This infographic is actually about how to publish a book. But almost everything also applies directly to writing a research paper. So, whether you’re trying to write your first novel, or you’re just trying to finish that research paper that you’ve been procrastinating on all semester, I thought you’d appreciate this. enjoy. (Click to embiggen.)
It happens to everyone. Maybe you’re working on a sermon, a research paper, a poem, or anything else that requires you to come up with some new ideas and express them in unique ways. Whatever it is, you run into the dreaded “block,” that state of being that seems to keep you from coming up with anything more interesting than what you ate for lunch. And, when that happens, it can be pretty frustrating.
A new book takes a unique approach to tackling that problem. Breakthrough!: Proven Strategies to Overcome Creative Block and Spark Your Imagination offers tips and suggestions from 90 people from different walks of life on how to break through creative blocks. And the suggestions themselves are often rather creative. (One of my favorites is to check into an expensive hotel for a couple of days. The thought of how much money you’re spending just to be there will motivate you to keep working!)
Much of the advice, though, boiled down to two somewhat contrary-sounding ideas:
And the book offer some great suggestions for how to do both of these. But it still leaves you with a pretty fundamental problem: How do you know when you should push through and when you need to take a break?
Sometimes a simple simple comma or period isn’t good enough. Maybe you just wrote something brilliantly snarky, but you’re concerned that people will miss the subtleties of your sarcasm. Or perhaps you want to ask a rhetorical question, but you don’t want people to mistake it for a more mundane interrogative. With the current system, you don’t have much of a choice. Just slap a period or question mark at the end and pray that people are paying attention. Our punctuation options seem remarkably limited.
I suppose the day may come when these functions will be filled by the ever-growing universe of emoticons, and we’ll sprinkle our writings with smiling, winking, and smirking little faces. That terrifying future probably isn’t too far off.
Or we could adopt some of these handy little punctuation marks. I’ve commented before on the fabulous percontation point, which lets you signal that rhetorical question, and the much-needed exclamation comma, for those times when you get really excited in the middle of a sentence. But here are some other punctuation possibilities.
I have to admit that I’m a little torn when it comes to using language correctly. As someone who spends much of his day reading–whether it’s for fun, for information, to grade papers, or to chip away at the ever-growing pile of emails–I appreciate it when people use language well. It makes my job easier, and it causes significantly less angst.
So some part of me wants to insist that everyone use language correctly, particularly those entrusted with communicating God’s truth. I know you can still communicate without necessarily writing well, but good grammar makes it so much more pleasant for everyone else. It’s like having good table manners. You can eat without them, but it’s rather nasty to watch.
But another part of me wants to push back just a bit. Do we always have to use language correctly? That’s a tricky question to answer. And the problem comes from the words “always” and “correctly.”
Here’s a short video describing my book Gospel for the Living Dead: A Fresh Take on the Gospel Story. It’s pretty low-tech: just me, a couch, and an artificial ficus tree. (Do real ficus trees even exist?) But I think it does the trick.
We’ll be sending the video to some publishers later this week. And I’d like it to look like the video is really popular. So if you could hit “play” twenty or thirty times, I’d really appreciate it. Or, if you have children, students, and/or friends who need to be punished, you could make them watch this repeatedly. Either way works for me.
Oh, and feel free to hit the “thumbs up” button on You Tube as well. I’ve made arrangements for you to receive a crown in heaven for every thumbs up you give me. I have connections.
Desiring God has been posting some video interviews with J. I. Packer. As usual, he offers plenty of great insight. And I thought this video was particularly good for those of us interested in writing.
The video is less than ten minutes long, so it’s worth watching all the way through. But here are Packer’s three main pieces of advice:
1. Go deep in your grasp of God, and his will, and his ways, and the spirit of worship. Because you must constantly be expressing those things in every bit of writing that you do.
2. Understand, as preachers also have to understand, that it’s as important that you communicate with people as it is that you set before them truth and wisdom from the word of God.
