Writing as Driving: Some Reflections on Writing

I’ve been blogging online and writing guest posts for over a decade. Over the years many of the people who have subscribed to my blog know me well. Others know of me only from something I’ve written or from belonging to the same online writing community.

Because this second group of people makes up a large share of readers, I’ve been thinking for a while that it might be helpful to do a more “introduction”- type post.

Trey Perrot is a writer and non-staff pastor at his local church in Iowa. He recently asked me a bunch of questions about life and writing, and I thought it might help to share my answers with you. If you’d like to read more from Trey, you can find him on Substack.

Below is our interview. In it, I share a quote from Flannery O’Connor that I’ve been thinking about recently and explain why driving is a helpful metaphor for the kind of results Christian authors should hope for in their writing.

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[Trey] Tell us a little about yourself, Benjamin. 

[Benjamin] I’m a pastor at a local church, a husband, and father to six children. They range in age from 8 to 19. At our house, we’re probably a bit too dedicated to sports. My wife and I met on the track and field team in college, so it’s always been part of our lives. I grew up in Missouri, but my pastoring has brought us to central Pennsylvania for the last dozen years. Growing up, I never thought I’d become a pastor or a writer. I used to hate reading! Following God has been full of surprises.

[Trey] In your website, Fan and Flame, you say, “As I write, I’m trying to keep my fire alive. But I also want to write to fan into flame your joy and passion and hope.” When did you start writing and how did it help you? At what point did you think your writing might help other people's passion and joy and hope? 

About fifteen years ago, the church I was at needed curriculum related to membership. So I put it together. That experience—which followed years in the crucible of seminary and a few other small writing projects—caused me to enjoy writing and see some of the ways the Lord used my words to help others.

[Trey] As you look back across your blog, books, and guest pieces, which piece of writing felt the most spiritually formative for you personally? Why? 

[Benjamin]  I could mention a dozen moments along the way, but I’ll just highlight the first blog post I ever wrote, a piece I called “Fresh Words, Fresh Language, Fresh Blood.” In that post, I quote someone I might not quote now, but even as I went back again and glanced at it, I still remember how God was stirring my heart to write about Christianity, not in lifeless, expected language but in accessible and riveting language. I like to think I do this better now than when I first started. Still, I feel I have more ground to take.

[Trey] You’ve been writing extensively about eternal hope and Christ’s return. What started your interest in that topic? What has been one surprising truth you’ve learned? How has the process of writing on this topic shaped and formed you? 

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This is a long story, which I share early in the book, The Restoration of All Things. In short: A few years ago, our church denomination (The Evangelical Free Church of America) changed one word in our statement of faith concerning the end times. We became more open to the four orthodox views of Christ’s return, instead of committing to just one or two. I was the first pastor in our denomination to be ordained after this change, which sounds neat. But it actually meant my ordination was highly scrutinized. That process deepened my love for this often overlooked doctrine, not merely from an academic perspective but from a pastoral one. Having a vibrant belief that Christ shall come with trumpet sound can sustain us through many trials.
 

[Trey] Many writers struggle to hold together calling and discipline. What practices or habits have most helped you keep writing even as other responsibilities compete for your creative attention?

[Benjamin] I think we all struggle with this.

There’s a line from Flannery O’Connor that I’ve been thinking about lately. Regarding the limitations of her health and how it affected her writing, she wrote to a friend, “What you have to measure out, you come to observe closer.” The idea is that when you have a limited amount of something valuable, you tend to use it more carefully, and that carefulness often improves the final result.

I’ve always tried to set specific times for writing. Those times have moved over the years. Currently, I have a longer session on Wednesday mornings, lasting about 3 or 4 hours, and a one-hour block on Sunday afternoons. Any other writing I manage to do is a bonus. However, carefully “measuring out” writing time seems to, in an unexpected way, improve both quality and quantity. Like most writers, including apparently O’Connor, I wish I had more.

[Trey] When you receive feedback about clarity in your writing or public communication, how do you decide what to embrace and what to discard? How do you make sure that “input” doesn’t change your voice?

