Take Five
Five-minute reads about writing
Nov. 3 - Nov. 30, 2010
Courtesy: Sasha Soren (Random Magic)
Twitter: @RandomMagicTour
#23 of 30: The patient gardener
Writing requires a lot of time -- researching, writing, thinking, editing, proofing, then doing it all again, scrapping pages that don’t work, trying to figure out some tricky problem, and so on.
If you don’t have that time to write, you won’t be able to let the story fully develop, because it’s like…yes, it’s a bit like if you’ve just planted an herb garden in a window box on your sill.
So, yes, you have all the necessary items that you need -- seeds, dirt, container, water -- but if you don’t have time to actually use them, then you’re never going to be able to chop some fresh oregano over your spaghetti or make some fresh lemongrass tea or what have you.
You have to have the time to go through all the stages: The seeds (the initial idea or ideas), the dirt (characters, dialogues), the container (your framework of the story, the plot), the water (putting in writing time).
Then you have to prune, and wait for little new shoots to spring up (editing, proofing, rewriting).
And, finally, at the end, after all of that care and attention, you finally have something very tasty and delicious and wonderful.
But if you miss a step, or skip a step because you’re impatient, or just don’t have the time to attend to all of these important things, then you don’t have anything.
You have a great book that never had the opportunity to come to vibrant life, in that way. And that’s a real pity.
But the hardest part of writing is never the actual writing. The hardest part of writing is being able to have the time, the tools, the funds to write.
If no one’s going to come along and give you these things you need, then you need to provide them for yourself.
You work and then put money aside so that you can buy some free time when you can just write. You fight for it. You have to, because the world isn’t going to just give it to you.
From author interview with Sasha Soren.
Interviewer: Book Junkie (@bookjunkie74)
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More: Go to #24 of 30
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