Captain’s Log – The Process

Sometimes it’s hard. Finding something to write about. 

There’s a special kind of mental acrobatics that is often performed when one sits at a blank page with an obligation, for whatever reason, to fill that space.

Often, these time-killing activities don’t happen at the paper or the laptop but manifest in the most mundane of household chores being methodically tackled. Or, like today, all the news sources have to be examined at length, and then the online classes checked out. 

Anything but noun and verb on the page. 

I’m eternally grateful for the ability to string words together, some days with better results than others, but in a general sense, fairly satisfactorily. 

I used to love to read Tim Findley when he was writing for Range Magazine – he and CJ Hadley were on the same political wavelength, and she turned him loose to do what he did best, one after another in beautiful cadence he would use words to eviscerate some federal agency or lackluster bureaucrat. 

John Kennedy, Jr. also had a way about him – he published a magazine during the late 90s called George that I absolutely loved at the time. Maybe the part where he just started it from scratch, maybe the part where he did something unique and particularly bold. And he used words to do it. 

My dad paid me a particularly lovely compliment earlier this week. He sent a quote by Joseph Smith, the boy prophet who restored Christ’s church to the earth in the early 1800s and laid the groundwork for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints by translating the golden plates for our modern-day use. The boy Joseph dealt in words – translating, proselytizing, and using them to grow what would become one of the world’s largest organizations. 

“Oh Lord God, Deliver Us from this prison… of a crooked, broke, scattered and imperfect language,” wrote Smith. 

And dad followed in his note to me by text, “You seem to do well with that imperfect language.” 

High praise, indeed, made more meaningful as they came from a lover of words. A man who devours stories and can spin some yarns of his own.

One of my favorite things to read, and my bookshelves will attest, are books written by writers about writing. Stephen King is one of my favorites. I won’t read his novels, but this book, “On Writing,” explores his personal path to fame as an author and then talks about his process to get words on the page. I learned from King that you are only a writer when you write. And that’s as easy as it is. To write every day makes one a member of that exclusive club. Write, and your dreams come true. Write, and you are a writer.

Ray Bradbury, that brilliant scribe, wrote one as well—“Zen in The Art of Writing,” which also changed my life or taught me to recognize life and living, to recognize myself. 

“So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all. Writing is survival. Any art, any good work, of course, is that. Not to write, for many of us is to die,” he wrote. 

So, while we pound out another paper, another Captain’s Log, another love note to you, our readers, we’ll be right here…

…Keeping you Posted.

Rach