Yes this is an excuse to use that wonderful SAT word from the bygone era that I am using to show off my excellent vocabulary skills. Stay with me here though, the meat isn't here but if you fry or roast it in a lot of fat and cook with water or some sort of stock over many hours you'll be left with an amazing broth. It'll be watery but nourishing. A perfect summary of my personality you might say.
It is true, since I started writing a a healthy page last June or was it July I've come much closer to being a writer writer. It's become clearer what it takes to write on a daily basis, how much of an effort sticking to the same theme and topic through days and weeks is. I'm also more confident with words and 'ideas' and the fact that one doesn't need worry that one might run out of ideas or thoughts...they just...jump into you when you need them shall you reach out desperately enough to them, hopelessly and with sufficient duress. It's taught me patience, long-term planning, and good discipline.
And also how hard it would be to do things in an organized way. It's not much to write a thousand or two, or even five, thousand words describing what you want to write, and outlining it. And it's not hard at all to write slash fiction, just dump the crap floating in the ether of your consciousness. To organize it all though is a different tale altogether. The potter takes the formless clay and molds them into beautiful vessels, she fires them in the burning hot oven, glazes them, refires them, adds decoration. A child who plays with silly putty and makes a decent-looking 'bowl' is not comparable to a potter. They're not in the same league even.
Thus the realization. Perhaps I'm a little further away from my first novel, or collection of fictional pieces, than I'd have hoped I'd be. If you'd told me two years ago I'd have written almost a million words over the course of a year, I'd have believed it was at least three published works, not a zillion pieces of random wandering. Oh how deluded I was! Now I know I can write but writing a longform piece, something that can be compiled into a book is a tough cookie to bite indeed.
And yet it's not insurmountable. Maybe the timelines have shifted but it was never going to be easy, I was aware. It was a passion of love and labor, it wouldn't be for pleasure, surely. I knew that coming in. Now I know exactly how hard it is and what needs to be done. And deep within there's what's needed to write and complete those large complete pieces, I know. Nobody will want to read it yea but that's never been my goal. At this point I don't care about being read, I care about being published.
As my output has increased, so have expectations and expectations of quality. There is not a doubt in my mind if I planned out a novel, and took a 4-day vacation I could bang out a shit book in that time. It's not hard to become an unpublished novelist. It's about putting in the hours for planning out the scenes and characters, and then the grunt work to connect the pieces.
This comes up now because we're all evaluating our future options, in a post-COVID world. The pandemic has forced us to consider what we care about really, what we're living for and where we want our lives to go. I get afraid, vertigo from the dizzying heights of nothingness, that there seems to be nothing supporting my feet and my body, that I may have gone up in an untethered balloon. What was I going for again, I have to ask. And then it comes back in. Oh yea that is what the plan is, to write and write and write, while other things keep happen. Make it a point of meditation. What's beyond the wall of writing? Who cares. It doesn't matter. I don't know about my future but nobody does. And what I know and want very few people have that awareness to begin with.
The unknown personal future shouldn't be the cause of fear and anxiety, but for enthusiasm and excitement. It portends infinite possibilities!
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