From My Point of View: In Hope Of Joy -- By: Evelyn Bence
Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 10:1 (Winter 1996)
Article: From My Point of View: In Hope Of Joy
Author: Evelyn Bence
PP 10:1 (Winter 1996) p. 13
From My Point of View:
In Hope Of Joy
Evelyn Bence is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in a variety of publications including Publishers Weakly, Today’s Christian Woman, Christianity Today, and America. She is the author of a number of books including Leaving Home and Mary’s Journal. This article first appeared in Centering. Winter 1990, and is reprinted by permission.
A few weeks ago at 5 p.m. I pushed my chair away from my desk. I had only three hundred words of prose to show for an eight-hour day. Not that I had stopped to shake popcorn or weed my garden. I had sat and stared. I’d written a sentence and crossed it out. I’d stared. I’d written half a sentence and crossed half of it out. Eventually fit words had filled a page, but the day was over; night had drawn nigh.
Later that evening I unleashed my frustration on a patient, trusted listener; I tried to explain my ambivalence. My drive to write and my dread of the process. I cried, sobbed actually, and when he felt there was hope of a smile my friend finally spoke: “Maybe you should find one of those groups, you know, ‘My name is Evelyn B. and I’m a writer’.”
If such a group existed I might be in good company. Mark Twain could admit the struggle: “Last summer I...could only make two little wee things, 1,550 words altogether, succeed — only that out of piles and stacks of diligently-wrought MSS, the labor of six weeks’ unremitting effort.”
I never wanted to be a writer. Struggling over a paper due for a college creative writing class, I sat in the library horrified at a sudden insight: There were people who wrote for a living. Why would anyone choose to do this? Digging for words you’re not sure you want to find. Clarifying thoughts you’re not sure you want to name. Crafting sentences you’re not sure you want to claim.
Only now, fifteen years and five books later, can I make a stab at an answer: I didn’t choose this search for words as much as I was drafted, like the servants in Jesus’ Matthew 25 story to whom the master entrusted coins known as talents.
Talents. Gifts. If I allow myself to slice my gifts into day-sized pieces, then view one at a time, I feel more cursed than blessed. Fr. Peter Daly aptly described God’s call on a life: “You can’t stop that insistent ringing until you answer the phone” (Washington Post, June 18, 1989).
Though all gifts have their “what am I doing” days, I find writers especially burdened with the process of their craft. Several years ago I drove into Washington, D.C. to Wesley Seminary for a meeting of a local g...
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