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<\/a>An Accidental Artist<\/b><\/p>\n
Since childhood, my ultimate career ambition has always been to be a novelist, to craft long-form prose, to see it in hardcover with a removable jacket sleeve, and to somehow sustain myself and my family through the quest of creating memorable fiction.\u00a0 I was told at an early age by a teacher with whom I maintain contact to this very day that I had a talent, that in fact I had \u201cno reason whatsoever not to be a writer,\u201d and this initial encouragement was reiterated by others \u2014 teachers, friends, mentors \u2014 throughout many years.<\/p>\n
I believed what I had been told.<\/p>\n
Writing morphed into other creative interests, primarily drawing, but also poetry, music, and painting.\u00a0 Anything with an aesthetic nature flowed somewhat easily.\u00a0 In college I landed the lead in a university\u2019s major production without ever having any acting experience (and managed to land a wife in real life in the process).\u00a0 Years later my wife and I were given full-time jobs in radio without ever having taken a class in broadcasting.\u00a0 Like these, in many of my creative pursuits I\u2019ve stumbled into them rather than actually sought them out.<\/p>\n I have always understood the arts and had an appreciation for movies and novels, in particular.\u00a0 1989\u2019s Dead Poets Society<\/i> spoke to my core and resonated on a level I\u2019d infrequently experienced before.\u00a0 I identified in some way with each of the characters and for the next year I almost always had a notebook within arm\u2019s reach to scribble out a stanza when inspiration struck.<\/p>\n Most of the creative endeavors I\u2019ve encountered, I\u2019ve enjoyed.\u00a0 And for the most part I have had a certain level of competency.\u00a0 Not expertise, mind you, but competency, and enough competency to make me think I had a shot of actually transforming one of these artistic pursuits into a genuine career.<\/p>\n But creative writing was the only endeavor that allowed me to relate to the phrase, \u201cit feeds my soul.\u201d<\/p>\n Somewhat surprisingly, my interest in the arts lead to a successful career in the IT industry.\u00a0 I always loved to write and I always liked playing video games.\u00a0 In the early 1980\u2019s my father bought us an Apple II+ computer which, if I wanted to write and and play games, I had to learn to use.\u00a0 Even Applesoft BASIC (and later just regular BASIC) programming had a certain creative sensibility and flow to it.\u00a0 Because of this combination of technical and creative ability, when it became possible to create graphically enhanced websites in the mid-1990\u2019s, I stumbled into an unexpected career that was nothing more than being in the right place at the right time. Anyone could now create a website, but in the early days of mass-acceptance of the Internet, and long before the pervasiveness of WordPress, making a website actually look good was akin to voodoo.<\/p>\n After several years, though, my technical pursuits involved less and less creativity as employers saw in me a proficiency for project management and leading teams.\u00a0 I had children to feed now, and a mortgage, and creative pursuits and the romantic notion of being a starving artist and modern day Bohemian felt selfish.<\/p>\n The Worst Possible Doubt<\/b><\/p>\n In 2000 I was several years into a career developing software systems both as a developer and a manager. \u00a0Struck by inspiration, I\u2019d leave work each night and stop at the local library to pound out 1000 words before heading home.\u00a0 The concept for the story was the fruit of frustration from the myriad of pop sensation novels that revolved around dysfunctional characters living out immoral solutions to their shallow lifestyles.\u00a0 In the midst of writing, as a result of multiple factors, my own relationship with God was deepening.\u00a0 I told myself and God that my novel was an antidote to a literary market filled with tales of dysfunction that was given free reign to destroy lives.\u00a0 As my own story was borne, I daydreamed of best-seller lists and bidding wars and advance checks with multiple zeros. \u00a0 I\u2019d convinced myself that the publication of this novel would alter my life forever.<\/p>\n The end result was a novel called \u201cThis Time For Good\u201d which was promptly rejected by over 150 agents and publishers.\u00a0 All the secular publishers said it was too religious, all the religious publishers said it was too Catholic, and the one Catholic fiction publisher at the time said they weren\u2019t publishing any more fiction.<\/p>\n The rejections poured in over the course of a year in which the distaste for my accidental career in IT was magnified with each returned manuscript.\u00a0 I\u2019d arrive home each evening and check the mail before greeting my family.\u00a0 Another rejection letter, and then another.\u00a0 Each morning, before my eyes would open, I would wonder if that was the day everything would change.