[Benjamin] When it comes to critique of my writing after publication, I don’t get much. Beforehand, there’s a lot of private feedback from editors, though. I’ve heard you should set your default to “yes” when receiving corrections from editors. This approach has served me well. I try to push back on every tenth edit or so, just to show that I actually care about the minutia.

When it comes to preaching and speaking, I receive more feedback after the fact. I try to take that to heart as best as I can, believing people mean well even if it comes across as testy. Recently, just a few comments about how fast I preach led to a lot of rethinking (here).

To be honest, I don’t always accept feedback as well as I should. Ungodly discouragement comes far more often to me than ungodly confidence. But God has been kind to bring growth over the last decade. Leading a church kinda forces the issue.

[Trey] You’ve been involved with writing for years. If you could go back to your earliest posts, what would you tell that younger version of yourself about writing?

[Benjamin] All the publication angst isn’t helping your soul. To borrow from Jesus, I’d say, Do the writing work for a decade with your left hand, not worrying so much about what your right hand is doing.

[Trey] You’ve been an editor and writer for online articles. In your experience, what’s one thing that makes short-form articles most helpful? 

[Benjamin] The website I used to work for and the types of articles I tend to write are what would be considered “long-form.” But I get what you mean. Even a longer article is still twenty times shorter than a book and much shorter than even chapters. Probably the best aspect of website articles—whether short-form articles below 750 words or longer ones around 2,000 words—is the ability to provide godly “nudges.”

As we follow Christ, we need some “shoves,” those big events and big moments of transformation. But more frequently we need little nudges to keep us on the right path. Think of it like driving. Sometimes you must really turn the wheel sharply to stay on the road. But most of the time, you just need frequent but little course corrections to stay safely in your lane or to follow the gentle curve of the road. These adjustments may seem small and insignificant, but without them, cars crash. I think of articles like that. This approach level-sets expectations while also encouraging me that the lonely and laborious work still matters.

* Photo by Zoshua Colah on Unsplash

Godly Euphoria & the Christian Writer

Dear Reader: This is part of a longer project I’m working on related to the life of Abraham and the journey of Christian writers. I know these 2,400 words exceed the bounds of a normal blog post, but I wanted to share them together. Thanks for reading, Benjamin

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“And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

Genesis 12:2–3

To grab only one half of the famous lines from Dickens, it is the best of times for Abram, the age of wisdom, the epoch of belief, and the season of light. The wind and flame of God’s Spirit carry him. Downhill. With a breeze. In the shade. Filling his belly, lifting his eyes, and quickening his heart with godly euphoria.

Abram knows he did not earn an audience with his creator through his good works; he receives God’s presence by grace alone. God sought him when a stranger. God pours promises upon Abram so rich and layered and unexpected that they surpass anything Abram’s prayers could have ever asked for or imagined. He considers it unmerited favor. The unexpected call of God is changing his identity.

For all the challenges inherent in forsaking the threefold cord of country, kindred, and father’s house, God promises a great nation, a great name, and blessings as far as the eye can see across all his posterity. For all the paternal protection that Abram counts as loss for the sake of following God, he finds a better protection provided by God, his Father. Indeed, how any outsider responds to Abram—God’s newly appointed representative and missionary to the nations—becomes the touchstone for how God will respond to the individual: If you bless Abram, you get blessings from God; if you curse him, you get curses from God. What a privileged position and sacred identity.

Then there is his name, a great name, God calls it. His name means “exalted father,” but when the Bible talks about a great name, it’s not the letters, syllables, or sounds that matter most. Instead, a name reflects one’s reputation and character. “A good name,” we’re told in Proverbs, “is to be chosen rather than great riches” (Prov. 22:1). The integrity inside you matters more than the money inside your bank account.

Abram’s riches are such that he will one day possess both a great name and riches. But even now, here at ground zero, we see a stark contrast to those in Genesis 11 who wanted to build a tower to reach heaven and make a name for themselves. What they failed to build with their works, Abram receives as a gift. Good measure—pressed down, shaken together, and running over—plops into his lap.

