“Lock up your libraries if you like,” Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own, “but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” The freedom, Woolf posits, is found in the having of a room in which to write. The irony being that for so many of us, it is in those exact rooms in which we feel the imprisonment of our minds most.

A friend tells me recently that the persistent question in her mind while she writes is, “What will [they] think?” (They has a name, but you’re free to fill in the blank with whatever name you’d like.) I say the writing world will tell her that question is an enemy, one to be warred with and won over. But I tell her that question can also be a friend, even if not the sort you want to cuddle with. The question is a governor of sorts, a restraint on all the things we want to say and probably shouldn’t or at least shouldn’t yet.

The great memoirists say things like, “You own your story” and “Tell it like it is.” Some even say with Emily Dickinson, to “tell the truth but make it slant.” But most of us don’t quote the rest of that poem which reads:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

“The truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind.” To dazzle gradually, I think, means we ought to be looking for restraints wherever we can find them and not so given to the fast and easy language of the postmodern poets who treat rules like fast fashion.

Keep the question, I tell my friend, but keep it in its proper room. It belongs in the editing room and not the writing room. In the writing room we must never ask the question, “What will they think?” The writing room is sacred and ought to be one’s very own.

But I’m a fine one to talk, aren’t I?

. . .

It is 11:30pm and I have snuck down the stairs, trying to miss the squeaky steps. I can’t sleep and usually I will toss and turn until I eventually do. But tonight I am thinking of the death of a beloved saint today, how of course it was going to happen, but how very sad it is when a faithful old man who has lived a faithful long life breathes his last. All day long I’ve been remembering lines and phrases of his from essays and books and snippets I’ve secreted away for half of my life.

My friend Seth says that we only need 1000 true fans to make a living writing and I believe him, but man, it’s easy to doubt that when you’re neck deep in hawking your wares to the world. Recently I feel I might as well be wearing a sandwich board that reads “Buy My Book or Else!” Trusting I have 1000 true fans—thick and thin readers who will buy what I write no matter what—would make the book launch season much less fraught, I think. But these are the times we live in, right?

Right?

But then I think of my writing heroes, Frederick Buechner, Eugene Peterson, Madeleine L’Engle, Annie Dillard, Parker Palmer, Barbara Brown Taylor, Kathleen Norris, Wendell Berry, Brian Doyle—I would (and nearly have!) buy everything they’ve written and without hesitation. If that is a definition of a true fan, then I am one. But it is not lost on me that they have all either died in recent years or will die soon, probably. Sometimes I wonder if they are the last of their kind. Sometimes I wonder if our world is too uninhabitable for writers of their caliber any longer. There are so many up and comers these days but I’m not sure any of us can do what they did unless we make some real and lasting changes to the publishing industry, top down and bottom up.

I took a sabbatical earlier this year and since it ended, I’ve been longing for one element of it back almost constantly. It will surprise no one that the element is a social media free writing life. My writing flourished in that hidden space. I felt like I finally had a room of my own again, the freedom of my mind back. It’s not even that what I share on social media or scroll through takes up that much space in my mind. It’s more that it’s there at all. That I feel beholden to it at all. That I feel its presence lurking and irking like an unwelcome shadow. It’s intrusive, I think this is the word I’ve found most apt to describe its presence.

I have considered all the pros and cons, all the privileges and losses, all the pluses and minuses of absenteeing my social spaces and (like a good Enneagram 9) have merely found myself with no perfect or easy choice.

But as E.B. White said, “Writing is an act of faith,” and I wonder if too many of us faith-writers have been putting our faith in the wrong things? How many of us opting out would be enough?

. . .

I think what I was really thinking about today in the wake of Frederick Buechner’s death is: “Who can meet his mettle?”

Buechner wrote once of the world’s deep hunger and our deep gladness and the meeting of the two, how this is the space God calls us to fill. I’m thinking about the spaces that have been left behind by my heroes, Peterson, L’Engle, Doyle, and now Buechner, and I’m thinking, “That’s where my deep gladness has been met and I think the world is still hungering for more.”

I’m not saying I can fill those shoes, Lord knows, if I could, I’m getting an awfully late start and I’d be a fool to think I could anyway.

But I am saying I want to.

I am saying, “What do I have to do to put myself in a room where my mind is free?” I believe in asking what will they think. I believe in restraints. I believe in good editing. I believe in telling it slant and owning our stories and telling the truth. Buechner did too. In his book, Telling the Truth, he wrote, “If the truth is worth telling, it is worth making a fool of yourself to tell.”

But, like another poet wrote,

“I'm a fool you see
No one knows this more than me.”

Have you ordered my newest book? A Curious Faith: The Questions God Asks, We Ask, and Wish Someone Would Ask Us. Also available: Handle With Care: How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry

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