Roads to Joy

I’ve often realised, as the creative writing sessions have accumulated, and I’m apprised of the errors littering my newest submission, that I have been too easily pleased. The creative writing community has a term for that: the bons mots are the writer’s ‘darlings’, and in order for the work to properly progress, they must be killed off.

Another way of putting an unsatisfactory project to one side is to wrap it up, package it, and put it on a bookshelf, so that the next piece of work can be developed. One hopes, of course, that lessons learned from the previous effort can be put to good use in the current one. And if the previous effort is merely binned, what hope has a writer to successfully finish the next project?

These days, the growth of Artificial Intelligence is much in the news. My story of Biome NE47, developed over four years of writing, has had the advent of the Superior AI at its heart. Had I skill enough, and confidence enough, and financial resources enough, I should have attempted to embark on a more persuasive marketing campaign for my beloved trilogy. Perhaps I should yet take more advantage of the ongoing, hand-wringing publicity about the dangers of AI, and try harder to flog my books with that exploitative gambit in mind. I do have the sense that my writing and novelistic skills have improved with each successive book. But I remain bashful about self-promotion.

Indeed, my inclination is to let sleeping books lie, while I work ahead on my next effort, which has now grown to some 50k words and is looking like it could be completed with some useful research into place. I have so much to learn about showing, about avoiding telling, about concentrating on the primary characters, about plot and pacing and dramatic tension and creating a descriptive atmosphere or ambience. Part of my encouragement to myself, however, is a presentation of my erstwhile science fiction efforts, what I now think of as an apprenticeship, into a tidy collection. Something that I can have and hold, a sort of talisman against the demon of self-doubt, that I can show my cynical self as some sort of personal accomplishment.

I like the sense that that work is there, that I’ve given it what I could, and that it’s time, now, to move on. Too easily pleased? Sure. But at this stage of life, perhaps it’s better to look for the pleasure that’s possible, than to bang one’s head against the wall and never find a sense of completion.

As long, I reckon, as one’s ambition for the next project is to improve. And that’s a present joy as well, that eager sense that yes, I can, I can and I will, do better.