Book Update

Tony Reinke Writing

After eight and a half months of work done mostly on a computer screen I held in my hands for the first time a printout of my entire book on Saturday evening. It weighs in at 118-pages (single-spaced) and 48,894 words (about the size of a 180-page book). We have a name picked. Author and manuscript are doing well but tired and recovering. Balloons welcome.

I am very thankful for all your encouragement and prayers over the months and know that my strength for this project has been sustained by God’s grace.

The manuscript is due on November 1 and that’s good because it still needs a fair bit of work. But the trajectory is looking good and I am encouraged where it stands.

Occasionally people ask me when I find the time to write and mostly that work is done in the early morning before I leave for work and also at Starbucks on Mondays (my day off). I initially guessed the book would require a total of 1,000 hours of work and that looks to be accurate. Once I came to that calculation it was all about plodding and putting in the hours.

At some point I’ll drill down and tap into the gusher of lessons I’ve learned during the book writing process (still very much in process) but for now here’s a summary of my book writing procedure:

Stage 1: Outline (Nov, Dec 2009)

For two months I collected ideas and formed my thoughts into a comprehensive outline. The result was a 95-page Word document. Now as I review that initial outline it looks like I used maybe 40-percent of the original ideas, the majority being discarded because it didn’t fit the flow or for for the sake of brevity. I finished the outline in my in-laws basement in Omaha last Christmas. This outline itself is an evidence of grace because I usually just swan dive into project without planning.

Stage 2: Rough draft (Jan, Feb, Mar 2010)

On January 4, 2010 I sat at my computer and began writing chapter one and proceeded consecutively to write each chapter. The first rough draft process required about 10 weeks of time and included one intense 3-day retreat of 18 hour writing days. Once the chapters were written they went to my primary editor (my wife) and then sent them off to the publisher for initial feedback and large-scale edits. As you can imagine, having a gifted editor for a wife is a great blessing of immeasurable value!

Once the rough draft was complete in mid-March, I unplugged and took a three-month break from the book. In June I invested a chunk of my book advance for a week at the beach with the family. My kids love that dad is writing a book.

Stage 3: First draft revisions (final two weeks of July 2010)

The rough drafts went off to my publisher for edits between April and June and edited chapter drafts have been arriving in a steady stream for a couple months. For the last two weeks I worked the changes in and gave each chapter an overall tweak. In the last week I’ve also reworked the book’s subtitle, sharpened the chapter titles, and drafted an introduction.

Stage 4: Second draft rewrite (Sept, Oct 2010)

The new version of the manuscript (the 118-page draft I held in my hands on Saturday) is now being distributed to editors. I don’t plan to work on the manuscript much in the month of August. In early September I’ll launch the second draft rewrite.

To pull manuscript along to this point it was necessary (1) to decide what I wanted to say, (2) to get the ideas on paper, (3) to get those ideas approved (or challenged) and then sharpened by a few initial editors. The manuscript is sharper but it remains quite ‘lumpy.’ In the final two months I’ll be working to smooth out the prose in my second draft rewrite.

The fourth stage is my favorite stage. Here I tighten sentences, trim paragraphs, bridge sentences, smooth transitions, activate verbs, and sprinkle a few images and possibly some humor. Just about every sentence, all section break headings, and even chapter titles will be smoothed out in one way or another so “rewrite” is an accurate term.

Getting to this stage of editing is not automatic for me. For eight months I’ve been a researcher. I have read about 60 books related to my book’s topic; referenced sections of another 100 books, encyclopedias, and commentaries; read a pile of magazine articles; and wrestled through a couple complex journal articles. But now I must change hats from researcher to prose stylist and for me this is more of a brain recalibration, a recalibration that will govern my summer reading. For the next month I’ll be reading books by masters of creative prose stylemanship:

N. D. Wilson, Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl. I doubt I have read a more creatively written book in the last five years. This will be my third reading. I know I’ll never write this well but for some reason as I read Wilson I’m motivated to try again.

Christian George, God•o•logy. The book’s size, shape, trim, simple vector cover on the outside and the text size, font, and page layout on the inside are a model for what I would like my little manuscript to grow up and become one day. Christian (son of scholar Timothy George) is a very gifted prose stylist, knows how to write punchy section headings and summary statements, how to transition paragraphs with brief sentences, and how to introduce direct quotes.

Timothy J. Stoner, The God Who Smokes. Stoner is very good at bringing Old Testament narratives to life and in the few places in my book where I attempt to do the same Stoner will be a helpful model. He is, like George, a creative writer of catchy metaphors (i.e. “Quiet dropped like a well-oiled guillotine”).

Dave Harvey, Rescuing Ambition (Crossway, 2010). Dave is a gifted communicator. After reading his books I come away inspired to write with clarity and with punch. This is his latest book and it’s a wonderful model of style.

Seth Godin, Tribes. I appreciate the simplicity of his writings and his abundant use of section headings. He uses those section breaks as transitions, allowing him to make fairly abrupt turns that save a lot of space. From the beginning of this project I have sought to model this transition-through-section-heading style.

Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made To Stick. A reread for me, this is a wonderful how-to on making ideas sticky and is itself a model of clear/tight writing.

Arthur Plotnik, Spunk and Bite. Apart from his dissing of E. B. White (which is something of a cliché these days), this book is very creative both in principle and example. Chapter 27, “The Earnestly Engaging Sentence,” is especially helpful. This will be my first reread.

Joseph M. Williams, Style. This is one short book on writing clear sentences that I reread as often as possible. For it’s size, I think it’s the most important book on writing I own. Because of it’s size, I often keep it in my backpack.

So that’s an update on the book and little glimpse into my writing process and my summer reading. I’ll be traveling for the next couple of weeks, enjoying the time away. We have some promising audio books all queued up in the van for the 40 hours of driving including another model of creating writing: Andrew Peterson’s On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness.

