Lately I’ve been reading the book Eats, Shoots & Leaves. It’s one of the most enjoyable books I’ve ever read, even though few people around me would agree.
As soon as I tell someone, “it’s a book about punctuation,” the conversation pretty much ends. It’s like a child who tells you how many peas he can stick up his nose; the average person doesn’t know what to do with that information—or really if he wants to do anything with it at all—so he says, “that’s nice,” and goes on about his business, completely apathetic to the plight of the overworked apostrophe.
Lynne Truss, however, cares about punctuation a great deal: so much so, she felt the need to write a whole book about it. That got me thinking, not just about punctuation—because I am genuinely nerdy about that sort of thing—but also about the motivation of a writer.
See Eats, Shoots & Leaves is not merely a textbook for high school English classes. It’s a passionate celebration of punctuation’s role in creating rhythm and meaning in our language, a sardonic assessment of our culture’s undervaluation of language in general, and an intriguing dive into the history of the marks of punctuation we regularly overlook. Whatever a reader might think about the subject, Truss sees punctuation’s place in grammar and syntax as being so important that she had to write about it. She couldn’t leave the subject alone. It was just too lovely, too valuable to not use all her talent to express that.
This, I’m beginning to think, is the root of great writing: a great subject.
I realize the thought is nothing new—nothing I think ever is. Greek artists used the term muse; modern artists might call it inspiration. In either case, what’s described is the sense of being overcome by something outside yourself that enables creative expression. It’s discovering and longing to convey something lovely, excellent, praiseworthy that makes any artistic medium more than what it seems. Just as a pen in a writer’s hand is only the tool through which talent passes, it seems an artist does his best work when he is merely a tool through which beauty passes.
I think the Apostle Paul was on to something when he told the Philippian church, “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” Of course, he wasn’t speaking to a room of writers; he was teaching a small community of people how to live a life pleasing to God, a life focused on everything God is and does: everything that is great and worthy of our attention. Still, I think his recipe for a life of faith and obedience is also capable of whipping up a life of great writing. Stare at the things in life that are worth staring at, and those same things will begin to flow out of you—they must.
So, with Lynne and Paul in mind, the question is posed to me: what great thing am I going to attend to? Maybe self-sacrifice? Love? The magnificent semicolon? I’m not sure what my inspiration is yet (there will probably be many different things over time: some earth-shattering and some just me-shattering), but it’s where I think we have to begin.
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