Ask the Author: Mischa Field
Answered Questions (6)
Mischa Field
I love being able to make connections, particularly those that allow people to see familiar things in new ways. Writing allows me to make connections in a number of directions. You connect with the writers who influenced you. You connect with the texts you examine. You connect with the reader. You connect with God. If I can do that, I’ve done something.
Mischa Field
I read. I watch. I live. I had a screenwriting professor in college who assigned us a journal of the unusual. Every time we saw something funny, or odd, or striking, we had to write it down. Out of these unique moments, we not only discovered material for scripts, we also discovered ourselves. We learned what moved us. And then we had the opportunity to make something of it.
Mischa Field
Writers block paralyzed me for years. I used to allow perfectionism, fear of failure, aversion to process, and a variety of distractions to derail me. Now i am willing to write my way through it, to not fear the junk draft, to not insist the process be uniform. The steps that brought me to my last destination will not necessarily bring me to this one. I also find that allowing a piece to emerge in pieces goes a long way. Some of my best work has started as a series of text messages to a friend. Or to myself. Finding your message, your posture, or your voice involves a degree of mystery. You are discovering something that is buried within you, or in the atmosphere around you. You have to be willing to dig.
Mischa Field
Write all your moods. Explore every mode. Aloe yourself to play. Decline to self-define and wrap a neat bow around yourself as a creative. You have no idea the fullness of gifting that lies within you. Seize opportunities to let it out.
Mischa Field
I am completing the second and third books in the Soul of the Citizen series. I have a book of Proverbs for daily living in the on-deck circle. And at some point I need to birth an autobiographical work that I have been compiling one sermon, one column, one post at a time for roughly 20 years. I used to have a shortage of inspiration. Now I have a shortage of time.
Mischa Field
As I note in the introduction, Soul of the Citizen constitutes a type of spiritual diary. It started out as a daily exercise of praying through the joys and concerns of the day, and in the digital age, there are no slow news days. Our political, cultural, ethical, and moral crises emerge daily, because our political, cultural, ethical, and moral conflicts lie at the core of our national identity. We are United States, but divided people. We are vessels of hope in oceans of despair. We are wonderful, but wounded. And we tend to allow our wounds to spill onto everyone around us. If we are praying people, we always have reason to pray.
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