on being a writer
I have found over the years that I like a lot of ideas, but when I do something about it and put them into action, I don’t like them as much as I thought I did. Unlike the ideas which have fallen by the wayside, I think this one might have something more to it than just liking the idea. I’ve always thought of myself as a creative person, though I don’t work as an artist because my artistic skills suck. It would take longer than I’m willing to devote to develop the skills I’d need to bring the ideas in my mind to expression that I would consider acceptable. So, for the moment, my creative energies are being channeled into the software I write – a creative endeavor, but I’m not sure that it’s my preferred one. Plus, the field is always undergoing change, there are flaws to fix, documentation to write – a never ending cycle of tedium that comes along with creating a new piece of software.
Writing is a bit different – once its published, it’s done, flaws or not. There’s no going back and rewriting after the words have hit the paper, they are there and it is done, walk away and move on to the next project. Sure, editing can be tedious, but it’s something I enjoy, which some may think a perversity. Obviously I enjoy writing in some form, or you wouldn’t be reading these words on my blog, since I would have been doing something else other than writing this. I’ve been doing this on and off for slightly more than three years now, while the majority of blogs see 3 or 4 entries and then are never updated again. I admit there have been times where it was a month or more between updates, but fortunately, those times have been few and far between.
Unlike my regular writing, I almost never go back and edit my blog entries. I blog to get thoughts out of my head – most of the time I’m satisfied that my writing expresses my thinking, even if it’s not intelligible to others all the time. What matters to me is that my writing is internally consistent, which I believe it is. Of course, you have to take my word for that since you can’t read my thoughts, live my experiences, or see things through my interpretive filters except as I describe things to you.
I appear to be wandering a bit in this entry, but that’s almost natural for a subject that encompasses so many areas of my thought processes at times. I figure I could be a professional writer in as little as two years. My logic goes this way: in my current job I take about an hour at lunch every day, and I can write almost an entire page at lunch. There are approximately 250 work days in a year – 50 weeks, 5 days a week. Writing everyday at lunch, that’s nearly 250 pages I can write on my lunch hour. I figure 200 pages is actually a more realistic and achievable goal.
Additionally, I’m not in jujitsu class on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. I could easily spend 4 – 6 hours writing between the two nights, which would nearly double my writing output. So, you can see that without too much trouble, I could write 400 or more pages in a year – more than sufficient for a decent novel. That’s not even counting any time on the weekend spent writing. But I can cut myself some slack on the weekends, I don’t want to over do it and burn myself out.
Okay, so I said two years. Well, 400 pages is a lot of material for someone like me who hasn’t written a complete novel before. That first year is just to produce the first draft. The second year is to edit, edit, and edit some more. And to start looking for a publisher. Or more likely, an agent. The number of authors getting first books accepted by publishers is incredibly small. So a more likely route is to self-publish my book. But that’s getting way ahead of myself. The big question confronting me now is, do I want this bad enough to do the work, to set the wheels into motion and begin the process of doing the work, or is this just another daydream that I have no intention of putting any energy into except to occasionally think how much greener that grass is, when I’m not willing to jump the fence and check the grass out for myself?
The grass may not be greener, but I’m thinking it might be time to check out the grass somewhere else, see if I like it any better.