Shelby Foote on Preaching?

I found these remarks by the notable writer Shelby Foote (1916-2005) to be somewhat analogous and applicable to preaching. After all, preaching is a form of writing, insofar as it requires preparation and thought, and is done by means of words woven together into a larger work of narrative - whether one preaches with a manuscript or not.

As far as what can improve one’s preaching, I’m skeptical of homiletics classes and preaching worships. As I’ve written elsewhere, my own homiletics professors did not focus on public speaking and outlines and the structure of a sermon. They said little about the mechanics of writing a sermon. I was blessed to have homiletics professors who really didn’t teach homiletics per se. Rather, they taught their students how to attentively read and ponder the scriptures, and what to look for as a preacher. They left the rest up to us, knowing that the real learning happens - as Foote says in another online video (a graduation speech) - after graduation, going out into the real world - which for us, is the altar, the font, and the pulpit (which are also brought into the home, where we proclaim to those who cannot come to church). The preacher’s education begins at his first parish.

You don’t really learn in school, except the almighty thing of learning how to learn. When you finish, you’re ready to start your true education, which you learn for yourself…. I hope you’ll bear in mind that an education is simply a thing that tells you how to learn what you’re gonna learn after you finish being required to learn things.

I think what makes a man a better preacher is to deeply read the scriptures, the confessions, and the fathers. Read literature of various kinds. Pay attention to words and rhetoric. But then, you have to write. You have to do it, and lots of it. You have to find your own voice. You have to do the heavy lifting week in and week out. It simply takes time and practice. It takes action. And you won’t have the stomach for it unless you love it, unless you are genuinely called to do it. There is no shortcut, hack, or formula for preaching. You learn it by doing it, again and again.

As Foote says:

Anything that helps you learn how to write, any outside thing that gives you laws and rules, such as a teacher of creative writing, is short-circuiting you, is keeping you from having some very valuable experiences that can only be gained by making mistakes. What he tells you may be literally true, but you don’t know it on your own skin. And the only way you’re gonna know it for yourself is to discover it for yourself. So anybody who gives you excellent advice about writing is almost keeping you from learning it. You can say, “yes, right,” but you can’t put it into practice unless you found it out for yourself.

You can be vitally interested, and I can talk to you endlessly about theories, about writing, about what’s good and what’s bad, and what you should do and what you should not do, and I guess it’s very well to have all those notions in your mind, but when you sit down at that desk, you better get that all out of your mind. You fly by the seat of your pants when you write. You don’t bring these theories with you.

That is what I meant a while ago when I said there are some dangers intendent upon being highly educated - for a writer, not for a critic, he should be. But a writer doesn’t want to develop his critical faculty to the point where it’s riding herd on his work. It’s alright for it to be up there, but it better not be in command. There aren’t any shortcuts, or if there are, they’re to your detriment. A shortcut is a very poor way to arrive at a precept about writing. The longer it took you to learn it, the harder you had to sweat to learn it, the better it will stay with you, and the more it belongs to you….

There’s an awful lot of work involved in learning how to write. You have to learn how to make your hand do what your mind is telling it to do. And the only way your hand can learn how to do that, that is, write, is the same way a tennis player gets good with his racket or anything else….

You have to learn your craft. You have to learn it so well that you’re not conscious of it while you’re working. And that takes a very lot of hard work, sitting at a desk facing a blank wall working very many hours day after day after day, until you’re able to use your hand the way your mind wants to put things down on paper. If the story grows out of the natural propensities, then you have a true story. And I’ve always believed that, and I operated accordingly….

(The quoted portion begins at 16:19 in the video below)…