Why Write: To Hide Truth Away in Your Heart (Part II of II)
If you write, or desire to write, you’ve likely faced the question, “Why write?” This question can become even more pressing when our work goes primarily unseen. For most of us, we’re clacking away at the keyboard for just a handful of blog readers, newsletter subscribers, or social media followers at the most—and perhaps some of our work goes completely unread by others at all in the form of journaling or an unpublished manuscript. On days when writing is particularly hard or the stats are especially low, we may pose that question with a great sigh. Why bother to write at all?
What if we didn’t write for the sake of the reader, but rather for ourselves? How would this change our perspective? What if writing could simply be to hide truth away in our minds and souls?
Charlotte Mason and Narration
In a previous article, I explored an answer to “Why Write?” from Dorothy Sayers. We saw that we can’t write for the sake of a reader, but rather for the sake of the craft itself. Today, we’ll consider another writer and educator from the past to inform our reason for writing: Charlotte Mason.
You’ve likely heard of Charlotte Mason from the homeschooling community. She was a British educator in England who lived from 1842–1923. Anne White’s words for Ambleside Online describe her well:
[She] believed that education was about more than training for a job, passing an exam, or getting into the right college. She said education was an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life; it was about finding out who we were and how we fit into the world of human beings and into the universe God created . . . [She] believed that children are able to deal with ideas and knowledge, that they are not blank slates or empty sacks to be filled with information. She thought children should do the work of dealing with ideas and knowledge, rather than the teacher acting as a middle man, dispensing filtered knowledge.
In this vein of thought, that children can make connections on their own in what they are learning (and must in order to understand), a major part of Charlotte Mason’s methods was narration. “Narrating is an art,” Mason declared, “like poetry-making or painting, because it is there, in every child’s mind, waiting to be discovered, and is not the result of any process of disciplinary education” (Home Education, 231).
Mason explained how narration is the natural response of any and every child. Have you ever had a child run up to you out of breath and red-cheeked to spiel out one run-on sentence describing a hilarious event? My five-year-old son loves to retell the stories we tell him with his own imaginative twist on them. Mason believed that because this response is so natural to children, we should make use of it in the classroom. Her lesson structure was often quite simple: Review what was learned the day before, read a passage from a good and beautiful piece of literature, and have a child narrate it back to you without interrupting them. When they were finished, you could have another student fill in the pieces they missed or correct any mistakes, and then give their own narration.
Mason loved narration not only because it comes so naturally to children but because it causes them to tuck the information away in their minds for years to come. An article in The Parents’ Review (a magazine that was edited by Charlotte Mason during her lifetime and sent to all the parents and teachers of her schools) said, “‘We narrate and then we know.’ This was the answer given by a small girl to an enquiry from an admiring relative as to how she managed to remember a story from the beginning to the end of the term with no revision.”
Narration requires careful attention, which in turn helps us better retain. Charlotte Mason and her teachers did not repeat or re-read; the students had to pay careful attention to each detail. When asked what to do if a child forgets an important piece of information in their narration, one instructor wrote in that same The Parents’ Review article, “‘Don’t you remember the bit about the horses?’ If the children say ‘No’ the proper response is: ‘What a pity! Now you will never know that bit. You must listen better next time.’ The children will miss something, but they will have learnt a lesson in concentration.”
When we narrate, our imaginations take hold of what we heard and translate it in a way that makes sense to us. Charlotte Mason’s principles for education were based on the science of relations—that knowledge is gained when children make the proper connections between all that they are learning. By narrating, we strive to connect what we just heard with information already tucked away in our brains. This is how information is stored in our memories; the only way we retain new knowledge is by connecting it to another piece of knowledge that’s already deeply rooted.
Writing as Narration
What does all of this have to do with writing? Treat your writing as an act of narration. We’re told by the blogging and social media gurus that we need to find a niche, choose pillars of content to focus on, and only write what’s interesting to our ideal reader. But when we do that, it quickly leads to writer’s block and discouragement when the readers aren’t interested in what we labored over. We lose sight of the joy of writing, and it quickly becomes a burden when we can only write about one topic. Our craft suffers as well; we lower our standards and throw in layers of fluff because we’ve run out of ideas.
Remember what Dorothy Sayers told us: to keep your mind on your neighbor is to paradoxically stop serving your neighbor and God. When we write for the trendy market, we end up writing for no one and our art is no longer art. Do you see how it’s come to that point?
Yet what if, along with the foundation we laid from Dorothy Sayers’ essay Why Work?, we also took Charlotte Mason’s principle of narration as the other half of our why. What if we wrote as an act of narrating to hide truth in our hearts? Forget niche and pillars of content and simply write whatever is fresh in your mind and beating in your heart from what you’re reading and hearing. Tell the funny stories about your kids, share the personal application you gained from Sunday’s sermon, write a book review of the Christian nonfiction you just read, or share how the last novel you read convicted you. Narrate to your readers what God is teaching you and view writing as part of God’s calling on our lives: to explore and strive to know him and this world he created and what it looks like to love and obey him.
If we are writers, we write because we can’t not write. Instead of making it a begrudging chore, make it an act of worship to God where you treasure all the knowledge and wisdom he has given you. I can’t guarantee that anyone will ever read it or even care about it, but I can promise that you will stow that knowledge away in your heart for a time when you need it again. Isn’t that purpose enough? And all the more glory to God if a reader stumbles upon your work and gains a bit of truth too.
* To read Part I of this series, click here.
Lara d’Entremont is a wife and mom to three from Nova Scotia, Canada. Lara is a writer and learner at heart—always trying to find time to scribble down some words or read a book. Her desire in writing is to help women develop solid theology they can put into practice—in the mundane, the rugged terrain, and joyful moments. You can find more of her writing at laradentremont.com.