johnmdemarco posted on February 13, 2010 07:33
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle once again rests upon my night stand. I am trying to muster up the courage to give it another try.
Me, afraid of a book? you might wonder with alarm. I must confess that I am a little intimidated. It is one of my wife's favorite books; when she read it last winter, she could not put it down. She cried on numerous occasions. The writing is almost "lyrical," she contends, and I've also learned that author David Wroblewski did FIFTY drafts across a DECADE and cut tens of thousands of words before his work was perfect enough for publication.
There's lots of irony going on here. Certainly I will love this book as well. It will inspire me. It will educate me.
But what if it makes me think my fiction writing basically sucks, compared to Wroblewski's opus? I'm only on my third draft, and have the audacity to believe that I might be, well, done after this draft. And I only started the original manuscript slightly less than seven months ago.
The late, great Ernest Hemingway told the enigmatic F. Scott Fitzgerald to not get psyched out by external factors when trying to write. "Just write the truest sentence you can write," Hemingway told his friend, according to A Moveable Feast.
It is futile, in the end, to compare yourself to another writer or your book to another's. The next "truest" sentence remains my focus, and journeying with Edgar will only take me deeper into truth in general, I assume.
So thanks for encouraging me! And ask yourself today: What is the next, truest thing you can do, say or write?