Write This Down

Write This Down

The question I’m asked most often when I go somewhere to speak or I’m meeting new folks is this: “How do you become a writer?”

There are more instructive answers, of course, but I usually just say, “Writers write.” Writers process their world by writing it down—from the mundane to the profound. It’s what we do because it’s who we are.

Once, in the process of packing up my parents’ home of nearly fifty years, I stumbled onto a small, very seventies-looking notebook filled with my handwriting. In the summer of my thirteenth year, I had apparently already begun the practice of recording stuff. Flipping through page after page, I read that the Indians won the Little League baseball championship, defeating the Braves. I read who I’d met at the neighborhood pool for a swim, where I’d ridden my bike, and what books I’d read and records I’d listened to in my more solitary, happy hours. I know this now because I wrote it down.

By the time I arrived at college, I had filled page after page of journals; I’d written nothing marketable or deeply profound—but the life I had lived to that point I had written down. Pleading prayers. Answered ones. Hurts. Dreams. Everyday happenings. I had not yet called (or even considered myself) a writer. But I was. Because writers write.

Writer or not, everyone has a story. And that story is solidified by writing things down. “Write down what you have seen,” the apostle John hears just before he witnesses the apocalyptic vision, “both the things that are now happening and the things that will happen” (Revelation 1:19). Why? So that others will know the story of God—and of his everlasting love.

There are things you really should write down—so that you will remember too. “Don’t be afraid! I am the First and the Last. I am the living one. I died, but look—I am alive forever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and the grave” (Revelation 1:17-18). He is God and there is no other. Write this down.

He who sits on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” And He said, “Write, for these words are faithful and true.”

Revelation 21:5, NASB