One day, a student enters my office for assistance with a paper for church history, or perhaps it’s systematic theology. She is coming to me because my daily work is to assist writers; my office doubles as a writing center at a seminary. On that day, or on any day, the student, or any student, sits down, sighs or grimaces. I ask her how she’s doing, and, she stammers on about how hard she is working to finish this paper and how much more she has to do before the deadlines for all of her classes. Then, she bursts out with the heart of the matter: “Writing this paper is killing me!”
This is a good thing, I tell her. Let me tell you why.
Take a long look at a painting -- Caravaggio’s St. Jerome Writing (c.1605-06). Jerome is reading a large, heavy book, his nearly bald head shines in a wash of light that beams onto the canvas from the left side. His skull is framed by tufts of wild grey hair and a subtle saintly halo. His hyper-focused eyes are hidden beneath bushy eyebrows, and his big white beard contrasts with his bright red robe. A 4th century translator of the Bible into Latin (known now as the Vulgate), Jerome also composed an extensive number of theological essays and letters. He is known especially for his writings about the moral life and history. If anyone worked diligently on papers, it was Jerome. And Caravaggio, the late 16th century Italian painter who undertook this depiction of Jerome hard at work, understood this.
The writer’s callused left hand grips the book he is reading while his sinewy right arm is stretched out across the wide pages, writing quill in hand. Though he reads intently, his fingers clutch the quill, itching to write. Our eyes follow the length of his arm, stopping just beyond the quill to see another skull. This one is of bone, no flesh and blood, and it is gazing intently at Jerome. Belonging to someone long gone, the skull is perched atop another open book, which nearly slides off the table beyond Jerome’s reach. Sitting at his writing table, Jerome is a writer faced with death. Every moment he translates a biblical passage, every moment he writes a treatise, death is looking him squarely in the face.
Surely, this is not a painting to share with an anxious student, someone might say. How cruel! But I think it is a perfect image because it explains what happens to us when we write, if we are writing well. Most of us have been educated to think that writing is about expressing our voices or communicating with an audience for some purpose, but, after teaching writing for nearly 30 years, I can say without a doubt that the best writing, the writing that lasts, comes from a person who is willing to let the writing kill them. I do not mean this literally, I say to my student. I do not subscribe to the Romantic notion of the writer as a hero standing on a rocky crag who risks everything for his art. You are not required to die at the altar of theological academic prose or fiction or poetry or anything else you might be writing.
What I do mean is that the ego, or who we think we are, or the story we tell about ourselves, must die to give rise to something that is new. Each day that Jerome sat at his desk, perhaps in the catacombs with actual skulls surrounding him (as legend has it), he faced letting himself go so that the work could become something for others, so that the work could become itself. Too much Jerome, and no translation or fresh epistle would have washed so powerfully through 4th century minds, provoking them to anger or curiosity. Too much Jerome, and his translations and writings could not have lasted beyond his lifetime. For Jerome’s work to stand on its own, for him to find the voice of the piece of writing, he had to let go of himself. And that is what any writer must learn to do.
I think of writing as a three-phase, often repetitive, process leading to this kind of letting go. We begin with a discovery phase, learning about what many call our “true voice.” Young writers, and some experienced writers at the beginning or in the middle of a writing process, will write to seek out this voice, to hear themselves. This is a good, productive stage that helps the writer come to grips with the current limitations and possibilities in her use of language and the workings of her mind. Paying close attention during this phase, the writer will learn all sorts of things, including how to be her own first best reader. As you write, I tell my student, you are the first person to read what you think and feel, the first person to witness how your language wraps itself around those thoughts and feelings and flows through your fingertips onto the page or the screen. This is a remarkable privilege, I say. And while I do not subscribe to a singular “true voice” for any writer (because I think we are made of multitudes), I notice in writers that there can be a true witness who watches with equanimity as the process comes to life.
