pondering writing

This blog is practice. Some of you respond well to what I write, how I write... THAT I write. That helps me. Because this is all practice.

A year ago I read these words by Frederick Buechner:

Write about what you really care about. Write about what truly matters to you - not just things to catch the eye of the world but things to touch the quick of the world the way they have touched you to the quick, which is why you are writing about them. Write not just with wit and eloquence and style and relevance but with passion. Then the things that your books make happen will be things worth happening - things that make the people who read them a little more passionate themselves for their pains, by which I mean a little more alive, a little wiser, a little more beautiful, a little more open and understanding, in short a little more human. I believe that those are the best things that books can make happen to people, and we could all make a list of the particular books that have made them happen to us.

The writers who get my personal award are the ones who show exceptional promise of looking at their lives in this world as candidly and searchingly and feelingly as they know how and then of telling the rest of us what they have found there most worth finding. We need the eyes of writers like that to see through. We need the blood of writers like that in our veins.

I knew when I read that, that I have to write. Really write, as in a book. As in bookS. I've taken steps in this direction: last year I participated in an Artist's Way group, for example. But I busied my schedule with too many things and so I didn't actually end up really ... writing. Now? Well, now it is time. Events and relationships of this past year have enriched the story even more, so that I don't regret waiting. I am eager.

My husband bought me a little netbook laptop thing that is so light and tiny, and ALL MINE. I won't share it with kids. It can come with me on bike rides. It will go everywhere with me. And while they are in school each day I will hold up somewhere-not-at-home, get comfy, and by golly ... I will write.

What will I write about? What kind of books?

Why, the kind Buechner spoke about, of course. The kind that make people more human.