I Wasn't Neurotic Until I Became A Writer (Killing The Desire For Success)

Here is a piece that I wrote for the Redbud Writer's Guild Blog. It came out last week:

http://www.redbudwritersguild.com/i-wasn%E2%80%99t-neurotic-until-i-became-a-writer#.TxV3A8fH-uQ.twitter

C.S. Lewis on Writing/Writers Getting Over Themselves

One of the people I truly admire and want to emulate (Jan Johnson), a modern day Amma,  sent me this quote from Lewis:

From the age of sixteen onwards I had one single ambition (becoming a successful writer), from which I never wavered, in the prosecution of which I spent every ounce I could, on which I really and deliberately staked my whole con­tentment: and I recognise myself as having unmistakably failed in it. I feel that I have some right to talk to you as a man in the same boat.

The side of me which longs, not to write, for no one can stop us doing that, but to be approved as a writer, is not the side of us that is really worth much. And depend upon it, unless God has abandoned us, he will find means to cauterise that side somehow or other. If we can take the pain well and truly now and by it forever the wish to be dis­tinguished beyond our fellows. And honestly, the being cured, with all the pain, has pleasure too: one creeps home, tired and bruised into a state of mind that is really restful, when all one’s ambitions have been given up. Then one can really say for the first time, “Thy Kingdom come.” For in that Kingdom there will be no pre-eminences and a man must have reached the stage of not caring two straws about his own status.

Think how difficult that would be if one succeeded as a writer: how bitter this necessary purgation at the age of sixty, when literary success had made your whole life and you had then got to begin to go through the stage of seeing it all as dust and ashes. Perhaps God has been specially kind to us in forcing us to get over it at the beginning. We have got to die.

I would have given almost anything -- I shudder to think what I would have given if I had been allowed - to be a successful writer. I am writing this as I do simply and solely because I think the only thing for you to do is absolutely to kill the part of you that wants success.

The Temptation For Writers and Artists and Poets and Musicians and Pastors

. . .  for all of us really. This comes from the Great Divorce By C.S. Lewis (one of my favorite books of all time).  pp. 84&85 

"'When you've grown into a Person (it's all right, we all had to do it) there'll be some things which you'll see better than anyone else. One of the things you will want to do will be to tell us about them. But not yet. At present your business is to see. Come and see. He is endless. Come and feed . . . . '

It was all a snare. Ink and catgut and paint were all necessary down there, but they are also dangerous stimulants. Ever poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love for the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn't stop at being interested in paint you know. They sink lower--become interested in their own personalities and in nothing but their own reputations.'"