I start with a quote from a guy who was wildly brilliant and cross-sector with that brilliance. So I feel like he knows something about art. “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” Leonardo da Vinci Uplifting quote to really warm you up to writing today, right? You know that piece you just finished? The one that took up your heart, soul, and brain space for months? Time to abandon it! Okay. Abandon is a big, scary word. And for this writer, not the best fit. Perhaps…transfer its energy. Give it to the community. Time to (and I’m sorry parents) just…let it go. I struggle with this concept. Calling a writing piece done is a complicated endeavor. How do you know when its done? On the flip side, say you know it’s done – how do you leave it alone? Intellectually, I know my piece done. It’s gone through a beta reader – usually more than one, it’s spell checked (ten gazillion times) and if I’m brave enough, its even got my mother’s stamp of approval on it. And yet. I tinker. During intense quarantine last spring, I picked up a short story I hadn’t touched in literally years and rewrote the entire thing to present tense. Once the tense was switched, I had to find bits that had fallen out of sense and shove them back into formation. The word count got tighter, which is almost always a win, but seriously. Seriously? Seriously. I should have been working on my WIP. I could have been washing my hair, getting caught up on overdue tasks at work, or, like, doing dishes occasionally. Rather, I used it as a procrastination tool to skirt around what I should have been doing in that moment. So how do you stop the tinkering?
Listen, we all know that writing and publishing is never entirely done until the ink is wet. Even then – we live in a digital era. Sometimes there’s no ink at all. I promise you that once I hit post on this blog post, I have the liberty to read it again in a few hours, and if I find something I hate, I’ll change it. I’m better at letting go than I used to be. Not perfect, not at all. But who is? Yours in not-yet-abandoned-work, Stephanie
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