Obsession

It takes a certain level of obsession to be a novelist.  To go over the same territory a dozen times and finding a way to make it fresh.  To revisit the same moment again and again, and work it until it sparkles, until its natural, until it hurts just the way I want it to.

Life is lived going forward, going blindly into the unknown of the next moment.

But the creation of a novel is lived backward, sideways, any way I want it, the best and worst parts repeated again and again.  I can go back and fix what didn't work, erase a mistake, or take a new action and get an entirely different result.

In my writing I get to render the chaos of life into the tempered line of a story.

Until this moment, I always thought of myself as an outcome driven writer:  I want the satisfaction of a finished product, of a beautiful sentence, a book deal, or a wowed audience gushing in their seats.

But at this moment, I am struck by how much I love the process.  I love polishing a scene until it's shiny and fluid like a flowing river, organically flowing and twisting along.  I love consciously crafting an experience until it gets closer and closer to what I want.  I love seeing what I can accomplish with just the changing of a word, and I love being utterly surprised by what comes out, in both the quick snaps of inspiration and the well-oiled nuances that emerge on their own over months.

It takes a certain level of obsession to be a writer.  Luckily, I've got it.