\u00a0 Would that be the day when a publisher would snatch up my book and I could leave the IT industry behind, the financial security of my family assured as a result of a silly story I\u2019d concocted?<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s all I think of all day,\u201d I told my wife.\u00a0 \u201cI can\u2019t stop thinking about it.\u00a0 Literally a minute doesn\u2019t pass where I don\u2019t think about that book being published.\u00a0 Why would God give me these talents, and the desire to give life to these words and these creations if I wasn\u2019t supposed to do something with it?\u201d<\/p>\n My wife had no idea how injurious \u2014 and true \u2014 the words she would then speak would be to me, how deeply they would wound, and how long the wound would bleed. \u00a0Having said that, I’m so grateful she had the courage to speak them to one as hardheaded as me.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s as if you\u2019ve made the book a god,\u201d she said, and I was furious at the accusation. \u00a0 Furious not at my wife, but at the mere possibility her words were true. \u00a0The hours I\u2019d poured into the novel, the sacrifices I\u2019d made to bring it to life.\u00a0 A false god, she said.\u00a0 In the service of God, had I created an idol?\u00a0 Had the pursuit of a supposed good in fact brought life to an evil<\/em>?<\/p>\n I railed against everything that night, in a way I\u2019m not sure I can adequately describe.\u00a0 For hours, I cried and screamed at God in hushed anger.\u00a0 All I had worked for and toward, all hope of escape from my present work situation, all I had dreamed of for years, it was all lies.\u00a0 My dream since childhood, which seemed so close to reality as I wrote that book, was nothing more than a dream, and I had just woken up to realize it as such.<\/p>\n And on that Friday evening, this book I\u2019d told myself I\u2019d written for<\/i> God, caused me \u2014 for just the briefest of seconds \u2014 to actually doubt the existence of God. If all of what I’d set forth to accomplish in my life was lies and misdirection, then perhaps the God I longed to serve was a lie, as well.<\/p>\n And there it was, on the table, for just a moment, a thought I\u2019d never considered.<\/p>\n My family had gone to bed by this time and I remember so clearly exactly where I was standing in the kitchen when that thought was made manifest.\u00a0 I had one hand grasping the kitchen counter to hold myself up against the despair that threatened to overtake me, when I had the thought that if this book, this skill, this talent, and desire, were all false, \u201cThen maybe You don\u2019t exist, either.\u201d<\/p>\n Meaninglessness<\/b><\/p>\n The arts lost meaning to me. In the grand scheme of things, what did it matter? Even if I did get a novel published, unless I ended up being a bestselling author, what good would it do the world 100 years from now? Suddenly, creativity was an exercise in selfishness, something I\u2019d waste hours on for my own gratification.\u00a0 I may as well just play video games or watch television.<\/p>\n One afternoon, when cleaning out our attic, I threw away three large trash bags of my short stories, poetry, and drawings.\u00a0 Destroyed them for good, forever. \u00a0Left to mold and decay and disappear buried deep in a mound of trash somewhere.<\/p>\n Yet no matter how I tried to squash it, the need for creativity would not be killed.\u00a0 In the early days of podcasting, I used that medium to create absurd radio plays and parody songs.\u00a0 The more outlandish the better.\u00a0 The podcast was supposed to be for catechetical purposes for our non-profit religious apostolate, yet I couldn\u2019t help myself from doing oddball things from time to time, even though I was completely unaware that all I was doing was feeding the creative part of me that I was simultaneously trying to abandon. That part of me was starving and wanted to be fed.<\/p>\n The podcast lead to a video series, which lead to radio, which lead to a sitcom pilot, which lead to writing two non-fiction books which easily found a publisher.\u00a0 But all these, I told myself, were for the purpose of evangelization.\u00a0 And for the most part, they were.\u00a0 During the same time I taught myself to play piano and continued to play guitar and sing (though admittedly not that well).\u00a0 Some of those initiatives did in fact placate \u2014 though not satisfy \u2014 my soul in a way fiction and painting once did, but on a very superficial level.<\/p>\n Through it all, despite all those many rejections I\u2019d received on my novel, I still thought of the unpublished novel, of the manuscript that has pretty much been haunting me for the past fourteen years.\u00a0 I can\u2019t get the story out of my head, and I can\u2019t shake the desire to have it professionally published.\u00a0 As I said, I\u2019ve had no issue finding publishers for my nonfiction Catholic works, and those works have sold fairly well, but fiction is a whole other beast. \u00a0And it is at the heart of what I’ve always wanted in life.