To me, the work changes every year. Possibly every month.
The snapshot changes just like the face in the mirror.
Perhaps slightly. Perhaps with subtle touches. A line here, a gray hair there.
But when you leap through decades, a sixteen year old penning a tale certainly changes when he’s twenty-six or thirty-six years old.
That’s why the stories document growing up. They document trying to find wisdom. They document wrestling with life, with love, with faith, with God and Satan.
The work echoes where you’re at the moment you create it.
That’s why it’s beautiful and ugly. Because it’s a part of you, for better or worse.
I’m going through my latest “WORK” that will be hitting stores next year. I’m liking it, finding certain parts wonderful and others woesome. I feel poetic in places and hackneyed in others.
Yet the cool thing as I read through this manuscript for final tweaks is that I feel it’s exactly what I was hoping to do with it. It’s got a pretty big payoff. It’s one of these things where I’m holding a sparkler in one hand shaking it around while the secret is in my other hand unnoticed.
The jury is still out and will be for quite some time, but I’m close to letting this one go. Close to being finished with the creative part of it. Close to being done with the labor of building it.
I learn something every time I do one of these, building one of these stories. I don’t ever get it right, but then again, nobody does. If they did, they would miss the beauty that is life.
The wrinkles and the gray hairs and the flaws are what make us who we are.
I'm working on a book now with a partner. The first short draft was done a month ago. We are now hammering out the longer draft and I'm finding echoes of what you have said here.
I think wherever we are in life, slowly slides from fingertip to keyboard and writes itself across the pages. Echoes of me, echoes of the man he was (partner), are there underlining our characters. I think it gives them more depth, pain, beauty, chaotic realism to make them bigger than life. (Hugs)Indigo