3. Don’t attempt to be a writer unless you have got things to say which you feel must be put on paper and I am being called to do it. Writing, in other words, is as vocational an exercise as becoming a preacher.
And one quote in particular jumped out at me:
There are writers who think that simply by crisp, orthodox formulations of Bible truth and wisdom, without any searching application to the reader, they are fulfilling the full role of a Christian writer and that nothing more is required of them. That I do not believe to be so. There are enough people around already who can verbalize orthodoxy on paper. What we haven’t got is writers who can blend, or join, truth and wisdom about God from the Scriptures with personal communication, that is, communication that hits the heart, that makes you realize that this writer is a person talking to other persons, that this writer is trying to search me in order to help me, and I must let him do it. There is a certain art, or shall I say a certain craft, or perhaps I should use both words, there is a certain art and craft in writing in such a way that it gets to the reader’s heart. I think sometimes God has enabled me to do that in things that I have written. It isn’t accident, I means it’s something that I’ve been trying to do, and shall go on trying to do. So I would say to my budding writer, now this is a craft you must learn.
Here’s the video. Enjoy.
Stepped into Powell’s bookstore the other day. Always a mistake. Just the sight of all those books makes me feel like Chuck when the intersect kicks in and overloads his brain. So many books.
Depending on my mood, this generally leads to one of two reactions. Either I stroll quietly through the aisles like an explorer drifting down a newfound river, amazed by the towering trees and tangled vines, awed by the thought of all the new experiences that hide behind every leaf. Or I just get depressed.
So many books. Already more than the world needs. Yet more coming every day.
And still I write.
Does that make any sense? What kind of idiot continues to write in a world already bloated by the constant consumption of its own publications? That seems a bit like watering your lawn during a flood.
And still I write. Why?
Some kids have a favorite toy that they carry with them everywhere. Whether it’s a stuffed animal, a doll, or a spaceship, it offers a sense of security, a feeling that things are okay. Other kids have a special blanket. Wrapped in its gentle folds, they feel safe, at home.
My daughter had a bucket.
Seriously. A bucket. And it wasn’t even a nice one. It was a plain white, 5-gallon, plastic bucket, the kind you find at Home Depot, somewhat scraped and stained from years of hard use. And she took it everywhere.
It was her safety bucket.
She had a rough winter last year and was sick a lot. Several times she got caught unprepared, which can be rather messy. That’s particularly annoying when it happens at night. In your bed. On your favorite jammies. Her solution was to start carrying her special bucket everywhere. I’ll never forget the sight of my tiny daughter hauling this huge plastic bucket behind her as she climbed the ladder to her bunk bed. But I can understand. It made her feel safe. Prepared.
Two years ago, I began an unexpected journey: I started writing a book about the gospel. It’s been interesting.
If you’re new to the blog, I’d like to introduce you to the book and what I’m trying to do. If you’ve been around for a while, you may be wondering where the project stands. This will help you catch up.
Writing isn’t unusual for me. I’ve written one somewhat technical theology book that you probably don’t want to read, and another really technical theology book that you almost certainly don’t want to read. And I’ve written other stuff too. So the new journey wasn’t writing itself, but a different kind of writing. Different for me, at least.
Two years ago, a friend and former student asked me to speak to his high school youth group on their winter retreat. I accepted and decided to do a weekend series on the gospel. I wanted to help them understand how the gospel fits into the broader storyline of the Bible and how it impacts far more than just how you get saved. How can you go wrong with that?
It was terrible.
Despite the fact that I’d spent years in youth ministry, I found myself struggling to transition from 4-hour seminary lectures to 45-minute high school talks. Go figure. Let’s just say that I ran a tad long at times. And it inevitably felt choppy and rushed. Oops.
But that weekend gave me a vision for what could be.
Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard them.
MICHAEL MICHALKO
