Writing Updates and New Year's Resolution
My writing-related updates and 2025 commitment to writing regularly for this newsletter.
It’s been a while since I’ve reached out. As a reminder—since some of you might be wondering, Who is this guy and why is he randomly emailing me?—at one time or another you likely signed up to receive emailed updates/essays on my website (formerly named The Call Collective). Many of you, I suspect, found me through my writing on Word on Fire.
So, I’m reaching out for two reasons: to share some personal writing updates (for those interested) and to reaffirm my commitment to writing regularly for this Substack newsletter Ends in Mind in 2025.
First: my writing updates. I’ve had a couple of modest literary publications in the last year or so. For those familiar with submitting stories or poems to literary magazines, the process often entails a soul-wringing slog through stock rejections, punctuated by that rare, semi-affirming personalized rejection, and that even rarer golden ticket of acceptance. As most writers will tell you, though, it’s part and parcel of the literary profession. Having said that, it’s been nice to garner some small wins.
One story I had (somewhat) recently published is titled “Herr Director!” and is about a recovering alcoholic. I began writing a very rudimentary version of this story over a decade ago (that initial draft was overwritten, lacked a compelling inciting incident, and had an unnecessarily and shockingly dark conclusion—in other words, it was pretty awful). While the story has since benefited from a workshop in my doctoral creative writing program and the helpful feedback of one of my dissertation committee members, I owe this story’s inspiration and my familiarity with 12-step recovery to my good friend Scott Weeman. In fact, I can still recall meeting Scott for breakfast in San Diego at Great Maple to discuss it as I was thinking through an elementary outline of what would eventually become the piece published in Adelaide Literary Magazine. If interested, you can read that story here.
I also had a (shorter) story published in The Saturday Evening Post about a family trip to a local fair after a funeral. If interested, you can read that story here.
On the non-fiction side of things, I recently had an essay published online in FareForward titled “Writing for Epiphany” (I’ve provided the first several paragraphs of that essay below). In that piece, I explore how approaching writing and reading literature (or, really, any form of narrative art, such as film, TV, etc.) with a certain degree of attention can—to quote Simone Weil—become “the same thing as prayer.” I discuss how this type of apprehending of reality is transferrable to personal prayer and how it can illuminate our understanding of God and the role we’re called to play in the grand narrative of His providential will. If interested, you can read that essay here.
Finally, in keeping with one of my New Year’s resolutions, my goal is to write regularly for this newsletter. As I’ve shared before, you can expect my writings to be in a somewhat similar vein to my previous essays. My hope with this newsletter is to explore topics that interest me: Christian spirituality, culture, technology, the arts, literature, film, work and leisure, consumerism, and more. While I’m interested in a lot of topics, the thread connecting my writing encompasses this question: What does it mean to flourish as a human being in our world today? In other words, how can we keep the “ends in mind” (hence the newsletter’s name) when it comes to faith, culture, technology, the arts, and so on?
Also: just like with this very message that you’re reading, I’ll use this newsletter to share my own personal writing updates from time to time.
If this sounds like something that interests you, great. I’m grateful for your readership. If not, no problem—you can unsubscribe at any time using the link below.
As always, thank you for reading.
Now for that promised preview of my essay, “Writing for Epiphany”:
When I teach creative writing to undergraduates, I begin by developing with them a shared vocabulary for talking about narrative art. I introduce them to various basic techniques: interiority and dialogue; point-of-view (first, second, close-third, omniscient, etc.), plot and tension, setting and atmosphere, characterization, and so on. I imagine some students find learning these terms and techniques burdensome. I get it: Many students take a creative writing course precisely because they want to escape the litany of rhetorical rules expected in standard English courses. Creative writing, they presume, will allow them to soar unbridled on the fuel of creative intuition. No rules—just pure and unadulterated inspiration!
This is partly true, of course. As the writer John Gardener points out in The Art of Fiction, the artist sometimes writes in a “thoughtless white heat of ‘inspiration,’ drawing on his unconscious, trusting his instincts, hoping that when he looks back at it later, in cool objectivity, the scene will work.” Still, the best writing balances these passionate flights of fancy with an editor’s sharp and rigorous eye, and as the semester continues and we begin workshopping stories, students start to realize this. It becomes clear that some stories seem to “work” better than others, and we can trace these reasons, usually, to the presence or absence of certain techniques. A clearly sketched character is important. Adequate action and dialogue propelling the story forward keeps it from feeling flat. Very few writers are able to disregard such techniques and still write good fiction. Flannery O’Connor perhaps captured it best in her revelatory Mystery and Manners: “You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.”
So, over the course of the semester those students who were perhaps resistant to these so-called techniques of fiction start to accept their necessity. But they also begin to think much more deeply about characters in space and time. For instance, a student might begin writing a story about an alcoholic struggling to connect with his daughter, a middle-aged woman contemplating an affair, or an autistic teenager getting through his first day of high school. At first, these characters are mere caricatures: a composite of stereotypical traits that we tend to associate with the alcoholic father or autistic teenager. However, as they discuss these characters and continue writing and rewriting them, the characters eventually turn into unique and distinct figures. In other words, as students think deeper about their stories over time—as they practice sustained and intense reflection on their own work—their characters become more and more human and particular.
Naturally, the same is true in my own writing. As I wade through each draft, wrestling with my characters and thinking through their various interactions and dilemmas, something well-rounded and concrete eventually emerges. The more I try to understand and imagine a given character in a specific situation and what their conflicting desires are (because good characters, like real people, don’t always know what their desires are and often have several in conflict—we can look to Saint Augustine or Saint Paul here), the more I learn about what it means to be human. I learn something meaningful, and often something that surprises me. Again, though, such realizations only come by way of intense and regular concentration: a type of refined and patient apprehension.
Continue reading this article in FareForward.