Realizations

I had to make a hard choice. I was about 10,000 words in on part two of the book I’m writing called Legends of the End. Things had run off the rails. I stopped and read it all and found I was writing in circles. Very disturbing when you think you know where things are going. I realized that what I hadn’t done was account for the changes I’d made to end of part one. I mean who would have thought, right?

I looked at how to fix things and had this sinking feeling that the only way to fix it was to toss most of what I’d written and start again. That’s the last thing I wanted to do but as I thought about it over the weekend I came to the conclusion that just fixing wasn’t what I wanted. If I was to finish this book I was going to have to do the hard thing and dump most of my writing for part two and take another run at it. I know now how things need to progress and most of all why. This was a bitter pill.

It hadn’t been a total waste of time. I had written some good stuff and a little of it could be salvaged. It isn’t like I don’t need the practice. You only get better at something by the doing of that thing. It’s like what I would tell my kids when they were growing up and just had to be in band or strings. Practice is the only way you get better. It’s only between the pain of practice and the love of what you are doing that you will learn if you really want to do that thing. Be it a violin or writing if you can’t take the pain of practice then you don’t love it enough to become good at it.

So, what’s 10,000 words of practice when it helps you get to what you need to know. I know that when I get to the end of this book it will have been a small price to pay.