<\/p>\n Years later, after making more inroads in Catholic media as a result of our radio show and running several apostolates, a Catholic publisher that doesn’t handle much fiction offered to look at the manuscript and, after reading, suggested that the story was too candid in it\u2019s depiction of one\u2019s struggles with chastity, and in fact that I had written a book with too much sexual tension. As a result, I\u2019ve muddled with ideas of making This Time For Good<\/i> a gung-ho Catholic novel.\u00a0 Just go full Catholic, for a Catholic audience, chock-full of Catholicity on every page.\u00a0 Delete anything that truly resonates in the genuine struggles people encounter in their relationships and just write a sellable, sterile, predictable love story with the obligatory come-to-Jesus revelation in the third act.<\/p>\n Just preach to the choir from the beginning to the end and be done with the blasted thing.<\/p>\n But I\u2019m not comfortable with that for a few reasons, primarily because so far there has been no proven market for Catholic fiction, so why write for a barely existing audience?<\/p>\n And there\u2019s the crux of my problem from the very beginning: I love literature.\u00a0 I love to write.\u00a0 I love to create.\u00a0 But at the heart, I don\u2019t see worth in creating unless there\u2019s some sort of satisfaction of compensation at the end.\u00a0 Compensation, I suppose, equals affirmation of one\u2019s talents. \u00a0You wrote something so dang good I’m going to pay you for it.<\/p>\n But then recently I read in Pope John Paul II\u2019s 1999 Letter to Artists that, \u201cArtists who are conscious of [the tasks they must assume, the hard work they must endure, and the responsibility they must accept] know too that they must labour without allowing themselves to be driven by the search for empty glory or the craving for cheap popularity, and still less by the calculation of some possible profit for themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n This brings me great pause.\u00a0 So\u2026I\u2019m to create for the sake of creating?\u00a0 I must endure, to labor, not for affirmation, and certainly not for profit?<\/p>\n That stinks, man.<\/p>\n I read that as \u201ccreate for the sake of creating and for the sake of sharing the creation, but don\u2019t plan on getting paid for it.\u201d<\/p>\n Trust me, I don\u2019t anticipate payment, but why waste even more time on a novel I\u2019ve already invested countless hundreds of hours on if there\u2019s no renumeration in the end?\u00a0 That\u2019s the thing that\u2019s always stuck with me.<\/p>\n Haunted<\/b><\/p>\n But perhaps I\u2019m not in it just for a buck.\u00a0 Why else have I been so unable to escape the shadow of this story and the characters that inhabit this world?\u00a0 It\u2019s important to point out that this isn\u2019t even my first novel.\u00a0 My first novel was finished in 1993 and was so terrible I have since destroyed every copy.\u00a0 I\u2019ve gotten 200 pages into two other novels. \u00a0Those books I rarely even think about, but This Time For Good<\/i> I can\u2019t shake.\u00a0 I have three children who have been in my life for less time than this book has. \u00a0For a third of my life, I’ve been trying to bring this novel to completion.<\/p>\n A little over a year ago I went back and started reading the manuscript again, toying with making those Catholic changes.\u00a0 And after time away from the world in which I’d so completely immersed myself, what I saw wasn\u2019t impressive.\u00a0 There was too much telling and too little showing.\u00a0 Too many extraneous characters.\u00a0 No overarching character plots. \u00a0Infrequent set-ups and pay-offs. \u00a0In short, it was abundantly evident I\u2019d basically vomited words out on paper to get it out of my head, but little of it could ever be considered \u201cliterary.\u201d\u00a0 There was a good character-based story, and the two main protagonists really are people I\u2019ve grown to love very deeply, despite their fictitiousness. \u00a0But the overall tale was pointless.<\/p>\n One day I was sitting in an airport waiting for a flight and for no reason whatsoever, I decided to take just two simple paragraphs and expand them, to dive more deeply into the terrain of the tale and see what I may have missed in the original telling.\u00a0 What came out of my fingertips astounded me.\u00a0 It was writing I couldn\u2019t believe was even mine.\u00a0 Over the fourteen year sabbatical, it was as if the story had been marinating and had grown in intensity and flavor. \u00a0And once I’d tasted the story again, I couldn\u2019t resist another helping.<\/p>\n Over the last year and a half since that day in the airport, I\u2019ve been drawn back to that chapter time and again.\u00a0 I just haven\u2019t been able to shake this story.<\/p>\n But that question remains.\u00a0 Writing this, or painting a picture, or making a YouTube video.\u00a0 What\u2019s the ultimate point? \u00a0If I do this, if I write, if I spend time away from the family and staring at a computer screen, what good will any of this bring?