Walking the Path Already Made

I have bitten the bullet and started the very necessary task of working through my novel, cleaning it up as I go. I get to marvel at my brief moments of lucidity and good use of language, I get to despair at the plain laziness and lack of inspiration in many parts. But that's okay, the beauty of a novel is that parts are torn and rebuilt as fast as a replacement can be imagined.

What makes the journey hard is the length, my days work amounted to a very small part of a greater whole. What's more that's time in which I won't be adding to my holy word count, in fact that will be diminished as I edit out the parts I deem worthless and trim down sentences so they don't flow like a blocked canal.

It's certainly not glamorous, walking over this path again. Seeing my points of strength and weakness, often I can remember where I wrote each individual section. I remember how I felt then, I wonder how I would have felt then if I knew what fate waited for my work. The fate of rework and deletion.

My editor hat is on now, I have become that critical person every writer fears who descends on his work with a scalpel and cuts out all that does not match my expectation. I don't care how much I loved a particular sequence when I wrote it, if it doesn't come up to scratch it's gone.

And, ultimately, most interestingly, I am not bothered by this any more. I feel my experience has added up enough now that I look at a novel as a whole. It has strong parts it has weak parts, sometimes something that's not perfect needs to stay in place to support the greater whole, sometimes something great needs to go because it just doesn't fit the tone or structure of a chapter. That is the essence of architecture and I intend to build something greater than any single piece.

Feeling Roguish in General

Well, updating one's blog is a vaguely important thing to do. So I've decided to spend some time doing just that.

Sadly my writing is not progressing as I'd like it to right now, I'll dispose with the excuses. It's just not. The banquet of life is proving overly chewy for me at the moment so I'm just gritting my teeth and making good.

What is going well however is that cauldron of ideas that is my mind. I'm finding inspiration and material in everything right now, building up my internal store of writing fuel for when I finally do get back into the flow. So I can't complain.

So, what do I do when I'm not writing? This weekend found me playing a few hours of this little game I came across through one of the invaluable Total Biscuit WTF is... episodes. It's a rogue-like with graphics. If you don't know what a rogue like is, well, it's beyond the scope of this blog to explain it so I recommend a trip to google. You can check out the video covering it here. It was a very pleasant distraction.

I've also been listening to a lot of a podcast called Three Moves ahead. I've always had this fascination with war gaming even though I've never really got into one. The podcast is excellent food for thought both concerning what makes those games great but also concerning what makes the whole scene impenetrable for most. The only person I've ever been able to coerce into playing a war game with me was my brother, I've always shyed away from pursueing the hobby beyond the safety of my own home. Still, you can have a look (or listen) at the podcast here.

I'll probably organize some writing for myself soon. Even if it is just a short story or perhaps a review of something. In the mean time, I'm happy to be able to distract myself for a time before I need to return the fray at work.

A Piece

When I first started writing and it was a long time ago now, I was an ambitious little lout.

After a few short poems I soon had big ideas and started work on my great epic. There I was, at 15 years old, starting work on something that I dreamed would put Virgil to shame. I remember it clearly, it was about a piece of gold that a farmer found in his field. He had never seen gold before so was blown away by this shiny material. He didn't know what to call it, not knowing of a concept of god nor having a name for the sun. So he called it a "piece".

The story was then that this piece passed from the farmer to a poet, who likewise pondered the meaning of this "piece". I suppose the idea was that the story would follow it as it touched people in different ways, making them suddenly aware of something greater.

I wrote in free verse in a poem like language. Like Milton I guess, except of course unlike Milton I only got to the second page. I lost even that, I don't know where it is now.

Something earlier made me recall the farmers exclamation upon finding the lump of gold. "A Piece, I have found a piece." A piece of what he did not know, only that something so beautiful could not exist as anything but a part of some great whole. Well, I'm just being nostalgic, I'm sure my would-be epic would make me cringe now.

The part about this memory that bothers me however, was my ambition. I was a wide eyed lunatic of a kid, illusions of grandeur, more than a hint of megalomania. I remember wasting time during a Summer job thinking out the battle doctrine I would use to conquer the world. It's just the way I was. The Epic was part of these impossible dreams but it, unlike my dreams of sweeping victories and glory, was real. I wrote some of it.

I may have resigned myself to never ruling the world but that was easy, it was pure fantasy. I am comfortable with that, but my Epic, my writing. I have had a piece of that in my hands and once you have touched a piece of something like that, once you know there just has to be a whole, can you ever give it up?