The Lint Trap

Last year a former co-worker of mine from Arizona invited me to join a Facebook group she'd created. She and another online friend had decided to give up FB games for Lent and write instead. So they created the FB group which we loving call the LINT trap now and we were each challenged to write for 40 days in a row. Most of us (there are around 20 members) met the challenge. I wrote every single day of Lent last year even the day my Grandmother died and the day we buried her. Those days were short little sentences and phrases, maybe a paragraph but I wrote. Because I am a writer. Runners run. Smokers smoke. Writers write. 

As we come up this week to the one-year anniversary of our LINT trap, a member posed some questions as we get ready for our next 40-day challenge. Below are my answers to her questions and my own ramblings about writing during Lent and every other day of the year.

As a Methodist I grew up without the concept of giving something up for Lent unless you were Catholic then it seemed the only difference was you ate fish on Fridays. But my family never ate fish so it didn't really affect me. In college I think I tried the giving up thing but it never felt right. Usually I try to 'do' something instead - spend the time in extra study or whatnot. I am not sure this year; I am all over the place spiritually, mentally.

Why do I write? I write because I don't know what else to do. I've always written. I can still see the first top-bound spiral legal pad I picked out at Wal-mart and filled. Then the next. It's just who I am. Some people date inappropriate men. Some people tell bad jokes. Some people make really good banana bread. Some people do surgery on brains. I write. And I don't know how to stop. I don't know what I would do if I had to. In fact, the other night, I thought about stopping. At least stopping the journey to write professionally. I said the words out loud - "I'm done". There was talk of packing boxes and getting a job as a secretary somewhere innocuous. And then I started hyperventilating and shaking and it was horrible. I had this physical reaction (and I am sure some of that is still the emotions of the whole last month but...). So that's that. I just can't stop. I can't. Physically or emotionally. Because apparently if I try, I freak out. Physically and emotionally.

And here's the weird part (at least it seems weird to me): trying to squeeze my soul out through my fingers never scares me. Writing my novel, never afraid. Writing script after script or blog post or devotional, never afraid. Living life every day, making grown up decisions, dealing with people: fear. Lots of it. But when writing? Never. And that tells me all I need to know. That being a writer is who I am and what I should do, what I have to do.

And yes, I often feel like someone, mostly the characters, is speaking through me. I don't really feel like its God or some higher being, I just feel like it's the stories themselves, they're begging to come out, and when they do sometimes I don't recognize them. I wrote a short story in college about a car accident. In it a girl realizes that she'll never be the same because the boy she loved but never told dies. When my writers' group read it, they all thought it was my story. It wasn't, it was that character's. Same goes for scripts - I just type the words. The voices, the truths, they come from some greater place, some place far away. I'm just the reporter. And I love it. Every single moment of it. Even when I hate it. I love it.