It is far easier to name obstacles that hinder the craft of writing than it is to make a quick case for getting words down on the page.

Writers are persistently challenged by the sheer lack of time, a steady stream of distractions and staying motivated to keep working at the craft like clockwork.  Moreover, the inspiration that tanks up the desire to write often dwindles when striving to really spot where the time invested is making a difference.

Like salmon rushing upstream against the current, aspiring writers know they face stacked odds at being discovered any time soon.  Building even a small readership today is quite difficult when keeping company with 32.7 million other bloggers in the United States alone, not to mention the 600 million blogs already established worldwide.

Yes, the world is certainly a big place bent on pressing every nose against the tantalizing scent blazed by well resourced social media channels.

When factoring in the unpredictable nature of life, and everything else competing for time and attention, the would-be writer is left with little incentive to transfer creative thinking to paper.  On average, writing a single post requires a minimum of four hours for anyone dedicated to doing the art well.

And waiting for those right words to drop into place takes a lot of practice and patience.

Then of course there is fear, a monster with many arms.

Wherever the creative fire is lit, count on fear to be hovering nearby.  Its objective is to squash the desire and courage to keep writing hope into the world.  The culture today prefers to write its own self created reality on the walls, boxing out all hope in the Incarnation.  To be a writer with vision, you have to be good at juggling many things.  The fear monster wants to take away individual gifts of exuberance and eccentricity, and keeps tossing dispiriting balls one after the other until the pen is put to rest.

However, the writer must be adept at staying focused to accomplish the goal.  Keeping all those balls in the air while determinedly getting the words down on the page is hard work.

So with all of this in mind, why write?

Annie Dillard shares a compelling story when she faced this question.  In The Writing Life, she describes the mammoth effort it took to write a special nature piece about moths during her stay on the Pugent Sound.  Spending time alone in such beautiful surroundings presented the perfect opportunity to write minus the usual distractions.

When the exhausting work was finally done, Dillard submitted the piece for publication. She was thrilled when several journals quickly signed on to push it forward.  However, as time went by, the work drew comments from only one person in the field.

Hoping for much more, the results were certainly disappointing.

After redirecting her time toward new writing projects, Dillard describes an encounter that completely transformed her perspective on the metrics writers typically use to measure success.

It happened on a sunny afternoon when two youngsters happened to walk by her vacation place.  Upon seeing Dillard, they started up a friendly conversation.  While the small group chatted along, a moth suddenly landed on a table in full view.

Turning to Dillard­­­­­­, one of the young visitors asked, “Is this landing sort of like what you described about moths in that paper you wrote?”

Dillard was stunned.  The two students clearly read and grasped the heart of the piece she had written months earlier.  To say the least, she was deeply moved knowing that her work was incorporated into the school’s science curriculum.  Dillard goes on to illumine how the words shared in story make a difference in ways the writer may never know.  By chance alone, she discovered a young audience truly intrigued by her research, and still wanted to learn more.

It is not the mass that matters, but the hope that one person will find a little inspiration on the page put out into the world for someone to find.

Dillard’s story truly inspires me as a writer.  Knowing that my blog, Truths to Inspire is still young, it is gratifying to know that my writing is read in near and far-away places.

To me, writing is like prayer.  By far the most important thing is just to keep at it.

Here are my top 11 reasons why I write (as often as I can):

To:

1. Share God’s beauty, goodness and truth

2. Pass on the love of Christ, and the Word shared by the Master storyteller Himself

3. Inspire faith, hope and healing.

4. Because there is a dark side of the world that must be dealt with in the Light of Christ.

5. Affirm my belief in miracles, virtue and all things kind and good (like coffee and buttered toast in the morning).

6. Grieve when remembering my loved ones and those grieved by others.

7. Give witness to God’s presence in suffering.

8. Spread the truth of Scripture and great works of literature.

9. Leave something of myself behind for my children to remember.

10. Use God’s invented words to live out my own calling and purpose in the world (I love using God’s creative material for good).

11. Recapture and rekindle wonder, imagination and incarnational beauty in the world.

    To all the aspiring writers out there – write on, write on and keep writing on!