Author: Loreful Pursuits

Writers’ Rites

Writing is a discipline as much as a skill: There’s the discipline of sitting down and writing each day, whether you feel like it or not. There’s the discipline of editing yourself, and not putting up with any nonsense. There’s the discipline of keeping on writing, even when some inner voice is telling you it’s terrible and should never see the light of day.

Sometimes that inner voice is right; and you should learn to listen to it — judiciously, and at the appropriate time (i.e., after the piece is finished).

So, yes, writing is a discipline. But again, it is also a skill. One you learn through practice and experience – and reams and reams of patience. Not to mention, it’s also an exercise in humility.

Anyone who’s going to write well needs to learn humility from the get-go (some of us are still learning). But humility doesn’t mean false modesty, it means a keen observation of reality, avoiding both the tendency to puff your own ego and the tendency to beat yourself up for perceived “failings” and “flaws” (many of which often turn out to be imaginary, or just a sign that you haven’t been sleeping lately).

It means being realistic about your faults, and working to correct them in practice. But part of that means you don’t stop publishing meanwhile. Sometimes “good enough” has to be, well, good enough (for now).

You give it your honest best, you iron out any typos or errors you’ve made along the way — maybe even cut out a paragraph or two that you may have rather liked, but which really had no place in the piece as written — and then you publish it: you send it out into the world, and start work on the next one. Or have a rest for a moment, and sit back with a cup of tea, put your feet up, and relax …

… until the next piece comes along as an idea insistently poking at the inside of your head and demanding to be written.

It’s a dog’s life being a writer …

The Angels in Our Lives

Angels — the human kind — are like heroes: all around us, if you know where to look.

There’s a line in a book by Terry Pratchett* that best sums up part of the working definition of an angel, and (taken out of context), it goes something like this: anyone could have done it. Nobody did.

There may come a time in our lives, when we need help and we don’t know where to turn. And one person helps us. Just one. When we’d almost given up hope.

That’s it. That’s an angel. Someone who helps us when no one else will. Someone who’s there for us when it matters.

And, in a way, we make our own angels, or they make themselves, by being a presence in our lives. And they often appear in a form which surprises us and, often, when we least expect it.

Sans the white robes, the swans’ wings, and the halos, angels are just (“just”) regular human beings like you and me, who do something special: they’re there when we need them, they help us up again when we fall down, they give us what we need to carry on.

And it takes meeting an angel, sometimes, to appreciate the nature of a true gift. Whether that be friendship, or a helping hand, or someone who cares – or just life and being human.

These are the people who teach us what it means to give of ourselves — in fact, many of us only discover our own individual angels by being inspired to try to help them.

And then we see something, something we can’t quite describe, a gleam in their eyes, a look, a vivid impression of something beneath and beyond the outward frame – something that hints of harp strings and heartstrings (and plays upon both): a light, a sparkle, something beautiful, and intensely human.

An angel, a genuine, real-life — although maybe not-so-everyday — angel, has to be seen to be believed. But once you’ve seen, you can’t help but believe. That’s the beauty of an angel — who is a human being, nothing more, nothing less, but still, something more …

And, as Terry Pratchett reminds** us, one of the things about angels (sometimes) is ‘that you only ever get one‘.

An angel is the one we’re grateful to (who helps us when we fall),

For friendship true, for caring, and for being there at all.

Here’s to the angels in our lives, who as we get to know them, and grow to care about them, become dearer to us than we could ever know at the moment of meeting them: they are our heroes, our guiding lights, our friends.

*: ‘Going Postal’, by Terry Pratchett. Give it a try. Really. Don’t let the title put you off — you won’t be disappointed. (Or, at least, it’s highly unlikely.)

**: Great writers never die. They live on in their stories. (In some ways, curiously appropriate, given the book in question.)