I have two books I am writing still in rough draft form. One book is done, but I need to go through another draft because it is missing something. I wonder how many more drafts it will take to find that missing thread. Hopefully it will be found before I get so sick and tired of the book that I just toss it in the trash. The other book is only about a third completed and I hate to admit it, but I have sat it on the shelf so many times due to other demands that I have gone through several drafts warming myself back up to the story. That is not (for me) the best way to get a story down on paper. I like to get a very rough sketch of the entire thing completed and then go through the drafting process. I experience the rare sparks of creativity in starts and stops. I don’t know about you, but it always surprises me. Great ideas, well, ideas that inspire me, tend to hide behind the bushes and pop out at the least expected times. And when it happens, I have to go with it, or wait for the next unplanned moment, which can be a very long wait. That doesn’t work well in my “planned and scheduled” world. I need to be independently wealthy, with a small cottage at the beach, where the incoming ocean waves, made higher by morning off-shore breezes from the cold land to the warm water offer the promise of newness and fresh ideas and where the afternoon on-shore breezes actually hold me up. Then, when creativity strikes, I can jump on it and hold it until it eventually slips out of my hands. That would work for me because the wind and the waves would still be there. I just finished a book on media and meaning, so I suppose I should have some answers to how meaning is created and why it happens. I have some ideas, some tested hypotheses, and some interesting theories, but the actual spark is an awesome and mysterious thing and I think it will always remain so. As Miguel de Unamuno warned, when we dissect something to understand it, we kill it. We cannot know the square root of the ash tree.
So I will continue to write when I can and be surprised when I write something that is really good. It is always worth the wait.
