The ambition to be a writer has been with me since childhood.  If I can stay retired, my first book should be ready to publish next spring.  It will be an anthology of these Sunday Posts, a thirty-year work in progress.    

Since retirement, an average day finds me spending between 4 and 7 hours working on my writing.  While most of it is concentrated on the anthology, there are days when I dabble in one of my other 5 projects.   But I’m pushing hard now to get the anthology done.

The work of writing is made up of three primary tasks:  gleaning, writing, and editing.  First comes the gleaning:  finding and collecting stories, observations, thoughts, phrases, and words.  If you want to glean from your own life, you have to risk doing and thinking things that are interesting to people.  It takes lots of time for me to get into a pickle just so people can be entertained.  But the only gleaning hours I count toward my writer’s work are those I spend looking up and reading things.

The second task of writing is the actual writing itself.  I’m a fast and vigorous writer, so this short work for me.  I throw off all inhibitions and just type the words furiously.

The last and longest phase for me is the editing.  I think 70% of my writing work comes in the editing.  My writers’ group and a few others help me with this through their critiques.  But the bulk of those efforts occur in solitude, looking over every sentence and word with a judging eye, wearing out the thesaurus and dictionary, slashing out words and phrases that are wrong, despite being dearly beloved, and rewriting whole paragraphs, several times over.  

To make my editing work go faster, I’ve compiled a list of those writing mistakes most common to me. Almost all my editing and rewriting is due to the things on that list.  I was going to share the list with you, but it is quite boring.  Instead, I dressed it up and put it in a prayer of confession, thinking you’d be more pleased. 

WRITER’S PRAYER OF CONFESSION

O Lord, I have written those things I ought not to have written; and left unwritten those things I ought not to have wrote.  I have relied too much on the devices and desires of my own and neglected the holy laws of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style.  Also, dust has accumulated on my copies of Errors in English, Handbook of Good English, and Style and Grammar.  Plus, I meant to read Eats, Shoots & Leaves and am only on page 4 after neglecting it for ten years.  

O Lord, have mercy on my typos and misspellings.  Let me remind you, however, that these sins aren’t all my fault, as the spellchecker on my computer is mostly to blame there.  

And Lord, while we are casting blame, you must take a little responsibility yourself for the confusion caused by commas.  You are full of mystery, and your ways are high and beyond the eye of man.  And all commas come from you, from that place where we can only see dimly.  But still, would it have been all that much trouble for you to have given Moses just 5 or 6 more commandments to help us clarify our comma usage?

Okay, I notice lightning and thunder rolling in from the west.  Didn’t mean to upset you, so just delete that last paragraph.  

I acknowledge that I purposefully throw in an incomplete sentence now and then, if I think it makes the thought flow more smoothly.  But before you come down too hard on me, let me remind you that even Jesus broke the rules once in a while, like those times he did something good on the Sabbath.  Whenever he would break a moral regulation in order to serve a greater principle, you even let your angels celebrate and rejoice.  Surely you will let me break a grammatical rule now and then… if it makes the communication sharper.

Back to the ways my writing has strayed like a lost sheep.  Oops!  I’m going to need you to forgive that sentence fragment.  As I writer, I’ve found it is easier to ask for forgiveness afterward than get permission in advance.  

I confess that my writings get too lengthy.  Sometimes I just go on and on, forgetting that “a fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion.”  (Proverbs 18:2).  Let me also quote Job 16:3:  “Shall windy words have no end?”  Or this, “When words are many, transgression is not lacking.”  (Proverbs 10:19.)  As you know, I could go on, for I know many Bible verses.  I could go on and on.  And sometimes I do, so forgive me for not editing out all the extraneous verbiage. 

But before I go to my next point, let me mention that I probably got this aversion to shutting off the word-spicket from you.  YOUR book is ten times worse than anything I’ve ever written, especially when it comes to wordiness, redundancy, and getting people lost in the weeds.  On the other hand, who am I to argue with the Almighty, must less a best seller.

Too often I give generalizations without offering specifics. I will also make a dramatic statement once in a while but fail to give evidence. I can’t think of any examples at the moment.

It seems that every time I finish a piece, its paragraphs need reorganizing, otherwise the reader just feels tossed back and forth.  That rearranging is one of those things I ought to do that I sometimes leave undone. 

Because you are omniscient, you already know that I sin quite regularly with homophones.  Of course, that is something I would never confess in public, as some of my friends have their minds quite made up about anything containing the prefix “homo.”  If my sinning with homophones ever got out, many would think me unfit to be a pastor.  They wouldn’t wait around for me to explain that homophones are words that sound alike but are spelled differently.  Homophones get so confusing.  Sometimes I write “male” when I should have written “mail.”  “Principle” may get typed in as “principal,” “capital” as “capitol,” and “stationary” as “stationery.”  English has too many homophones, and I think you know you are partially to blame.  At the Tower of Babel, when you made everyone invent their own separate language, you shouldn’t have given English to the most sadistic guy on the work crew.

Before signing off, there are other various and sundry writing sins I need to confess.  I write my first drafts in a hurry, which is okay.  But then I fail to edit my verb tenses to be sure they are all consistent.  Sometimes my facts come from the part of my memory that is foggy and suspect.  Sometimes my facts come from the internet, which is certainly suspect.  Sometimes I rewrite paragraphs on my word processor and don’t notice that I’ve left it with “widows and orphans,” words left over from the original sentences that I forgot to remove.  Sometimes I’m so excited and tuned into a new idea of mine that I fail to notice it remains mere gibberish to others.  Sometimes I fool around with words and play with my thesaurus so much that I lose track of what I wanted to say.  

And sometimes I’m so caught up in my own amusement that I become condescending toward the people I’m describing.  This last, of course, is probably the only writing sin you really give a damn about. 

Oops!  Sorry about the next to last word in that last paragraph.

Amen.