| |
|
...I am extremely tempted to try to pick up where I left off with my unfinished effort from 2001...
(shamefacedly nods head in the affirmative)
I'm of several minds on this: on the one hand, to take this tack would be to give in to the fear that I've only got a few good ideas in me, and I'd better mine them for all they're worth.
When the truth—the truth that I need to believe, anyway—is that ideas are cheap and plentiful and common as water, but they take some finding: and that the only way to find new ones is to do the damned work: and that otherwise I'll just end up polishing and refining on the same few ideas into nothing—"putting the finishing touches" on that marble statue until it's ground to dust.
The other angle is that there's always time to revisit the past and live off its spoils, to colonize the territories you've opened up, but for now the important thing is to forge on and open up new territories.
It's about allocation of resources: to use a different metaphor, you can either spend your cash-in-hand to build a hotel on a property you already own (say, Baltic Avenue), or you can go ahead and buy Park Place.
The above assumes it's still early in the game, of course. The dark flipside of that assumption is the deep-down fear that ideas really aren't cheap and plentiful, and that some day I'll have to turn to autocannibalism just to survive: and when that day comes I want a big stockpile of ideas and unfinished works to draw on and endlessly rewrite into infinity.
On the third (fourth?) hand: I recognize that it is infinitely more seductive to the ego to be able to say "I am writing a novel" than to say, "I once wrote a novel."
So: wannabee or has-been? What's your choice? |
|
|
