Didn’t realize until now that yesterday marked four years of blogging on Spinning. Though I’m showing 4,260 posts, I know that there are about another 300 that were farmed out or original to other transient weblogs that I’ve had briefly up and running and have since bitten the dust. Talespinning, Morning Stories, Pseudohyperfiction, all writing-related and basically related to classwork.
When I look at the first post at Spinning I see an "attempt at minimalist writing." The second post is the beginning of a story in rough form that has been worked and reworked and to this day is still one of my favorites. It’s been submitted to many lit journals and returned to me each time.
So maybe there’ll be a more obvious change here at Spinning–though it’s become semi-established here in the last year already–of reading, not writing. The more I read, the less inclined I am to believe myself to be a writer and so, the less I write.
This cycle goes beyond the four years of Spinning, beyond the hopeful going back to school. It’s been ten years since I wrote a novel and made up my mind to dedicate myself to finally seeing this dream through. Ten years is long enough. Though deadlines of this sort mean nothing in terms of measurement, they should be taken as a period when focus produces growth and growth produces results. I’ve seen the growth, and the result is only in the growing.
So writing will be about the reading. For most of us, dreams are only that, just dreams.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
You wrote a novel huh.. Did you ever try hooking an agent?
Oh yes. Then I went back to school and kept the fire going while learning the craft. Some day I’ll throw away the last copy of the novel and delete the file–it’s so bad that even I wouldn’t accept it were I an editor. I think I can make the emotional break with it now, even as a symbol.
Perhaps you are not a writer of novels but you are a writer of truth, the finder of meaning in the writings of others and the very best supporter of writers who haven’t learned what you have, but will. Don’t ever stop spinning because just when you least expect it, when you finally just let things lie something wonderful may happen. Like that book yu never thought would happen. :o)
No, I’m not going through my annual (or more often when spurred by self-doubt) should I renew my Typepad account so Spinning isn’t in danger.
I’ll, as you said, just read and write about the words of others. That’s my destiny I guess.
I wouldn’t mind taking a look at what you wrote.. but I also don’t want to get in the way of a mental severence. I do understand why many creative minds take that route. (I officially had to do the same thing this past summer with my “card game developer” aspirations.)
Josh, thanks, but I wouldn’t put anyone through that torture again. Only my nearest and dearest friends plodded through it and as I remember the story and the writing, I’m destroying it as an embarrassment.
Well, my Inbox will remain open if you should reconsider 🙂
So write another novel. I have two, totalling about 150,000 words, sitting etched in brilliant bits on my hard drives. The first one is pretty awful.
Do you enjoy writing? Reading your writing here, it seems that you do. I read joy in the craft. If you enjoy writing, why not keep doing it? It is, in spite of the popular images of it, largely a solitary and externally unrewarding pursuit, and anyone doing it for the fame or the money or the chicks is going to be disappointed. But when I read what you write here, I see a person who loves the written word.
So why not keep doing something you enjoy? No deadlines, no writing with an eye to sale: write a novel that you want to write. Who cares if it sells?
I do enjoy writing, and will always be writing something. But I’m not going to write fiction anymore because even if I write for myself, I’m the one who’s deciding here that there’s much better fiction out there than I could ever write, and there’s plenty of it for me to read and enjoy.