I posted about this last night on Facebook, and I think it’s worth sharing here. It’s about writing. I’m not sure when it came to me, but I was looking at various pieces of writing, amateur, professional, and thinks-its-professional, and this thought came to me.

Amateur writers generally think that their thoughts are too simple, that they need to be dressed up for publication. Professional writers know that their thoughts are too complicated, and need to be simplified for publication.

Much of the problem, I think, for the amateur is insecurity. He contemplates the thoughts in his head, the thing he wants to say, and thinks, “I have to dress this baby up in his Sunday best, or people will laugh at him.”

But that Sunday best is likely to be stilted language, plus the biggest words the amateur knows (or thinks he knows).

The professional sets his ideas down, muddy and unkempt as they may be, and then takes a knife to them. He cuts away the unnecessary stuff, until all that is left are words that convey precisely the thoughts (or feelinsg) he intends to communicate.

Clarity. Focus. Economy. Those are the marks of the professional. Knowing what to take away is what separates the pros from the ams.

Jeffrey Overstreet writes about his distaste for talk of integrating one’s faith with one’s art. “If you are a Christian, and your art does not reflect that, the problem is not primarily with your art but with your faith — because true faith transforms what we are and do.”

I heard Mark Noll say something like this in an interview. He didn’t like the word “integration” because it lightly assumed the things being integrated were essentially different, but if the Bible is right, if it describes real life, then work, art, and play are naturally Christian for the one who follows Christ Jesus. We don’t add our faith to these things in an effort to Christianize them.