Until then, the blog will remain fairly quiet.

Stay thirsty, my friends (1 Pet 2:2).

Tony

What do you say to someone who is suffering?

Tony Reinke Suffering, Tragedy, Trials

The son of Yale theology professor Nicholas Wolterstorff died at the age of 24 in a mountain climbing accident. After the accident Dr. Wolterstorff wrote meditations about the hole left in his life due to the passing of his son. They were originally intended to be private, a place for him to voice his grief, but they were eventually published as a short book, Lament for a Son (Eerdmans, 1987). His meditations provide a penetrating glimpse into the grieving heart of a Christian enduring deep personal suffering. The following excerpt comes from that little book [pp. 34–35]:

What do you say to someone who is suffering?

Some people are gifted with words of wisdom. For such, one is profoundly grateful. There were many such for us. But not all are gifted in that way. Some blurted out strange, inept things. That’s OK too. Your words don’t have to be wise. The heart that speaks is heard more than the words spoken. And if you can’t think of anything at all to say, just say, “I can’t think of anything to say. But I want you to know that we are with you in your grief.” Or even, just embrace. Not even the best of words can take away the pain. What words can do is testify that there is more than pain in our journey on earth to a new day. Of those things that are more, the greatest is love. Express your love. How appallingly grim must be the death of a child in the absence of love.

But please: Don’t say it’s not really so bad. Because it is. Death is awful, demonic. If you think your task as comforter is to tell me that really, all things considered, it’s not so bad, you do not sit with me in my grief but place yourself off in the distance away from me. Over there, you are of no help. What I need to hear from you is that you recognize how painful it is. I need to hear from you that you are with me in my desperation. To comfort me, you have to come close. Come sit beside me on my mourning bench.

I know: People do sometimes think things are more awful than they really are. Such people need to be corrected—gently, eventually. But no one thinks death is more awful than it is. It’s those who think it’s not so bad that need correcting.

Some say nothing because they find the topic too painful for themselves. They fear they will break down. So they put on a brave face and lid their feelings—never reflecting, I suppose, that this adds new pain to the sorrow of their suffering friends. Your tears are salve on our wound, your silence is salt. And later, when you ask me how I am doing and I respond with a quick, thoughtless “Fine” or “OK,” stop me sometime and ask, “No, I mean really.”

Active Love

Tony Reinke Fyodor Dostoevsky, Love

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Pevear/Volokhonsky edition (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990) p. 58:

…active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching. Indeed, it will go as far as the giving even of one’s life, provided it does not take long but is soon over, as on stage, and everyone is looking on and praising. Whereas active love is labor and perseverance, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science.

Reading for Delight

Tony Reinke Fiction, Literature, Reading

Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature (Harvest, 1982) p. 64:

Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. … Let us be proud of our being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame. The brain only continues the spine: the wick really goes through the whole length of the candle. If we are not capable of enjoying that shiver, if we cannot enjoy literature, then let us give up the whole thing and concentrate on our comics, our videos, our books-of-the-week.

Growth in Holiness

Tony Reinke Sanctification

One very helpful book on the doctrine of progressive sanctification—or how we grow in our display of Christ-likeness—is David Peterson’s Possessed by God: A New Testament Theology of Sanctification and Holiness (IVP, 1995). In a chapter on how we are positionally sanctified in Christ, Peterson makes these two helpful conclusions:

Our essential identity as Christians is formed by Christ and the gospel, not by our own personalities, backgrounds or achievements. Through the death and resurrection of his Son, God has cleansed us from the guilt of sin and liberated us from its consequences and its control. He has set us in a right and faithful relation to himself, together with all who call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Drawing us into an exclusive relationship with himself in this way, he has made us his holy people, destined to serve him and please him for ever. Sanctification is about being possessed by God and expressing that distinctive and exclusive relationship by the way we live.

Although God calls upon us to express the fact that we have been sanctified by the way we live, our standing with him does not depend on the degree to which we live up to his expectations. It depends on his grace alone. Those who are bowed down by the pressure of temptation and an awareness of failure need to be reminded of the definitive, sanctifying work of God in Christ, by which he has established us as his holy people. On this basis, they should be urged to press on in hope and grasp again by faith the benefits of Christ’s sacrifice. Approaching the exalted Lord with boldness, we may always receive mercy and find ‘grace to help in time of need’ (Heb. 4:16). [pp. 47–48]

This is a very carefully expressed way of explaining how our pursuit of personal holiness is rooted in the finished work in Christ. Without ever coming across as though the Christian is passive in the pursuit of sanctification Peterson makes this point well. He writes in his final conclusions:

The popular view that sanctification is a process of moral renewal and change, following justification, is not the emphasis of the New Testament. Rather, sanctification is primarily another way of describing what it means to be converted or brought to God in Christ and kept in that relationship. It would be more accurate to say that renewal and change flow from the regeneration and sanctification that God has already accomplished in our lives.

Sanctification is thus primarily the work of Christ on the cross and of the Holy Spirit through the word of the gospel, bringing us into an exclusive and dedicated relationship with God, as the holy people of the New Covenant. It is a concept with important, ongoing implications for the church, as well as for individual believers. [p. 136]

Peterson is good at showing how personal holiness is rooted in the finished work of Christ. He also does a fine job connecting personal holiness to (a) the New Covenant promises of God, (b) the broader re-creation of the cosmos, and (c) in showing that growth in godliness is a growth in Christ-likeness in his humiliation and why this should caution us in comparing ourselves to others. These are strong iron beams on which our pursuit of holiness rests.

On progressive sanctification this is not a definitive book (for example Galatians 2:20 is never mentioned!). But nevertheless Possessed by God is very good and deserves a careful read.