I'm reading The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs, which was loaned to me by a friend. I had intended to read it for light entertainment while on my last business trip but ran out of room for it in my carry-on bag. And it was just as well; I was much too brain-dead to commit to reading during the evenings.

The book's subtitle does an excellent job of describing its contents: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible.

Jacobs is Esquire Magazine's editor at large, and he writes really, really well. He writes so well, in fact, that I find myself questioning some of the last-round editing decisions I made on Practically Shameless, like the decision to remove as many contractions as possible. Jacobs uses tons of contractions, and they don't bother me as a reader at all; in fact, they seem to make the book more readable, by rendering its prose more like normal everyday conversation. I can almost hear this guy talking as I read.

On page 29 (hardback edition), I noticed something that resonated with my writing process on Practically Shameless:

"I continue to second-guess everything I do and say. I've noticed my speech has slowed down... This is because I mentally check every word before allowing myself to utter it. Is it a lie? ... What about exaggeration? Does the Bible allow me to say 'My friend Mark's been working at Esquire since 1904?'"

If you've read my book, you know that the second-guessing and self-editing Jacobs is referring to is one of my core personal issues. But I'm talking now about my writing process. As I wrote in an article for Heartbeats and Heartsongs, I sometimes wrote in a voice I came to call "Glib," and while in Glib, I sometimes wrote things that weren't really true but that came easily and sounded good.

Later I rewrote those passages from Glib to make them more authentic. Some passages got rewritten again and again and again. Because as I wrote my very personal story, it was important to me to be as truthful as possible, because I wanted to be as authentic as possible. I believed that authenticity would make the story more compelling and more understandable at the same time.

Later (page 53), Jacobs writes about how much he lies. ("Man, do I lie a lot. I knew I lied, but when I started to keep track, the quantity was alarming.") His lies are mostly of the "white lie" variety, and when I lie, mine are, too. I think I learned to lie at an early age because revealing the truth left my heart more exposed to criticism. When I lie these days, the lies are still mostly of the white-lie variety to protect myself or my lifestyle from criticism. 

Jacobs' example of exaggeration, incidentally, I would categorize as humor, and I don't believe humor should be required to stick to the truth -- it might not even remain humor if it did. I once heard humor defined as the orgasm of intercourse between reason and unreason, and I'm not sure unreason has much truck with the truth.

So I'm thinking about this issue of how one writes the truth of the moment. I don't know for sure that there is one sole truth in any moment; in fact, I think there are probably many truths in a particular moment. And I think also that there are probably many different ways I could express those truths, not just one correct way.

Blogging has often been a good way fo rme to write the truth of the moment. It seems such an informal way of writing compared to formal essay writing, and perhaps that makes the truth easier to come by. Maybe it just makes it less risky.

As I write these sentences, I'm asking in my mind, "Is that true?" Or rather, "How true is that?" It seems Glib isn't the only voice that appears in writing about the moment. When I ask, "How true is that?" I may be writing from another voice called Uncertain.