Just finished doing something I haven't done in a long while: wrote something new for Swords of Fire.
The entire Saga has been put on hold while I explored a new realm of creativity with Apprentice, Ekundayo, The Sweet Girl, Panthera, and Sassy. But I think about Swords of Fire every day, even if I do not actually write on it.
Now I have only completed the first two books - and neither of those is ready for prime time. (Probably never will be.) I've started Book III, but I'm no where near the climactic battle. So why I should be concentrating on something that occurs in Book V or VI I don't know. But it's something I have been thinking on for more than a year. Nearly two years now.
I guess when a thing's ripe you harvest it. Whatever.
Typically, I do not like writing scenes from the future. I've done it. Many times. But nearly so often as smart writing says I should. You see, I like writing to a milestone marker, and these scenes in my head become those milestone markers. They're my inspiration to keep writing when a thing is going slowly. Without the milestone marker I lose interest and fade away.
Generally, the markers have to be close enough in the future to realistically be reached in a few days. This gives me my childish immediate gratification. And to write them early often results in the equivalent of eating one's dessert before the main course.
But today I just had to write. It didn't come out exactly as I wanted, but I was kind of rushing it, I think.
I have to laugh. Everything I've ever read about writing tells me that whenever I come up with one of these scenes I should write them down. Get them out of my head. I have so many on Swords of Fire alone I suspect I could easily produce a 100,000-word volume just on vignettes alone. Anyway, this little scene took a couple thousand words, and I was rushing it. Left out some things because I am short of time and I wanted to finish it before I had to leave. I could have written more. I still have ten minutes.
Oh, well.
I wish I could go back in time and make up for all the wasted years in which I wrote, but failed to learn my craft. At my current rate of decay I often wonder if there's enough time left to get it done.
So maybe I'll add these vignettes to my legacy. Maybe after I'm gone somebody who actually has the skills can put things together and fix them up into something for the world.
Until then, I write.
Sailors on the Sea
Monday, November 23, 2009
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2 comments:
You'll never know if you've got enough time to hone your skills or not until it's too late. So you have to act as if you have got the time. Otherwise you could end up in twenty years looking back and thinking, "I wish I hadn't kept holding off because I thought I hadn't enough time."
And if you run out of time, at least you can tell yourself that you tried.
True. And yet it is incredibly discouraging to know I have been writing for more than forty years and still don't write as well as people twenty, or even thirty, years younger than me. Somewhere along the line I have missed something.
And I really don't know what it is or how to get it.
All I can do is write my stories and hope the current work is better than the previous. But when do they become "good"? To be honest, I can't tell the difference. I read things that are published, sometimes by accredited writers, and I can't tell the difference.
That's not a good sign, I think.
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