then I got into the creative writing course at the University of Wollongong.
Why did I write? I wrote because it was fun. Because it provided an outlet for my daydreaming habit. Because I loved to tell stories and get lost in the whole narrative process. Because it was fun.
And it's still fun. But I find I have different priorities. I have different reasons for writing. Over the years I've come to develop a kind of “creed” statement for my writing. Here it is:
(NB: I am indebted to Greg Clarke for some of this material.)
1. God, the Writer
God's word is powerful. By his word he created the world and by his word he sustains it. His son is his word in the flesh (John 1:1-5, 14). Our God is a God who writes—not just the Bible through human agents—but the very finger of God is said to have etched out his commands on stone tablets in Exodus 31:18 and now continues to write his word on tablets of human hearts (Jeremiah 31:33). God chose to preserve what he wanted us to know—what he wanted to communicate to us—in written form (epistles, Psalms, law, prophecy, history, etc.) And, when God created the world and made us in his own image, he also gave us the gift of writing to use for his glory.
2. Permanence
"Writing ... [is] words that stay,” says one of the characters from The Dark Crystal. The written word has a certain permanence that transcends time in a way that the spoken word does not. Through writing, a student in 21st century AD can read what Herodotus wrote in sixth century BC. Writing enables us to preserve and store the things we want to remember—biographies, diaries, scribbling appointments on calendars. We should be mindful of this permanence and use our words with care (in our technological text-filled age, we have grown far too casual).