Waiting for the Wave...
Nov. 8th, 2007 06:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thisnewday For some months, close to a year, actually, I've been working on a piece made up of entries from my LiveJournal. It's proceeded very unevenly, with starts and stops at odd intervals. And it's been interupted, several times, with trips back to Pennsylvania to take care of my father.
When I first started it, or when I first recognized that I might have something more than a few short pieces that happened to share a common theme, I thought the scope of it would be limited to events surrounding the court battle for custody of my grandson.
As that part neared completion, I actually felt like I had something that I could read for the writers' group I'd been attending in Liverpool, NY. I even Emailed Swamp Rose, our LJ friend who chairs the group, to see if that could be arranged.
But as I worked to prepare for the reading, I felt less and less sure that it was really complete. The thing is that everything I write, regardless of length, is written as a stand-alone piece. Even if it's part of something larger, each part is intended to feel complete, to work logically and emotionally by itself.
It's like the generations of computers that have followed the original IBM-PC. Each one works as a separate entity but each one can also be integrated into a network of computers, including the nearly infinite one you've linked to in order to read this.
Which is also, I suppose, an analogy for the way life is, with one event rolling into another and another. Anyway, you get the idea. It's the artist's job to break off a piece of it, here and there, and frame it in a way that we're able to share a bit of its beauty or meaning or whatever it is that the artist is attempting to reveal.
I guess what I'm getting at, finally, is that I think I'm about to catch the next wave on this perhaps infinite ocean of experience. Which may actually be a good thing for the particular piece that started me on this meandering discourse.
In its present form it's, well, hard to place, in terms of any sort of publishable, much less marketable, genre. Maybe I should've said,"at its present length," because I'm really ok with its format. But it's too long to be a magazine article, not really a short story, and not fully enough developed to be called a memoir.
Now, having just returned from my most recent hiatus at my father's, I have a renewed sense of its possibilities, a sense that at least some of what it needs is already written in this journal and simply awaits integration into what's already been done.
So, if I have a hope for this project, it's that the next wave will carry it, and me, somewhere closer to that distant speck on the horizon of this and every writer's literary aspirations...
When I first started it, or when I first recognized that I might have something more than a few short pieces that happened to share a common theme, I thought the scope of it would be limited to events surrounding the court battle for custody of my grandson.
As that part neared completion, I actually felt like I had something that I could read for the writers' group I'd been attending in Liverpool, NY. I even Emailed Swamp Rose, our LJ friend who chairs the group, to see if that could be arranged.
But as I worked to prepare for the reading, I felt less and less sure that it was really complete. The thing is that everything I write, regardless of length, is written as a stand-alone piece. Even if it's part of something larger, each part is intended to feel complete, to work logically and emotionally by itself.
It's like the generations of computers that have followed the original IBM-PC. Each one works as a separate entity but each one can also be integrated into a network of computers, including the nearly infinite one you've linked to in order to read this.
Which is also, I suppose, an analogy for the way life is, with one event rolling into another and another. Anyway, you get the idea. It's the artist's job to break off a piece of it, here and there, and frame it in a way that we're able to share a bit of its beauty or meaning or whatever it is that the artist is attempting to reveal.
I guess what I'm getting at, finally, is that I think I'm about to catch the next wave on this perhaps infinite ocean of experience. Which may actually be a good thing for the particular piece that started me on this meandering discourse.
In its present form it's, well, hard to place, in terms of any sort of publishable, much less marketable, genre. Maybe I should've said,"at its present length," because I'm really ok with its format. But it's too long to be a magazine article, not really a short story, and not fully enough developed to be called a memoir.
Now, having just returned from my most recent hiatus at my father's, I have a renewed sense of its possibilities, a sense that at least some of what it needs is already written in this journal and simply awaits integration into what's already been done.
So, if I have a hope for this project, it's that the next wave will carry it, and me, somewhere closer to that distant speck on the horizon of this and every writer's literary aspirations...
