On Writing

I started late taking interest in books. I only started reading seriously at 20. By serious I mean, that's when I started to read books that had no pictures in them. Books were a bore, compared to music, which was my main thing.

When I said music being my main thing, it means that I treated music like religion. I play guitar so the natural instinct of playing musical instruments is to form a band. So, i used to practice my guitar playing by rewinding my cassettes until I was able to nail a song. Well, not necessarily note for note but i would say I got like 80% right. I meant to put 90% but that would be bragging. I'm an OK guitar player so saying like I got something right on a 80% scale would be a humble description. There was one that I skipped sleep for two days in a row playing guitar.

It was during this time too that I was really into song writing. I always respected band that plays their own music and writes their own songs. True artist I would call them. I liked how songs talk about something. That's when I ventured into song writing. I wrote songs in the vein of KORN, complete with the "Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics" kind of vibe to it. The lyrics were dark. My dream was to form a band and write our own songs and who knows, to be famous.

But the band thing did not materialize. Soon songwriting evolved to different perspective when I turned my life to Jesus. Sort of like songs venturing in the worship music vibe kind of song writing. But somewhere along the line I sort of 'gave up' taking song writing seriously. I guess that when my attention came to books and again back to writing. I plan to be some sort of writer someday...hopefully. Part of the writing bug has evolved into this blog. I think it is a good platform to keep my mind in focus on writing. Anyway the narrative aside here are two posts on writing that I found interesting by Donald Miller (See here and here).

4 or 5 point pamphlets or the whole biblical narrative

An excerpt from Donald Miller's "Searching for God Knows What";

"Earlier the same year I had a conversation with my friend Omar, who is a student in a local college. For his humanities class, Omar was assigned to read the majority of the Bible. He asked to meet me for coffee, and when we sat down he put a bible on the table as well as a pamphlet containing the same five or six ideas Greg had mentioned. He opened the pamphlet, read the ideas, and asked if these concepts were important to the central message of Christianity. I told Omar they were critical; that, basically, this was the gospel of Jesus, the back bone of Christian faith. Omar then opened the bible and asked, "If these ideas are so important, why aren't they in this book?"
"But the scripture references are right here,"I said curiously, showing to Omar that the verses were printed next to each idea.
"I see that," he said. "But in the bible they aren't concise like they are in this pamphlet. They are spread out all over the book."
"But this pamphlet are the summations of the ideas," I clarified.
"Right," Omar continued, "but it seems like, if these if these ideas are that critical, God would have taken the time to make bullet points out of them. Instead he put some of them here and some of them there. And half the time, when Jesus is talking, he is speaking entirely in parables. It is hard to believe that whatever it is He is talking about can be summed up this simply." " (p 152)