Life by Drew

Writing towards eternity

Asher Brown Durand, “Pastoral Landscape,” 1861.

My online writing life is fourteen years old; it’s about to get its learner’s permit. It is fighting for a later curfew, getting braces, worried about the way it looks before leaving the house for school.

Don’t tell it, but it’s really only been surrounded by failure. Nothing much has happened in its lifetime—at least, nothing especially noteworthy. Very little to clip out and affix to the fridge. Little trophies and publications dot its dresser, but they pale in comparison to the trophies and awards of others its age.

But still, there is something admirable about this little enterprise. I want to pat it on its back for getting up each morning and continuing to grow, to grasp, to work out what it thinks in real time, in front of real people.

I still believe in it, no matter the size of its trophies.

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Lex and I honeymooned in England. I intentionally didn’t pack as much in my suitcase because I knew I’d be returning with more books than could possibly fit in a carry-on. I was right.

On the second day, Lex and I took a tour of the Cotswolds. We sat in the tour van as green fields and stone hedges passed by outside and sheep stood in fields baa-ing in British accents.

We stopped in one village for about an hour. Lex and I held hands and spoke sweet nothings and walked up and down the main street until we found a bookstore. Inside, on the center table, sat Leaf by Niggle by J.R.R. Tolkien. I picked it up and immediately bought it because the back said it was about the artist’s life. And—lo and behold—I consider myself a (struggling, somewhat failed) artist.

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Some of you already know this story (I wrote about it in my first ever Slow Faith post back in 2020), but I started my writing venture with great enthusiasm to become the next big name in Christian publishing. I created a website with my name in the URL and took quirky headshots barefoot on the side of a road in the California foothills. I wrote clickbait headlines and courted controversy because isn’t that what every good Christian writer does? Oh, and I wrote about sex. Well—to be more precise—I wrote a lot about abstaining from sex.

But I was struggling. My platform was growing but I felt hollow and empty, anxious and paranoid about my online presence. It began to feel like, instead of using my platform to promote God, I was using God to promote my platform.

So I shut it all down. I deleted my website and started writing a simple newsletter that didn’t have my name in the URL or my face on every page. I wrote Wendell Berry a letter thanking him for his model of sustainable writing, and I got cozier with a quieter—more hidden—life online. And my brain felt like it could breathe again; my priorities felt more aligned.

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At the end of our tour, we sat in the bus sleepy and content—filled with so much frothed milk and pastries—and rode back to Bath. On the drive, I opened up Leaf by Niggle and aimed to finish it in one sitting. (At forty-three short pages, this was the exact type of manageable and doable goal I enjoy.)

~Spoiler alert~

The story is about an unsuccessful artist named Niggle who spends a lifetime painting leaves in a giant forest tapestry. Life happens, and his attention is diverted from his art by any number of “life” things. Doctor appointments and a needy neighbor and trips into town to buy groceries. But still, he slowly plugs away at his art.

Eventually, he dies. His life’s work—this beautiful tapestry of a tree with such delicate, intimate leaves—is used as a canvas to cover his neighbor’s roof and is destroyed. One leaf is found in the rubble and framed and put up in a museum, but even that is eventually lost and forgotten.

Niggle—his art, his passion, his memory—is lost forever.

—

My days are filled with things I’d rather not be doing, things that distract me from my art, that distract me from painting my leaves and working on this grand tapestry that is my writing. I have to make money to pay rent, first of all. I have to go to the grocery store and take my car into the shop and run that one errand I’ve been putting off for a month. I have to renew my license or make lunch or even just take a shower. So many things to do in order to be a functioning human being—things that take me away from my art, my precious, precious art.

And sometimes I worry none of this will last. I was away from my newsletter for a few weeks to get married, and I watched as the notifications and the likes and the comments dwindled to nothing. Like a fire, attention must be stoked, and if I quit stoking, the attention will also end. What then? Have I even painted one leaf that will remain after my time?

Most likely? No.

Am I—and my writing—destined for oblivion?

—

Niggle wakes up after death to discover his great tapestry—the one lost and mangled and torn on earth—has come to life in his new after-world, his heaven. He walks around the tree and sees the forest and the mountains in the background and he sees each leaf—each precious, precious leaf—and is overjoyed. What he worked so falteringly at in life has become realer than he could imagine in this land-after-time. He takes it in and gets to work, adding more color and paint and beauty to an already beautiful canvas.

He does not care about what came before, about what was destroyed, about what was forgotten.

—

The first page of Leaf by Niggle says this: “Niggle was a painter. Not a very successful one, partly because he had many other things to do.”

If a book was written of me, it could begin the exact same way: “Drew was a writer. Not a very successful one, partly because he had many other things to do.”

As I rode in that tour van, back from the Cotswolds, I wondered at my writing, at my life. I am surrounded by things I have to do that aren’t writing, things that demand my attention. To ignore them would be to ignore the life in front of me; it would be to ignore the beauty of living; it would be to ignore my wife—this precious, precious human. All in the name of art. All in the name of fame.

No, I am perhaps destined to be an unsuccessful writer, but I believe God can transform these little words into something realer and sturdier than I could ever imagine. Perhaps, like Niggle, I will someday die to find these words transfigured into things of beauty, into words on pages that I will get to add to for the rest of eternity, even while the original words, here on earth, here on this internet, are forgotten forever and ever amen.

May it be so.

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A postscript

After posting my piece a few weeks ago about platform and the internet, I began to realize that Substack is beginning to feel similar to how Twitter felt for me when I was really struggling back in the 2010s. So much noise, and I am constantly comparing myself and feeling the need to be on here all the time.

So, just as an update, I am praying about what the Lord wants me to do with this. I know I am called to write, and I am continuing to develop a pretty exciting book proposal. I’m just not sure how to quiet the onslaught of comparison and noise that Substack facilitates.

I think I will pray about it, and I plan to keep you informed :)

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