Where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained,
But happy is he who keeps the law.
– Proverbs 29:18

CI Stands For ‘Craft Improvement’

My heart is that this website has a razors edge like that Santoku blade up there in the picture. The problem right now is that I’m having a terrible time continuing to come up with what to write about. My thought process goes like this:

Website?
Check.
Supportive readership?
Check.
Super vague but exciting vision statement?
“Oh…you mean the whole bit about shattering silence?”
“err…yes.”
Check.
“Oh okay, so I’ll write about shattering silence.”

…

 

And so after a LOT of thinking and praying and thinking I arrived at this:

 Shattering silence means addressing the evils that people face every day.

If we allow evil to operate in the silent shadows of our lives we may find ourselves facing monstrous seigeworks capable of laying waste to all the we are, and all that we hold dear.

Translation: We waste our lives by refusing to take out our trash.

Stories and Poetry

Malcolm Glass, Phillip Hailey (the sea captain in Part III of the series on insecurity), and Speak are all things that I sincerely enjoyed creating.

So I got to thinking…

How can I tie the creative work with the spiritual vision?

How can a story effectively translate into head and heart knowledge that brings freedom and, ultimately, a better perspective for life?

How do I shatter something as elusive and intangible as silence?

How can I help others take out their trash so they can lead better lives?

Seven Deadly Silences

The idea of “Parablogging’ (Parable + Blog post), where Malcolm and Phillip came from, was a lot of fun to write, and I think it landed well on the runway of valuable entertainment (versus entertainment for entertainment’s sake).

Jesus used stories so why not?

This brought me back around to the question of what.

What are my readers (you) dealing with? What silences are people fed up with within themselves that a parable could challenge or dislodge?

How would I organize them?

So I looked up the fourth-century old school way of classifying sins: Pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust.

But from the standpoint of a contemporary layman, the list seems incomplete.

Where does anxiety, regret, fear, shame, or insecurity fit in?

So Are We Focusing On Darkness?

And now have I shifted the entire point of my writing to minimizing my aperture?

No. No one navigates out of a dark room by focusing on the darkness, but on the light streaming from an open door.

Rather than making a list of vices into blog categories, why not the list of the things we know we need more of?

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, self-control?
Good, noble, righteous, pure, lovely, excellent, praiseworthy?

I don’t know about you, but if I were to visit a website, I’d much rather see that list in the blog categories.

So the format has to be:

1. Create a compelling story or poem.
2. Illustrate how it’s relevant to the things people deal with every day.
3. Focus on the light. On what is needed. Crank up the aperture. Open heaven.

Shatter silence.

 

 

#inthirds

 

Respond: The risk now is creating art that is cheesy. What topics and settings would you like to see tackled first in the fiction to come? Let me know in the comments!