Category Archives: writing

The Novel

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I can’t quite get up the gumption to finish this big project of a novel I have going on. I read it through, and made some notes, and even made a Post-it storyboard of scenes. There are definitely some changes I want to make, and some I’m not sure about. But what I’m really doing is putting off the challenge of sitting down to edit/rewrite the last half.

I believed in it enough to write 240+ pages of it. Hell, I believed in it enough to switch careers and am now contemplating an even bigger life change. But the project itself is stymied, and partly because I’m wondering if it is worth all this effort and time.

I know the answer to that one is yes, somehow it is worth it. (Even if all it does is teach me that I’m an inescabably bad writer.) And I was okay with that back in those golden days of yore when I actually enjoyed working on it. Have you ever gotten stuck on a project? How do you get excited about it again?

Ayn Rand’s Frank Lloyd Wright Cottage

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In 1937, Ayn Rand asks Frank Lloyd Wright for an interview to discuss a novel she is writing. Years later, she gets a house, or at least this design of a “cottage.” (The writing studio on the top level sounds incredible.) The whole story is fascinating, and for those of you who have read The Fountainhead, you can guess who she modeled Roark on. If you’re really enamored of it, this sketch is up for sale.

This has got me thinking of my ideal home. I would like it to project off the top floor of a apartment building so that it arcs dramatically over the street below. Maybe I would have an apartment spread over two facing buildings with an enclosed glass walkway between, one apartment would be my private apartment and one my public where people could visit. Of course, I’ve also always thought the water towers could be turned into really neat urban bungalows.

But, in order that any of this may actually happen, I’m going to get back to story boarding the novel. Happy Friday!

Why We Create Art

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That question has been running through my head the past day or so. You can google “why we create art” and get responses in varying degrees of inanity and less than helpful lists. Fundamentally though, creating art is not Darwinistic and it does not pay. Yet it feels much more vital than a hobby, which is what the hierarchy of life would reduce it to.

People create for many reasons, and often when discussing it they say they enjoy the process or they want to express themselves. But I think expression implies two parties. We create for other people to read or see or hear. Even while I say I write for myself because I enjoy it, there’s more. I write with the purpose of communicating. Even in personal journal entries, I explain situations as if I didn’t know what happened in my own life. Maybe that’s just me. To some degree, if I can finish my novel satisfactorily and no one ever reads it I will be proud of my efforts. Yet I want people to read it and I wrote with the implicit goal that if a person read it, he/she would understand the story I am telling.

So yes, we create for ourselves. Yet somehow the expression isn’t complete if there is no one on the other side to see it or hear it or read it and recognize it’s existence. It becomes “like dead letters sent to him who live, alas, away.” If a tree falls in a forest with no one there to hear it, it doesn’t matter if it makes a sound.