The Year of Writing

Here we are, 2011. And along with everyone else, i have goals and aspirations for this year. Not too many; I've made that mistake in the past. Just a couple; but one of them is to write more, at least 3-4 pages a day. Now they may actually look like less blogging as I save my best thoughts to be published. Yes, I've got a book idea, and I put some more thoughts to paper today in my new moleskin my wife gave me for Christmas. Very refreshing to get these thoughts out of me. And I discovered so much more in the 3+ hours I wrote this morning.

I found this affirming though: as I'm finishing up the Lincoln biography tonight I've been reading (Lincoln: the biography of a writer by Fred Kaplan) I came across this passage from a lecture he gave on Discoveries and Inventions in 1859:

"Writing -- the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye--is the great invention of the world. Great in the astonishing range of analysis and combination which necessarily underlies the most crude and general conception of it -- great, very great in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and of space; and great, not only in its direct benefits, but greatest help, to all other inventions . . . Its utility may be conceived, by the reflection, that to it we owe everything which distinguishes us from savages. Take it from us, and the Bible, all history, all science, all government, all commerce, and nearly all social intercourse go with it."

Good stuff. And he mentions too that speech is the other great invention. Confirms how I've decided to spend my time this year in continuing in Toastmasters along with writing. And it goes along with what I've learned lately about the power of words, spoken and written; perhaps why Christ is referred to as the Word, the expression of God in John 1? More thoughts on that later...

Happy New Year!