A second phase of the process that I’ve identified in myself and other writers, including my students, is one that I call the constructive phase -- or sometimes I refer to it as the creation stage. In this part of the writing process, the writer addresses her audience, considers her purpose, crafts a voice for the reader. She asks, Who am I writing for? Who is my primary audience? Who is sitting on my shoulder giving me feedback (usually negative) about what I’m doing? What am I doing this for? I tell my student that I wrote my own doctoral dissertation about this part of the process because it is most aligned with what people do in academic writing: to write for a very well defined audience (the professor) for a clear purpose (a class assignment) with the voices of critics dancing (loudly) in our heads. When the writer wrestles attentively with these aspects of her writing in this constructive phase, her academic writing can make improvements in giant leaps. Without close attention to this work, though, the writer gets lost in the weeds and feels owned by her writing rather than the other way around. She becomes a parrot of words from the “experts” in the field rather than the agent of her own work. To have a voice that is not the voice of others, the writer cannot simply repeat their words or moves, but has to progress beyond this in her thinking and in the words she uses to construct something new. She may work through this construction stage multiple times in a single piece of writing in an act of risky agency.
At some point, though, the discovery and construction phases, even though they might be repeated for greater transformation, must give way to another stage. Here, the writer meets Jerome -- or, at least Caravaggio’s depiction of him -- in the catacombs. We, too, must look at the skull. This is a phase of self-emptying, a jumping-off point, I tell my student writer. Spiritual people of all kinds, from all sorts of religious traditions, have explored this edge of the cliff, but, for the moment, I am focused on what the Christian tradition might have to say about the writing process and the shaping of voice. The Apostle Paul notes in one of his letters that “I die every day” (1 Cor 15:31). He expresses this in devotion to the Jesus whose own voice knocked him off his horse on the Damascus Road, giving him a new identity as a Christian leader. The model for the self-emptying process is not Paul himself, but the Jesus whom he came to love. In another letter, in a section known as the Christ hymn, Paul says Jesus “emptied himself” (Phil 2:6). At some point, I tell my student, whether you are Paul or Jesus or Jerome or yourself, you have to let go, to release whatever it is you are holding on to, to unspool the story you’ve wound up about yourself and your writing. For writers, that means releasing the writing and allowing the voice to fly free.
For anyone who wants to write something that might have meaning to others, something that might last beyond the personality and lifetime of the writer, the writer herself has to discover, create, and release herself in and through the writing process so that a voice emerges for the piece itself. Another, more recent and well-known writer has written something about this, I tell my student. I am talking about the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison. In her short essay, “Invisible Ink,” found at the end of a book of essays entitled The Source of Self Regard, Morrison conveys that the writer has a responsibility to summon the reader, to destabilize the text, and to reorient her reader. The writer accomplishes this by leaving space enough for the reader to jump onto the page and participate in the story “specifically to help write it,” Morrison says. A story, or any kind of writing, cannot open itself up to a reader if it is too filled up with the writer. Morrison demonstrates this not only in her novels, but also in her bewitching and wonderful Nobel Prize Speech in which she enacts the very thing she is talking about. In telling a story about a blind old storyteller to the assorted dignitaries, Morrison leaves herself behind to transform into the narrative voice of the story. In so doing, she is not her own self, not her own voice, not the person winning the Prize. She becomes, instead, the voice of the Storyteller-- who is more than she is -- by letting herself go, right there behind a podium in front of a huge crowd in 1993 in Stockholm.
Your feeling that writing a paper is killing you, I say to my student, is a very good sign. You are on to something good and true and transformative. By letting yourself go, allowing a new movement to happen in you, as part of the process of writing, you might have a chance of doing or saying something more meaningful. We spend so much time shouting out our tiny voices from the hilltops to claim a stage, a largeness, a good grade, or money, perhaps. But it turns out that the best way for our voices to be heard is to let them die to themselves. Shakespeare is not who he is, Martin Luther King, Jr., is not who he is, Morrison is not who she is, Paul is not who he is, Jerome is not who he is -- unless they look at the skull. If we let ourselves die, if we let the paper kill us, then the work stands on its own and its voice can live for the reader to complete. We writers have now become the voice of the Writer, the Storyteller, the Theologian, the Poet. We are not ourselves, but each of us is a vessel. You are a conduit for something new to enter into the world, but only if you will just look at the skull.
Shan Overton teaches writing and directs the Writing Center at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Her own writing focuses on spirituality, the arts, nature, theological imagination, and creating a new world together.
