74: Time Enough for Love
2/10/2014
Well, the twelfth scene is finished now, and I’m disappointed with it. It’s Diallo’s wedding challenge with Kinjul, 13 ½ pages that took me five days of writing all day long. Yet when I went back to reread it all in one sitting the pacing was way off – the drama was static, and even the dialogue was blah. It felt really good as I wrote it, and I was proud of several inventions and surprising twists. Yet they all fell flat on the reread. What I’ve got on paper is but a vague shadow of what was playing out in my mind and heart as I wrote it. I even brought myself to tears as I wrote the climax. Yet, on the reread… nothing.
I’m hoping that this is an illusion, created by the contrast of having just spent days living and breathing every nuance hour after hour, from the time I woke until I had to go to sleep again – then having it read in its entirety in about twenty minutes. The contrast between the length of creation and the length of reading may be offsetting my perspective.
The irony here, however, is that I wanted this scene to be only seven or eight pages because of the already excessive size of Dissolutions. And though it ended up being almost twice as long as I planned, it still feels like it went too fast.
My next, and last scene for Dissolutions, will be a brief one that I believe will turn out much better. I’d like to get it done today as a birthday present for myself. Finishing this chapter will make me officially halfway through the first book. That feels nice.
But it’s still frustrating. Why can’t I capture in words what’s in my head?
Present-Day Reflection
8/7/2026
Because there’s more in my head than just pictures and words. There’s a whole world of sensory detail, emotions, and context that can never be fully translated. Add to that, the fact that every reader brings to it their own unique world of psychological and emotional context to the scant sensory detail I provide – it’s a fool’s errand to try and control how it will translate for a reader.
Even when the reader is me, because my context changes in subtle ways from moment to moment. The greater the distance in time from the moment of creation, the greater the gap in context. Which is why I need time in order to properly evaluate what I’ve done. Time enough to create, time enough to judge what I’ve created, and time enough to fix it.
