“It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse.”
A completely minor and unimportant moment in the book and movie, "Life of Pi," was fascinating to me: the fictional author interviewing Pi shares his own life-changing experience with Pi: he had worked on a book for over two years and had finally given up and thrown the book away.
I, personally, would never give a "writer" who had abandoned a story MY story. Never.
Why would anyone bother to finish a book if they have to work through it? Shouldn't the story flow perfectly from Once Upon a Time to The End?
All writers start with a dream: a captured moment of pure inspiration. (Zap! Writing)
Here's where writers separate from dreamers in the pack: the personal, internalized "moment" of inspiration has to be expressed externally as a story. The writer chooses how to express the story she wants to tell. Will it be a poem? A book? A song? A play?
A dreamer can fake it through step one and start expressing an internal moment as a story, but the thrill for the dreamer is reliving the moment of inspiration; not the creation of the external story. The dreamer wants to keep the inspiration for herself. The dreamer will never write out the dream to its conclusion. Concluding the moment of inspiration would kill the dream.
The dreamer gives up the writing and clings to the dream. It's MY Moment. I'm not risking it. I'm tossing the story. It will never equal my dream.
Now comes the moment of truth. The writer faces the biggest question of all: can I tell this story? Do I have what it takes to push the dream I experienced out of my mind and into the world? Can I let it go?
The writer plunges on; putting words on paper until the link between inspiration and external expression of the dream are woven together into a story. Writers pour dream after dream into each scene of the story to draw the reader into a shared flash of inspiration.
A friend of mine, a talented painter, finishes a painting, shows it and sells it. She's kept a few paintings over the years, but for the most part, if a painting doesn't sell and she needs the space in her studio to work, she re-uses the canvas. She paints over canvases she didn't sell and isn't planning to show in the future.
In E-publishing, writers can rewrite over their canvases. I've received a ton of notices from Amazon that writers have updated their Kindle books with significant edits. I love that writers are re-painting stories that they want to sell or show.
Middles are the toughest to write. There's no doubt about that, but to bring the story out, you have to write out the whole dream. Don't be afraid you'll sell the dream short. You dreamed it perfectly and flawlessly. The dream will always be yours. Savor your dreams. Inspire yourself to make your story better as you push through the middle. Give the middle a chance to bungee back and forth from the moment of inspiration to the conclusion. Complete the dream. Move on to repaint the next dream. Push your dreams onto paper.
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