Just Like Liam Neeson

In the movie “Taken,” Liam Neeson’s character has a daughter who is kidnapped.  This is his speech to her captor:

Brilliant speech.  And if I were the captor, I would snap to attention and return my victim ASAP.  But let’s be honest—that speech is effective mostly because Liam Neeson is giving it.  It wouldn’t have the same impact if, say, Dolly Parton said it.  She does indeed have “a particular set of skills,” but they aren’t Liam Neeson’s.  Neither are mine.  I have no skills that would benefit anyone in a kidnapping situation—unless maybe I could write a very crafty, deliberately misleading ransom note.  What I do have—at least I’d like to think I do—is a particular set of writing skills.  These are a few that have served me well in writing and, as I think about it, in life:

Editing.  Editing, for me, is more of a compulsion than a skill.  I can’t read anything, whether it’s the back of a cereal box or the laundry tag on a T-shirt, without mentally rearranging and changing words and adding or deleting punctuation.  In writing, editing is about vocabulary and grammar rules.  In life, it’s about the words I speak, especially the ones I say to myself.  I catch myself saying the wrong phrase all the time:  I’ll say, “No, I can’t.”  And I have to edit myself—it’s not true to say “I can’t.”  The truth is that I can; I just won’t.  For instance, I’ll tell myself that I can’t write today.  I can’t go to my meeting.  I can’t do the work I need to do.  And then I have to edit my own words:  I won’t write today.  I won’t go to my meeting.  I won’t do the work.  When I hear the truth like that, I (grudgingly, I admit) have to change my response to “I can.”

Revising.  After I edit, I revise.  I change entire paragraphs and pages in a story.  I delete chapters and rewrite or add scenes.  I’ve realized that I can do this with my life, too.  When I look back on an event, if all I can remember is the negative aspects of it, I mentally revise it so that I remember the positive parts.  Laura Ingalls Wilder was an expert at revising her life story.  She wrote “The Little House on the Prairie” books and focused almost exclusively on the positives of every storyline and character.  In revising, she left out certain negative episodes in her life and reduced other unhappy times to mere sentences.  She also revised her characters to the extent that some had almost no negative qualities.  Ma, for instance, is unfailingly cheerful in every scene.  That has to be revision on Wilder’s part.  I cannot imagine any woman being as pleasant as Ma was, given the circumstances she lived in.  When she’s not having her innards shaken by being the passenger in a covered wagon, Ma spends her days sweeping her dirt floor, making and mending clothes, caring for her children, and cooking three meals from scratch, all while smiling beatifically and speaking in the pithy words of a needlepoint sampler.  And all without air conditioning.  That’s some creative revision (as you can see, given Ma’s picture on the right.)  And it’s a good lesson for me to revise my life in such a way that I focus on the positive aspects of the people I’m with and the things we’re doing.

Using my voice.  In writing, I check myself again and again to make sure that I’m using my voice and not imitating the style of other writers.  I didn’t realize, until the last few years when I began to find my voice, that this is more important in life than in writing.  I have to live my life using my own voice instead of copying the style of other people.  God didn’t create me with all my shortcomings, quirks, and oddities so that I would spend my life trying to be like someone else.  Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it’s a very depressing way to live.  I’ve finally accepted that I will never be like my sisters, and trying to be will only make me miserable.  I have to be the best version of myself.  And I’ve discovered something shocking: I like that person.  I like being the person God created me to be.  And it’s so much easier and more fulfilling to be me than to imitate someone else.

Trusting the process.  I can’t even count the times that professors, books about writing, and writers themselves have talked about this:  a writer has to trust the process.  You have to trust that when you sit down to write, the words will come—even if you have no idea what direction they’ll take you in.  E. L. Doctorow famously said, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog.  You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”  It’s the same with life.  I can’t see the future all lit up in front of me, but I can see far enough ahead to keep moving.  Psalm 119:105 says, “Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.”  A lamp doesn’t give as much light as the headlights Doctorow mentioned.  It only illuminates the small area around it.  My journey forward won’t be lit up with stadium lights, making it easy to see where God is taking me—my journey will be guided step by step, with the lamp of God’s word to light my way.  I have to trust that process and not fret about the future.

And now, back to Liam Neeson and “Taken:” without giving too much of the movie away, I’ll just say that it doesn’t end very well for the kidnappers.  Liam Neeson’s particular set of skills does come in handy.  My skills may not have been needed—yet—to rescue a kidnapping victim, but they do come in handy on the page and in life.  I do wonder as I write this—how much better would my words be if Liam Neeson narrated them?!  That would be a particular sort of dream for this writer—but just a dream and just about words.  I am, after all, taken.