<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been wrestling with this as if I\u2019m wrestling a demon.\u00a0 I\u2019ve prayed and asked God countless times to release me from the desire to write fiction, to escape creative impulses. \u00a0I\u2019ve questioned the need for any hobby at all.\u00a0 And, like any time I fight for understanding, I try to wait until God is ready to speak and reveal.<\/p>\n One evening just two months ago, I followed a compulsion to walk into an arts and crafts store.\u00a0 I stood for perhaps half an hour looking at paint brushes and canvases, remembering what it was like years ago when I first started to paint.\u00a0 I stopped painting after our first child was born, but now something was calling me, another artistic beacon calling out to me. \u00a0I knew I\u2019d never sell a painting, but I could at least make things to decorate our home.\u00a0 There was a certain rationalization to this particular creative pursuit.<\/p>\n I decided at some point that I’d give painting another shot. \u00a0I could allow that in my life. \u00a0But merely opening the door to something purely artistic like painting somehow brought greater life to my struggle with writing fiction. \u00a0For the next few weeks, both were regularly in my brain. \u00a0As I pondered what images I might bring to life through paint and canvas, I almost involuntarily kept thinking of the weak areas of the novel and my mind wrestled with solutions.<\/p>\n Shortly before Christmas, I mentioned this struggle on the podcast my wife I and continue to host each week.\u00a0 How could I spend time doing something as selfish as writing or painting at the detriment to my own family, I asked.\u00a0 Is it fair for me to go hide in the basement with paintbrushes or a word processor just to while away the hours?<\/p>\n I mentioned this to a few other people and my good friend and former co-worker Fr. Roderick Vonhogen (he, also, of a creative slant) said something that struck at the heart of all my deliberations.\u00a0 Paraphrasing, he said, \u201cCreativity allows the Holy Spirit to work through us to create something else.\u00a0 In that sense, it could be like a prayer.\u201d<\/p>\n Prayer is something that makes sense. \u00a0Prayer is something I know I need in order to make it through my hectic days.<\/p>\n Coupling that with John Paul II\u2019s Letter to Artists where he says, \u201c\u2026beauty is the vocation bestowed on [the artist] by the Creator in the gift of \u2018artistic talent.\u2019\u00a0 And, certainly, this too is a talent which ought to be made to bear fruit, in keeping with the sense of the Gospel parable of the talents (cf. Mt 25:14-30).\u201d<\/p>\n This is rationalization I can accept. \u00a0If I have been given talents, and yet I bury them away and don’t even try to expand them, I’m like the nervous servant who buried the talents entrusted to him.<\/p>\n John Paul II says at the beginning of that letter, \u201cNone can sense more deeply than you artists, ingenious creators of beauty that you are, something of the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked upon the work of his hands.\u201d<\/p>\n While that line is compelling, the next section, to me, was absolutely captivating.<\/p>\n \u201cA glimmer of that feeling has shone so often in your eyes when \u2014 like the artists of every age \u2014 captivated by the hidden power of sounds and words, colors and shapes, you have admired the work of your inspiration, sensing in it some echo of the mystery of creation with which God, the sole creator of things, has wished in some way to associate you.\u201d<\/p>\n God may not have called me to be a published novelist, but He \u201chas wished in some way\u201d to associate me with the echo of Him as creator.<\/p>\n Creativity, when brought to life, is an echo of God, and as much as I’ve tried to squelch it these last fourteen years, in is undeniable that he has “wished in some way” to associate me with the echo of Him.<\/p>\n Brush Strokes<\/b><\/p>\n For Christmas, my wife got me new brushes and paints and canvases and an easel.<\/p>\n When I sat down before that first blank canvas in so many years, I was struck not with fear, but with a sense of solemnity.\u00a0 And I prayed.\u00a0 I prayed for the Holy Spirit, if He so chose, to work through me to breathe life to something on that white screen before me.<\/p>\n And the first attempt was horrid.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a>I was immediately remorseful for even thinking it.\u00a0 Of course God existed, but now so did the doubt that all I\u2019d ever hoped to do in life would ever be made tangible.\u00a0 If writing, and more specifically, getting published, had become a god, I wanted nothing to do with it at all.\u00a0 Soon thereafter, I gave up the pursuit of writing completely.\u00a0 If I\u2019d made a god out writing, and especially that book, then I wanted nothing more to do with it.\u00a0 I closed the door on the dream I\u2019d had since childhood.<\/p>\n