With every keystroke...

For writers, or at least for my own experience in writing creatively, writing is much like living. Oftentimes, it mirrors our very lives. Not necessarily the story, but the mood, the direction, the paths it may take often reflect the roads our lives may at that time be travelling. Not the elements in the story, but sometimes the feelings behind it, the emotion, and, yes, the moral of the telling.

There is an old addage among established writers; write what you know. This goes far beyond that, however.

A crime story unfolds where a person has had incredible loss and seeks justice and closure through the events penned in the telling. The person writing may be having loss he or she seeks to make right, though it is not related to the story events at all. It is just a reflection. Some people write racy tales and romantic things, often because they are in a romantic mood or moment in their lives, or maybe the opposite, they wish they were.

Blues guitarists like Eric Clapton and Buddy Guy have equated the working and writing of a guitar solo in a song to being a song within the song, that a good solo should have the emotion, the feeling, and tell the story, of the song without the song even having words. That the solo could convey all the words do, all the feeling, all the things the words could.

To me, that is often what a writer's work can do. It can tell a story about the writer's life that the story's words did not, just in simple reflection, implication, or even contrast.

I am a Christian man, and I believe in living my life to glorify Jesus Christ. I see how this fundamental belief, this need within me to give honor and praise to the One who gave me my gift of the spoken and written word, bleeds into the writing I do, and sharpens it, improves it, makes it worth reading. I see where it makes it what it could not be without Jesus Christ. My writing reflects the part of me, the best part of me, that seeks to do good and honor the God of all, and makes me proud.

I seek honor for God more than for myself, and I am always happy to share that...

...with each and every keystroke.