This post references a blog called "Shatter Lantern" that I wrote a while back. I didn't want to get rid of this post, so I put it here. While it isn't new, it is still good. Enjoy.
Every writer knows how it is to stay up way too late or get up way too early just to work on finishing that story. There’s that familiar feeling of excitement mixed with dread, fear, and drowsiness. It’s the moment that balances your name on the line between being a ‘writer’ and being an ‘author’. And so you sit at your desk with sleep in your eyes, a cup of once-warm coffee at the edge of your workspace, scrunched in a painful position before your laptop while typing away at a million miles an hour so you can finish before you have to head off to a long day of school or work. Just one more page… Just one more page… One more page… You squint at the screen, not able to tell if what you’re looking at is English or chicken scratch. You have your lamp on so you can see your notebook full of notes and character sketches and you hope that your chair doesn’t squeak too loud and wake the people in the other room.
Ah, yes. This is what my grandma would call “burning the midnight oil”, and I know exactly how it feels, as I’ve done the same thing many times, sometimes ending in success and other times ending in a miserable crumpled ball of paper tossed in the trash. And this is where I guess I got the ‘Lantern’ part of my website name. Because what writing takes is perseverance, determination, and lots of lantern oil. (Or in our modern culture’s case, lots of lightbulbs.)
On the other hand of things, I envisioned imagination as a spark, as many do. And since stories come from imagination, I pictured that spark catching on the wick of a lantern. The flame then grew, as stories grow, to be a light. But a story cannot be contained in the glass walls of a lamp forever. Oh no. Eventually the glass shatters and the flames of the fire spread as if wild. When stories grow enough, they too spread like wildfire.
There is one last reason I chose to call this site what I did. I chose the title because light is important to me. And if even one of my stories manages to show a reader even a glimpse of the Light of Jesus Christ, our Lord, then I will forever know that my goal of storytelling has been reached. Because He alone is the lantern amidst the darkness. All my hopes for my writing is to contain ‘Lantern Light’, a glinting reflection from the Light that is Jesus Christ.
The great author J.R.R. Tolkien once said, “Just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so is myth invention about truth. We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only becoming a ‘sub-creator’ and inventing stories, can man ascribe to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall.”
As Tolkien said so brilliantly in that quote, my dream and goal is to write fiction that can “reflect a splintered fragment of the true light”.
That, my friends, is why I named my website what I did.
Maybe you are like me. Maybe you desire to write stories that contain Lantern Light. Or maybe you don’t care. But I do. My hope is to write things that honor and reflect Him. He gave everything to us, and so I believe He deserves everything we have for Him.
If you want to write stories of Lantern Light, welcome to the battlegrounds. If you want more content like this along with entries about what I’ve learned in writing, book reviews, information about me and what I like to write, and other great topics designed to inspire and help you grow on your own writing journey, make sure you subscribe. I hope to see you around.
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