Write yours

This is the chapter where the class either works or does not. Everything so far has been preparation for twenty minutes of writing, and no amount of agreeing with the previous chapters will substitute for it.

So: paper, pen, four headings, and quiet.

Three rules while you draft

Write it as you would say it. Read each sentence out loud as you go. If it sounds like something you would never say to a friend in a kitchen, cross it out. Written English drifts formal without your permission, and a testimony that sounds written is a testimony that will not survive contact with a real conversation.

No church words. Blessed, saved, walk with the Lord, gave my heart, born again, testimony itself. Not because they are wrong — they are precise, and that precision was earned — but because to somebody outside they are either noise or a signal that you have switched into a script. Say the same thing in words your listener already owns.

Keep it under a minute. This is a constraint, not a preference. A minute is roughly 130 words. It is far shorter than you want it to be, and the shortness is what makes it usable — long enough to be true, short enough that you can say it in a doorway.

Protect the silence

If you are working through this class with other people, the temptation is to talk during this part. Don’t. Give it the full twenty minutes of quiet.

Aguante el silencio. Hold the silence. The discomfort of a room where nobody is speaking is exactly the pressure that gets something honest onto the page, and the person who breaks it to be helpful is not being helpful.

If you are stuck, the way out is a question, not a sentence somebody hands you. What was hardest before you knew him? What would your closest friend say has changed? What is the smallest true thing you could say about now?

When a beat comes up empty

Some people finish with three beats and a blank.

Blank before, because it was not dramatic. Then your story is faithfulness, not rescue, and it is just as true. Before, my faith was secondhand; now I have tasted it myself is a complete testimony. Undramatic testimonies are also the most reproducible, because most of your listeners are not in the gutter either — they are in the same ordinary place you were, and a rescue story tells them nothing about how they would get from here to there.

Blank Jesus, because there was no moment. Write the season instead. Over about a year, reading Mark with two other people, it stopped being information.

Blank now, and you cannot think of anything. This one is worth sitting with rather than filling in. It may mean the change is real but invisible to you and obvious to everybody else — ask somebody. Or it may be telling you something you need to take to God before you take it to a neighbour, and that is a good outcome for an evening’s work, even though it is not the one you came for.

Blank invitation. That is usually not a memory problem. It is that you have never actually invited anybody, so there is no phrasing in your mouth yet. Borrow one for now: If you ever want to read one of those stories yourself, I’d do it with you. It will start sounding like you around the fourth time you say it.

Recite this

Write it as you would say it. Under a minute. No church words.

Try it this week

Draft it. Actually draft it, on paper, in one sitting.

Then do one pass with a pen and cut it by a third. Almost every first draft is a third too long, and the third that goes is almost always explanation — the sentences where you started telling your listener what to make of the story instead of telling them the story.

My testimony fits in ________ words. Write the number at the bottom. If it is over 150, cut again.