Dare to be Good
December 15, 2000
11:12 a.m.
System restored, mostly. [check] Christmas shopping done, mostly. [check, check] Presents wrapped, mostly. [check, check, check] With all those things done, I'm finally back to the page--nose to the grindstone and all that good stuff. In the process I'm looking back over the year. It's been a long one. Overall, it's been a good one. Still I find I'm not pleased with it. This feeling surprised me at first. But it didn't take long to understand. "You need to be writing a novel," Stephen Leigh said to me one night at a convention. He gave me that impish grin where his beard curls over the corner of his lips. "And you need to take your time and do it right." Stephen is a really great guy--able to provide his opinion and advice without making it sound like a sermon. I smiled and agreed. But still went on to focus almost solely on producing short fiction. This is what has made me uncomfortable with my year. And this is what I'm working on correcting as I go into the last couple weeks of the year 2000. I do need to be working on a novel. I'm not sure exactly what's kept me from working on it. There's always been another story to work on first. Something else that needed to get finished. Some other tale that could be tweaked. Looking back over my year, I find I've even spent time going back to old stories and rewriting them--something I really haven't done much in the past. I've heard writers talk about writers' block as a hurdle they have to get over to write something. As I've said before, I don't believe in writers' block. It's hard to believe you're blocked when you're putting material out routinely…which I have been. But stories come at their own pace, I think. I've been thinking about this story I'm getting ready to tell for a long time. I've been plotting bits, thinking about characters and situations. I've been trying to understand what the piece is supposed to mean in the big picture. I spent a bit of the morning putting together thoughts I've had for the past few months. It's together in my usual Rube Goldberg-esque flow chart. I think it holds together. I think I'm ready to tell this one. I've got bad news for Stephen, though. I'm going to write the first draft as quickly as I can. Or maybe I should say as quickly as it makes sense to write it. I really can't "slow down" when it comes to creation of words. I write as I write. Sometimes it's slow. Sometimes it's fast. But I think he'll be pleased to know that I'm not going to cram it into an arbitrary deadline. If it happens in a month, it happens in a month. If it takes two or three or four or whatever, well, that's fine, too. The other reality here is that creation of words is only a portion of the effort it takes to write a book. There's settling time. There's thinking through the story, and the characters. There's just stuff, you know? The truth of the matter is that I've been working on this novel for something over two years. Given this, I really should be able to create words at a moderately rapid pace. Maybe not Dare-speed, but at whatever naturally comes out, you know? Lisa Silverthorne said in her journal recently that she's tired of Daring to Be Bad--that she wants to Dare to Be Good. I understand what she means. But the problem is that I already think that what she does is good. I know she'll sell her novels. I know it's just a matter of time. Of course, I also understand how painful that answer is. The waiting is excruciating. Her comment got me to wondering, though. Just how do you Dare to Be Good? There isn't a recipe for it. There isn't a How-To book with that title, though maybe there will be now. I've thought about this in quiet moments, like in the car as I was driving home from Christmas shopping and while watching the stupid Windows "loading" bar scroll slowly across the screen. [sadistic grin]. I don't know exactly how to Dare to Be Good. You Dare to Be Bad by just putting words on the page. That's the value of the effort. You get better by putting words on the page, and by thinking about story, and by working your butt off. You get better by letting your worries focus on deadlines rather than the words on the page, and in some odd way freeing your inner psyche to run loose on the page. I'm tempted to say you Dare to Be Good in the same way. But maybe not. Maybe it's different. [is that sound you hear the sound of my heart growing three sizes?] So after all this thought, I still don't know how to Dare to Be Good. But I'm going to try. I'm going to Dare to Be Good by playing with the characters, by writing as well as I can, by having fun, by doing my best to make the story take off, by not worrying about the "deadline," by keeping my short work out on the market, by letting the process take me wherever it takes me. And I'm starting today   Have a great day.  Daily Persistence: Home of the Brave Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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I guess I don't want to Dare to be Bad anymore. I want to Dare to be Good. Lisa Silverthorne Dec 3 |
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