Starting Over Again - and Again, and again, and again ...

When is it all right to abandon something and start anew? A while back I had an exchange on someone else's blog dealing with this question. My feeling was she presented her position far better than I did, so that if one were to have considered it a "contest", she would have won.

Her position is solid. Basically, it is that one should not give up. But I think she was speaking more to life in general as opposed to specific paths and roads one walks while living. That is more what I think of when I talk of "quitting". No, she is absolutely correct with regard to life itself. We keep going. Even when it seems hopeless to do so.

And yet I have known people in a sick bed finally take the position they will not endure another tortuous treatment to stay here. But that's a different topic. I'm more thinking about specific paths, lanes, trails, directions. Whatever you want to call them. Choices.

Starting over is a sometimes accurate descriptor of me. I do it a lot. I guess that's why I've never made it anywhere. Too many restarts. Sometimes it works out well.

There is a table game I used to play. It's a strategy game. There was a time I was very into strategy games. Not so much anymore. Somewhere along the way I lost the drive to win. Anyway, the game is called Twixt. It's a bridge building game for two players. One player tries to construct a bridge going east-west, and the other tries north-south. By definition, only one player can complete their bridge. I've never lost at it. Ever.

It's a boastful statement, but to put it in context, in my entire life I only played one other person who took the game seriously enough to study it. All my other opponents just played it to play. Whereas I spent hours, days and weeks studying all of the possible strategies and their weaknesses, others did other things. Thus, when they went against me, it wasn't even close. Eventually, no one I knew would even bother to compete. That used to happen with all my strategy games. Now I hardly ever win. I can't bring myself to even try. Wonder what happened?

One day while at a family camp I saw an older man playing Twixt with the teenagers. (I was twenty at the time, which somehow made me feel a lot older than 'the kids'.) None of them could beat him, and he was enjoying his victories. Knowing something of the game I sat and watched. I didn't know the man, or even many of the teenagers, so I was not part of their conversation. But I found myself laughing inside at the old man's failure to take advantage of certain mistakes the teenagers made. "He's not so good as he thinks he is," I thought to myself. Finally, the teenagers all gave up and went to go swimming or something. The old man looked at me and then offered to let me compete. I smiled and said I would be happy to play. He asked if I understood the game and I said I did. Then we began.

What I quickly learned was that the old man had not missed the opportunities the teenagers had given him to end the game quickly. He had just ignored them in order to keep the game going. The truth was, he was quite good. Quite good. I found myself on the defensive after just a few moves. Not a common experience. I felt panic. I didn't want to lose. Especially to him. He had an arrogance which I didn't particularly like.

The nature of Twixt is that one can quit on a strategy and start over in another place on the board. This was my sole advantage over the old man. He hated to do that, and resisted it. But he couldn't let me get footholds, and so when I abandoned one battle he had to leave off, too. And so I led him around the board. We engaged in probably six or seven mini-contests. He won them all, forcing me to quit and start over. His arrogance was gone, though. He knew he had the advantage, but he also knew if he made a single mistake he could lose outright. I, on the other hand, had already made my mistake and was suffering for it as a result. Then came the final mini-battle.

By reason of so many "battles" remaining on the board, the last battle involved the linking of several previously fought contests. Now one would think that once a battle had been lost it could not be won. Not always true. By incorporating a previous defeat with a current contest, I managed to turn the entire game around in three moves. I felt it. For the first time in probably thirty or forty minutes my stomach was relaxed. It was over. To his credit, it only took him two turns to see it himself. Reluctantly, he conceded me the victory. Then he criticized me for my strategy. Basically, he told me I was lucky. Starting over was a poor strategy, and had I stuck to a real strategy I would have lost.

I didn't say anything to him. Didn't know him at all. But my thinking was, why the h*ll do you think I quit using that strategy? What's the point of doing something you know can't succeed?

The old man was unhappy because he felt my restarts were random acts. Shooting in the dark, as it were. In fact, he may even have used that term. But my restarts were not random. I didn't just go to a random place on the board to begin anew. There were specific reasons for why I went where I did. I knew about the linking strategies possiblity. True, I had to trust to a certain amount of good fortune, but that's true in any competition. What I was doing was trying to position myself to a place where good fortune would smile on me instead of the old man. And that's exactly what happened.

So, what does playing a silly game of Twixt have to do with writing? A lot. I think.

As a storyteller and writer of stories I very much want to be published. Getting published is like winning at writing. Unlike Twixt, which I never lost at, I have never won at writing. But the game isn't over. And it's an awfully large board. And this is where the analogy fits. I start over.

I have been working on my big story for a very long time. Longer than a good number of the people I know have been alive. Several times I have thought the work positioned well for publication, only to learn I was wrong. Failure. Defeated. Dead end.

But not end of story. Not end of game. I've just lost a battle. Not the war. To win the war (get published) I need but win the final battle. Like my contest against the old man, a decisive victory at the end makes all previous defeats meaningless.

And so after every rejection I have gone back to the story and started over. I do not write randomly. I do not just "try something new". I know the story now very well. Perhaps too well. I tend to infodump. But I try to take the lessons learned from the most recent failure and apply them to the new write - remembering the lessons from previous rejections, too. And, like the board from Twixt, the remnants of previous defeats remain at my disposal. I can link to them, and in so doing, perhaps change a previous defeat into a victory. After all, not everything I wrote was cr*p.

That's were I am at with Swords of Fire. Previous mistakes have put me to the disadvantage. Not only is there no guarantee of success, but the smart money is against me. But then, the smart money was against me when I competed against the old man. I expect he probably was/is a better player than me. I just survived long enough to win.

That's how I feel about my writing. If I can just survive a little longer, I can achieve my goal. I just need to restart again.

I told my sister I was going to "blow up the story" and start over. When I told her I believed I had started the story in the wrong place, she disagreed. She said the problem wasn't where the story began. It was with too much background data. (Infodump.) She actually liked the aside pieces I included and felt they added to the story.

Well, no matter where/how I do it, it is time to begin again with a blank page.

In the deep darkness he brooded...