It is Abram’s spring of hope. He has everything before him. He is going direct to heaven, as Dickens wrote.

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I’ve written parts of all my books in a university library just outside town. The best time to go is between Christmas and mid-January. During this period, students on break leave the campus almost empty. And when I visit during the summer, it feels nearly as deserted. You can sit alone in the quiet library to write, dream, and feel carried along by the wind and flame of the Spirit in a space as wide and tall as an auditorium and filled with rows of bookshelves reaching as high as a basketball hoop. You don’t want it to end. This is more than just a good writing day. It embodies the hope of God calling you toward something great, something that matters, a new identity.

In the introvert oasis of an empty university library, when you occasionally get up to walk around and stretch your legs, you pass by all the books and let your eyes behold all the spines and all the titles and all the authors and all the sections. A jazz music section catches your eye because you know nothing about jazz, yet the topic apparently warrants a whole wall of books. Many such sections exist, covering particular genres of knowledge of which you know not the slightest sliver.

Near the table where you work, you notice three bookshelves holding sixty-two thick books about Bob Dylan. Fascinating, you think.

This particular library is in a university with Christian roots, and so vast biblical sections also catch your eye as you walk past them. You see the huge sections of monographs on nuanced specialties, such as Acadian archaeology and commentaries on Zephaniah, a biblical book with only three chapters that warrants a dozen commentaries as thick as your wrist.

As you sit there and write the book you feel called by God to write, you feel the wind at your back as you run downhill with your heart quickened by, you hope, godly euphoria. You sit there writing, knowing that you participate in the same stream of common grace and grand knowledge that carried intellectual giants such as Socrates and Aristotle. As different as your life might be from hers, you understand why Maya Angelou’s caged bird sings. You realize that the same God of grace who called Athanasius and Augustine and Anselm to write words that changed the world also works within you.

It is the spring of hope with everything before you.

When I began following Christ in college, the hatred I harbored toward books changed. As I read and studied Christianity—at first informally on my own and later in seminary—new joys, passions, and hopes bubbled up within me, as if a chemical reaction were cooked over a Bunsen burner. Listening to good sermons, I felt God was calling me to preach. This call to preach seemed to pounce on me, irrevocably so, while listening to other men preach and feeling my mind and affections doused in a kind of spiritual kerosene so that I just knew I wanted to, and in fact had to, be involved in preaching to others.

During the early days of this feeling, if I could have hit pause during a sermon by any one of the many gifted preachers I was listening to, I would have described the experience this way: “What God is doing right now, through that guy, on that stage, behind that pulpit, as he explains that passage and the glory of God and the beauty of the gospel, with those words and those gestures, and that tone, and with all of that love and passion and urgency such that my heart is prodded and my mind is riveted, well, someday I just have to be involved in sharing that good news with others.”

This is what I mean when I say that my calling to preach came not only through opportunities to preach but also, even predominantly, through having it done to me. David Hansen, in his book The Art of Pastoring, describes his call in a similar way. As he heard a particular pastor preach, he says it seemed “the power, the conviction and the tender mercy of the gospel made the human sanctuary resonate like Pavarotti getting overtones from the rafters.” He continues, “I didn’t know what it was that he did. I just knew that if what he did was what pastoral ministry was, I would be a pastor,” he writes. “What I was made to be was being jangled by what I saw him doing.” I, too, know this feeling, this calling, this jangling.

And this rendition of the experience of the call to preach also doubles as my experience of being called to write, which came not long after. In his insightful book on the craft of writing, Stephen King said it this way: “Being swept away by a combination of great story and great writing—of being flattened, in fact—is part of every writer’s necessary formation. You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you” (On Writing, tenth anniversary ed., 146). Through reading good writing, I felt God calling me to write. The reaction felt explosive, if only in my heart—or, to use King and Hansen’s metaphors, flattened and jangled. The words from Scripture had this effect on me, but also the writing of other gifted authors, especially but not exclusively Christian authors.

