Writer. Contributing Editor at The Discarded Image. Digital Content Strategist. Here's where I publicly explore the books I'm reading, the projects I'm working on, and other current interests. L’Engle on writing in community
I finished Walking on Water a week or two ago, but as I mentioned in previous posts, I have been ruminating on it as a “writer’s devotional†of sorts. I am still going back over my notes and thinking through passages that particularly struck me; her comments on the collective efforts of writers within their individual communities, for instance.
Early in Walking on Water, L’Engle quotes Jean Rhys on a helpful metaphor of the writing life:
All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.
The idea is not that what we write is unimportant (we certainly don’t want to pollute the lake), but that we see ourselves as “servants of the work,†as L’Engle calls it. Rather than seeking to be a tributary to the lake, we should take humble joy in the privilege of serving the lake at all.
In a later passage, she relates this serving-as-we-are-gifted to a biblical parable, recorded in Matthew 20, in which a farmer hires workers to harvest his vineyard. Some are hired in the morning, some at noon, and some at the last hour to be sure the harvest is completed on time, and at day’s end all the workers receive the same wage—to the consternation of those who toiled all day.
The great ones are still the best mirrors for us all because the degree of the gift isn’t what it’s all about….Perhaps it’s something like the parable of the workers in the vineyard; maybe those who worked through the heat of the day were the Michelangelos and Leonardos and Beethovens and Tolstoys. Those who were able to work only one hour served their gift of work as best they could. And as in Alice in Wonderland, everybody gets prizes; there is the same quality of joy in turning a perfect bowl on the potter’s wheel as in painting the Sistine Chapel.
The important thing is to recognize that our gift, no matter what the size, is indeed something given us, for which we can take no credit, but which we may humbly serve, and, in serving, learn more wholeness, be offered wondrous newness.
I think that’s a perceptive analogy. I must write. But I must not strive to be Tolstoy, to be listed next to him at the top of the day’s work roster; instead I can be—I am—satisfied just contributing to the same body of water, the same heap of clipped grapes at the center of the vineyard. Did I produce as much as he did? No. But I accepted the vineyard owner’s offer and labored diligently until sunset. It is a privilege simply to participate in the same task as Tolstoy, both because of the artists like him with which I get to commune and because of the satisfaction of using my gifts as they were meant to be used, however limited they may be in comparison.
So L’Engle reminds me that I am part of a vast writing community. But that community extends beyond the shores of the lake, too—I am also part of a larger community that feeds my writing even as my writing feeds the lake. L’Engle puts it this way:
The building of a novel is also corporate work. The writer at the desk is indeed writing in isolation, but (for me, at least) this isolation must be surrounded by community, be it the community of family, village, church, city.
Parents and siblings and bloggers who read my work, friends who ask me how it’s going and exchange essays with me for the benefit of mutual critique, the nieces and nephews who pull me away from my desk and remind me how to just be—all sustain and inspire me as I toil away at my trickle of words. And this is an important reminder for a writer who struggles to develop personal discipline. Sometimes I need to set aside the innumerable distractions (both inside and out of my head); at other times, I need to do a better job of being actively grateful toward my community for the nourishment they provide.
So, Community, thank you! And now, to heed this advice, I’m off to balance all this ruminating by helping my mom paint her family room.
