In the Name of Clarity


Clarity

So here is the start to my blogging reboot. I have now went through my first two weeks of the writing tribe I belong to, and am still feeling good about this journey. Right now I am working on the writing proposal which is an exercise in planning out how your writing goes. It is what Kary Oberbrunner calls getting “clarity”.   So even though I think I know what that means, I decided to look clarity up for a reference.

Clarity means, “the quality of being easy to see or hear; sharpness of image or sound.”¹ This means that I need to focus my story and my message so that others will “see” and understand what I am writing. Okay. So what is it that I am trying to say? What profound, earth shattering message do I have for others? Then how am I going to take that message and wrap it in a fictional story symbolizing all the points I hope to make? Yes, this is proving to be a tall order for me.

I have been carrying around this story in my mind for years, but now I have to nail it down and decide what it should be saying to people. Thankfully I have done a fair amount of research (I will probably continue to do more as I go), and I know what ideas have jumped out at me that I would say to myself, “that would be good to put in my story.” Finding the right action and character to reflect this meaning is proving to be a challenge, though. So this is where I go back to the image I believe I was given when I first was struck with this idea.

Originally this story came from a discussion that me and my daughter were having. My book will center around the biblical account of Cain and Abel. This account seems to be straight forward on the surface about the first ever murder, jealousy of a brother that felt wronged, and a person who ultimately didn’t feel much responsibility for his actions. I could stop right there and duplicate that tale, and it would be a classic encounter of jealousy and murder, catch the bad guy and make him pay. But of course, if you have known me very long, you know I can always see something else, and that is where this fictional novel starts.

Because of this writing process, I have a working title, a general premise, an overview, and an unique selling point. It has giving me clarity of what my message should be. The vision of what I would like to share with the reader about how we relate to ourselves and others, and ultimately to our creator. I still have to decide on, among other things, the main outline for each chapter, which will be a major thinking process for me. I need to stop obsessing in all these other directions that I think I can go. I know that this may all seem mechanical, but this process is really helping me push out the noise, and think about what I have learned in life that I can relay through my characters.

I hope you, my audience, will continue on this journey with me. I encourage you to sign up for my email list. I promise it is nothing that I am going to share with others. I just want to connect with you in a way that allows for feedback and an exclusive access to content as I write my book. So to start it off, if you would like to sign up below, I will share a short excerpt from the story I am writing. Remember that it is still in the beginning stage, but I hope you like it. Here it is…..enjoy and let me know what you think!

Subscribe to my email list and receive a snapshot of the intro to my book.  Prologue



¹Resources: https://www.google.com/search?q=Dictionary

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