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deborahjrossOver on Janni Lee Simner's blog, Sherwood Smith talks about "keeping the flame burning" as we struggle through what's called midcareer:
"I think killers of inspiration are unexamined literary habits and complacency, but also, there is an insidious one: the conviction that one must speak an important Message. In my years of reading all the works of authors who had long careers, one pattern I’ve noticed is that for many, the earliest, written-purely-for-fun works are those that last, and forgotten are the later ones, wherein the writer—perhaps with sharpened skills, certainly with hard-won wisdom—gave in to the temptation to summarize all that hard-won wisdom in One Great Novel."
Gosh, been there, done that. Or rather, wrote for fun and then tried to pontificate on my own work as if it had cosmic importance. I do write about things that matter to me because I enjoy reading stories that have layers of depth, but I want -- and do my best to offer -- a whopping good tale first.
Read the whole thing here: Sherwood Smith on Writing for the Long Haul - Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches
"I think killers of inspiration are unexamined literary habits and complacency, but also, there is an insidious one: the conviction that one must speak an important Message. In my years of reading all the works of authors who had long careers, one pattern I’ve noticed is that for many, the earliest, written-purely-for-fun works are those that last, and forgotten are the later ones, wherein the writer—perhaps with sharpened skills, certainly with hard-won wisdom—gave in to the temptation to summarize all that hard-won wisdom in One Great Novel."
Gosh, been there, done that. Or rather, wrote for fun and then tried to pontificate on my own work as if it had cosmic importance. I do write about things that matter to me because I enjoy reading stories that have layers of depth, but I want -- and do my best to offer -- a whopping good tale first.
Read the whole thing here: Sherwood Smith on Writing for the Long Haul - Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches
