A Monday Moment Book or Writer's Apathy

Monday, June 2, 2025

Happy Monday and Happy Pride, my friends! As we begin Pride Month and all that comes with it, I’m reflecting on my writing and the reasons I enjoy and loathe writing. Like how parents feel about their children and how pet parents feel about our furry children, so too is how I think about writing. I love writing and I dream about spending quiet days writing for hours. I also loathe writing and can’t imagine anything worse than writing all day. As other writers will recognize, the polarity of my emotions on writing is what makes me a writer.

Lately, I’ve been considering consolidating 50ish Monday Moments, writing an introduction, finding someone to append a forward, and publishing it as a book. Including this piece, there are approximately 186 Monday Moments and while they all have something of a theme, no more than 30-40 are part of series. A major piece of the work needed would be cataloging them and choosing which essays make the book. A second trouble is that they are saved by date rather than title. But all that aside, would you purchase and read a collection of Monday Moments?

Monday Moments are, usually, the one piece I can reliably write each week. I often try writing other essays including op-eds and opinion pieces for a variety of publications, but some days and some weeks I encounter the worst writer’s block or, perhaps more accurately, writer’s apathy. The tricks and tips for beating writer’s block and writer’s apathy are legion and I’ve never found them particularly helpful. I just get in the writing mood and have to write. It happened this morning. I was on a call listening to briefings on one or another of the terrible bills going through the statehouse and something triggered the part of my mind that leads my writing. By the end of the call I had two-thirds of a serviceable first draft on a topic that had nothing at all to do with the call. That’s how writing works for me. I tell my congregation that while I normally don’t physically write my message (sermon) until Friday or Saturday, I’ve been writing it all week as I meld my idea for the message with my thoughts. Then, when my brain is too full of ideas, they fall out on paper.

I have several friends who can write at length with little prompting. Their drafts may not be the pinnacle of prose in the English language, but like my draft during the call, its serviceable and will form the foundation of second, third, and future drafts. I wish I could be like them and turn out new articles and even new books with surprising efficiency, all the while maintaining their distinctive voice and character.

Do you like to write? Do you consider yourself a writer?

Let us pray: God, you are the ultimate writer. You wrote the world into being and you declared it good. You authored the story of salvation when your people followed you and when they rebelled and went their own way. Bless our attempts at writing and bearing witness to our lives, practically and creatively. May we all be writers of your perfect kin-dom. Amen.

Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Let me know if there is anything I can do for you.

Faithfully,

Ben