The Writing Life
Edward Hopper (American, Nyack, New York 1882–1967 New York), Office in a Small City, 1953, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In my first year of seminary, one of my professors told me that my undergraduate education in English would serve me well in the years to come. As time went on, both during seminary and afterward, he was proven right again and again. Hardly a day passes when I am not extraordinarily grateful for a very happy few years spent reading and writing on the beautiful shores of Lake Michigan (though the current motto of my alma mater is yet another assault on the already besieged adverb). The repeated papers on literary analysis and close reading were, though I didn’t know it at the time, among the best possible preparation for exegesis. Likewise, a firm grasp on English grammar is a necessity for learning Greek, and the sometimes excruciating hours of constructing arguments, writing them out, and then facing the subsequent peer reviews in class were an exceptionally humbling and solid foundation for homiletics. I would, as a result, wholeheartedly recommend an undergraduate degree in literature before proceeding to seminary, though degrees in philosophy or classics are also certainly excellent preparation.
It shouldn’t be all that surprising that a familiarity with words would prove helpful in the priesthood. All things are created in the beginning by the eternal Word, all Christians are re-created through the Holy Ghost by that same Word, and God makes Himself known through the words of Holy Scripture. I could go on, but I think you get the point — a certain love of words is required of those who would spend their lives in the living and active Word of God. A guest author back in January posted a wonderful article on Biblical poetry in this general vein, which I highly recommend, but I would like to move in the other direction and recommend a book on writing.
The Writing Life by Annie Dillard was the most influential book of my undergraduate years. It is a chronicle of the sometimes agonizing process of writing — the impossibility of a blank page, the bloody business of amputating paragraphs, of throwing out your most cherished thoughts and turns of phrase when they don’t serve the end. I find myself re-reading it virtually every year, and even though I don’t write out word-for-word sermon manuscripts, it still proves invaluable. I’ll spare you any more of my own writing, and let her speak for herself:
The part you must jettison is not only the best-written part; it is, oddly, that part which was to have been the very point. It is the original key passage, the passage on which the rest was to hang, and from which you yourself drew the courage to begin….So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book’s form hardened. “The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon,” Thoreau noted mournfully, “or perchance a palace or temple on the earth, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them.”….
Several delusions weaken the writer’s resolve to throw away work. If he has read his pages too often, those pages will have a necessary quality, the ring of the inevitable, like poetry known by heart; they will perfectly answer their own familiar rhythms. He will retain them. He may retain those pages if they possess some virtues, such as power in themselves, through they lack the cardinal virtue, which is pertinence to, and unity with, the book’s thrust. Sometimes the writer leaves his early chapters in place from gratitude; he cannot contemplate them or read them without feeling again the blessed relief that exalted him when the words first appeared—relief that he was writing anything at all. That beginning served to get him where he was going, after all; surely the reader needs it, too, as groundwork. But no.
Every year the aspiring photographer brought a stack of his best prints to an old, honored photographer, seeking his judgment. Every year the old man studied the prints and painstakingly ordered them into two piles, bad and good. Every year the old man moved a certain landscape print into the bad stack. At length he turned to the young man: “You submit this same landscape every year, and every year I put it on the bad stack. Why do you like it so much?” The young photographer said, “because I had to climb a mountain to get it.”
TL;DR: To be good sermon-writers, we should first be good writers. Read this.