When did the wind of God’s favor first sweep you into the calling to write? When did words first become a thing for you? Which authors has God used to jangle your human sanctuary with overtones from the rafters?

In my office I have a few bookshelves. In the middle of all the shelves, I keep books from my favorite authors, those whom God has used most to call me into writing and to keep me writing. When any of those authors publishes a new book, I buy it, read it, and add it to their collection. Perhaps you do something similar. God often seems to call us into the craft this way.

This encouragement from other writers that compels us to engage the craft of writing and own our identity as writers, is true not only at the outset, but something that can help us in seasons of dryness. The call of God is meant to keep us moving forward, not just when we feel euphoric, but also when we feel writer’s block and frustration. During seasons of writing dryness, when ideas don’t seem to flow and every paragraph you write seems to stink, revisit those early voices that called you further up and further in. Set aside your own writing for a while and return to the words that remind you of the love you had at first.

Over the course of your writing life, the authors who most flatten and jangle you may change. You might begin enamored with the aesthetics of the Puritans and their concrete, imagistic style. Later, however, you may still admire their truthfulness and theological precision but also grow to prefer writing less wordy, writing that some might call less flowery, ornate, and affected. That’s okay. In this season you might come to prefer more the staccato writing of short, internet-sized paragraphs. That’s okay too. When God first called you to write, you might not have appreciated the beauty of a Shakespearean sonnet or the crisp euphony of “shook foil” in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. But perhaps now you do. Writerly tastebuds change.

An empty library might not be as enjoyable to you as the din of a coffee shop. Maybe you feel God’s pleasure when you write at home with the Interstellar soundtrack playing in the background. Maybe you sit by a stream and write with analog tools, the way everyone used to write. The point is not so much to copy what you perceive God uses to stir creative juices in others, but to embrace what God uses to stir creative juices in you.

Of course, it’s possible to elevate our reverence for great authors too much, to hold them so highly in our hearts that we always feel as though we write in their shadow and as poor derivatives of their work. We can taste and see so much truth, goodness, and beauty in the writing of our heroes that we fail to see what God is doing through our own writing. I know this feeling. We all do. It’s not wrong in itself to be intimidated by the greats, but, I believe, it is wrong by itself. The feeling of inadequacy should not be the main point we receive from the greats. This feeling of being overshadowed often appears to arise from a place of humility: Who am I to write words that matter? we think. But this has more to do with our pride and unbelief than our humility. It has more to do with looking at ourselves than at God. The promise Abram experienced, and the hope it produced in him, came from looking away from himself and to God.

As Christian writers, we don’t want to conflate the enjoyment of a good writing day with the hope that comes from the promises of God. Christian writers must remember that God’s lasting objective promises are far more important than our changing subjective feelings toward those same promises. Because Christ lived, died, rose, and promises to return, all our writing labor in the Lord can never be in vain (1 Cor. 15:58). That’s a promise true on the days we feel that it is true, and the promise remains true on the days we don’t feel that it is true. On the dark-cloud days that we hate writing and think we’re wasting our time following God, the sun still shines behind the somber sky.

For these reasons, we cannot determine our calling based solely on feelings. At the same time, our feelings do matter. Our aesthetic sensibilities and the joy God gives us as we read other authors, along with the joy we feel when we finally craft a perfect sentence, do matter. God is often pleased to use these to call us into a life of words and to sustain us in a life of words. It also seems responsible, wise, and obedient to revisit these greats every now and then to be flattened and jangled afresh.

People sometimes ask me why I left engineering to become a preacher and writer. They usually want a soundbite answer. I’m never sure how to say it briefly. Maybe someday I will figure out how. I’m sure many asked Abram why he left Ur and wanted a soundbite answer. The best way I know to say that God called me into writing is to say that it had something to do with vinegar and baking soda, corked and shaken. God’s call had then and has now something to do with the best of times, the epoch of belief, the season of light, the spring of hope.

 * Photo by Matthew Feeney on Unsplash