A Writing Inheritance by Liz Manning

Today would have been my grandmother’s birthday.

Looking back I have very mixed memories of her. We clashed a lot, with my poor mum caught in the middle of our explosive arguments. A young feminist, I fought against my grandmother’s old fashioned expectations of boys compared to girls, her apparent favouritism of my brother, and my constant failure to earn her full love. Now, I wish I had realised how similar we were while she was still alive, that many of our clashes were in fact due to our matching characters.

It’s made me think about all those traits we inherit from our families – not the physical but the less measurable: our talents and temperaments. And I wonder:

Can writing, or a gift for writing, be inherited?

Looking back in my own family, I can certainly see patterns. 

My mother wrote the long, newsy letters to me at university each week, another particularly treasured one just before I got married. She passed down recipes with fabulous, chatty advice added at the end.

After he died, I discovered a folder of the sermons my dad preached, all written out in longhand, full of wisdom and poetry. We used his own description of how he envisaged heaven as a poignant and hope-filled highlight in his funeral.

My brother too writes sermons, as well as articles for his local paper. My younger son writes songs.

And then there’s me, feeling my way slowly forward in the online writing world.

I can’t tell if a talent or desire for written expression was bequeathed through genetic code, or whether that love of words and rhythm, communication and meaning, was deliberately nurtured through experience from one generation to the next. I don’t know if our brains are correspondingly shaped and connected or if we have simply noticed and followed each other’s habits. Maybe there are examples of writing aptitude further back in our ancestry, stifled only by lack of education and opportunity. Or perhaps all those family trips to the local library followed by afternoons, together yet separately engrossed in our chosen books, instilled irremovable aspirations in each of us.

Of course, this is just anecdotal speculation. But I’d certainly be intrigued to know if any of you come from a family of writers?

One thing I do believe though is, however the urge to write came to be implanted in me, that it was seeded by God. There is a reason why it is there and I can’t ignore it. There is a purpose for it that I am still working out. And I am grateful to be part of a family tree with both roots and branches using our writing gift in some way, large or small, for His glory.

Communication is one of His attributes, who used words to create, who was and is ‘the Word made flesh’.  So, whatever our human family background, let’s remember that any writing talent we have is ultimately an inheritance from Him and perhaps, just like I came recognise with my grandmother, we’re more like God than we realise.