The Writer’s Faith

Writing a book can teach you about life, how to live your days, if you let it. Take this thing we call faith, this mystery that is as real in its presence as it is in its absence. You need it. The book cannot get written without it. But what is it? The kind of faith you need, the one you’re looking for, the kind you wait for open-eyed and thirsty is more than a belief. I believe in myself. I believe I can do it. My experience is that this kind of mental faith (for belief is a thing of the head) doesn’t get you too far. The faith that works is the kind that triggers surrender and that follows it. This vision of a book that I have, there’s no way that I can make it real. The work is beyond my powers and yet it must be done. I put my foot in the water, testing, and I wade in slowly. Or I dive in careless of depths or petrels. Faith is this two-chambered heart of giving up and going on. And as the book gets written sentence by sentence yet another kind of faith is needed. Let’s call it faith in the reality of your creation. The world that you are creating is made real and kept alive by your faith. You must not doubt your creation’s power or its purpose or its goodness. The world you have created has been made real by your faith and now you begin to love. You love your characters, the things that happen to them, the world they live in. Faith has become love. And that’s what it always wanted to be.