I Write It And I Delete It

There is no drafts folder. That is the detail that would tell you the most about her if she ever let anybody see it.

Because a drafts folder would mean she had stopped somewhere short of sending. That is not what happens. What happens is that she writes the whole thing, properly, with the right words in the right order, reads it once, and then holds the key down until the box is empty and watches the last few characters go.

She has done this, at a conservative estimate, sixty times in four years.

Different people. Her brother, twice. A woman she was at university with. A person on the internet she has never met who wrote something true about a completely different subject and to whom she has composed four separate honest paragraphs and sent none of them.

She is thirty-nine.

She is not a coward and she is not indecisive and she would like both of those on the record. She runs a team of eleven. She has told a man twice her age that his work was not good enough and she has ended two relationships that other people would have stayed in out of politeness.

The words are not the problem either. She is a good writer and she knows it and the sixty were good.

What happens is in the second before the deletion, and it is not fear exactly. It is closer to a category error being noticed. She reads it back and thinks, in about a quarter of a second, that is a thing somebody would say about themselves, and the sentence stops being about her and becomes an object she is looking at, and once it is an object she cannot send it.

The problem is the screen

Let me name what I think is actually happening, because I think it is mechanical rather than moral and that should be a relief.

A screen gives you the sentence back.

That is what it is for and it is why writing is such a good tool: you produce a thing and then you get to stand outside it and look at it as an object and decide whether it is any good. Every writer does this. It is the whole discipline.

And it is catastrophic for a confession.

Because a confession is not an object. It is an act, and the moment you can see it sitting there in a box with a cursor after it, you are no longer the person saying it. You are an editor assessing a claim, and you are an extremely good editor, and no claim of that size survives that scrutiny in a quarter of a second.

Sixty times in four years is not sixty failures of nerve. It is sixty encounters with a tool that is wrong for this particular job.

Now here is what you have actually been given.

The Lord GOD hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary: he wakeneth morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned.Isaiah 50:4

Notice the organ. The tongue of the learned. Not the pen. Not the hand.

And notice what it is for: to speak a word in season to him that is weary. The tongue is given for the moment, in season, at the time it is needed, and a tongue is the one instrument that does not hand you your sentence back for review.

You have been given a tongue for this and you have been trying to do it with a keyboard, and that is not a rebuke, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the quarter of a second rather than on a verse you may not have thought about in years.

Now let me say something about the quarter of a second itself, because your description of it is unusually precise.

That is a thing somebody would say about themselves.

Read that back. It is a sentence about a category, not about you. In that quarter second you move from being a person to being an instance of a type, and once you are an instance of a type the sentence reads as a performance of that type, and you delete it.

That move happens on a screen and it does not happen in a mouth. A tongue does not give you time to reclassify yourself.

You are not somebody performing a type. Scripture says the tongue was given by the Lord God, and the Spirit of God is the one who wakens the ear morning by morning, and neither of those is describing a person composing an object for review.

I want to say one more thing about the sixty, and then I am done.

They were good. You said so and you are a good writer and you know it, and I believe you.

You have written the true thing sixty times. That is not sixty failures. That is a woman who has produced the correct sentence, in full, from scratch, sixty separate times over four years, which means it is not lost and it is not unclear and it does not need finding. The Holy Spirit is the one who wakens the ear morning by morning, and He has been supplying that sentence for four years to a woman who kept deleting it.

It needs a mouth.

You have been given the tongue of the learned, and God named a tongue rather than a pen. Scripture says it is for a word in season to the weary, and the Holy Spirit is the one who wakens your ear morning by morning.