Today. I wrote and editing my writing from about 9.30 till 2.45 with only a break for lunch. In that time we weren't to talk to anyone. I have to say, this week has been a profoundly quiet experience, but with just enough talking to make this overstimulated extrovert feel quite balanced.
After 2.45 we did a fun exercise. Writing a fictional story as a group. We had 10 minutes to decide on two characters and a basic plot. Then 30 minutes without consulting with one another we got to write our section of the story. After this we read it aloud to the group. Some bits were very funny. Especially the group who used names like Fred and Wilma as characters. It was light relief to the heavy writing we've done in the last two days.
After 5 I did a totally different type of exercise. Playing half-court basketball with five other people. After only 20 minutes I was exhausted. I sat down to Skype my family straight after this. With sweat trickling down my back and around my eyebrows, they wondered what I'd been doing!
Tonight we've had the fun of reading our work to the whole group for 15 minutes and receiving feedback. That might sound scary to you, but I actually enjoyed it. It is not often you get instant audience feedback to stuff you've written. Last month a story I wrote more than two years ago was published in various places. People responded to it, but the gratification from writing it is very delayed.
Even better than reading our writing, we got to pray for one another and be prayed for. I confessed my struggle to find a way forward from here. My vision of what I'd like to do with my writing, but the difficulty of getting there. I long to tell the stories of ordinary women who happen to be missionaries. It was encouraging to have someone pray that God would bring people across my path whose stories I could tell. We'll see what becomes of this passion.
I wonder about following your passion as some kind of research project or even doing it to work towards a higher degree? The idea of telling people's stories and finding common threads has a bit of a qualitative research slant to it. I explored parents' stories of adjusting occupationally to parenting a child with a disability for my masters degree and it was a very enriching experience. But research might be a different type of discipline to what you're seeking?
ReplyDeleteJust a thought anyway.
No research is not what I want to do. What I want is to give the average Christian the opportunity to see that missionaries are not to be set up on a pedestal and revered as super-Christians. I want to write things that people who might not ordinarily read a book, want to read.
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