IWSG January 2022 The Longest Distance between Two Places

  

Welcome readers, writers, authors, and bloggers!

We’re glad you’re here! It's the First Wednesday of the month; when we celebrate IWSG Day in the form of a blog hop featuring all of the members of the Insecure Writer's Support Group. Founded by author Alex Cavanaugh (Thank you, Captain!) and fostered by like-minded associates, IWSG is a place to share the fabulous views and exciting news that occurs along our fascinating writing journeys. Check out the January newsletter here.  Perusing the many tips and resources offered here is definitely worthwhile and highly rewarding, so pull up a comfy chair, or better yet -  join us!

Our awesome co-hosts for this month's posting of the IWSG are: Erika Beebe, Olga Godim, Sandra Cox, Sarah Foster, and Chemist Ken!

This month’s optional question is:

What is the one thing about your writing career that you regret the most? Were you able to overcome it?

My answer to the question, were I able to pin it down to just one thing, would be the laughably unoriginal lament of never enough time. Albert Einstein believed that the only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once. But, would that be such a bad thing?  With all the events that come with living out of the way, there’d be all the time in the world left to write about everything that had happened all at once. Or would there be any time left at all? I think it best not to cast opportunity into the winds of regret and simply write any time, all the time.

Would I change events in my life that preempted writing? Not a chance. After all, a single moment recorded on a paper napkin could conceivably inspire the novel that rocks the next generation.

I believe that writers in complete control of their schedules are the luckiest among us struggling scribes. Still, even they are not immune to time thieves, timelines, or the angst of “If only I knew then.” However, they have realized, as Tennessee Williams suggests, that “Time is the longest distance between two places,” and instead of attempting to bridge that distance, they stroll comfortably along, with pen in hand, recording the journey.

Wishing all of us the most productive year ever. Happy 2022!

 

 

 “If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?”  ~Stephen Hawkings

 

Revealing Regrets And Notable Nuggets

I lost a hubcap off of my T-bird one afternoon during rush-hour, right in the middle of the intersection. I heard it clang on the pavement, from the side mirror I watched it roll away. Should I have stopped right there in the intersection; halting traffic as I chased it? Did it really matter? Well, shoot yeah, it mattered. For the two weeks it took to find a new hubcap it felt as if I were walking around with a run in my stocking! 

My thoughts (naturally) turned to writing and how rejections aren’t the only thing that can plague a writer. Regrets ought to be at least a close second. You know, that one nagging paragraph that, now that you see it in print, should really have been worded differently (Gads!), or the blog that garnered one measly ‘like’.  What’s a writer to do? Keep writing, of course! Regrets are naught but revelations of yesterday’s unknown. Today, you know better.

On the off-chance that I’m not the only writer to ever encounter the dreaded regrets I did a little research and discovered some truly interesting stuff. Anyone remember “Brokeback Mountain”?

http://writerinterviews.blogspot.com/2014/12/annie-proulx.html

Mark Twain
Tom Sawyer
“I perhaps made a mistake in not writing it in the first person,” Twain confided after the book’s completion in a letter to Atlantic Monthly editor William Dean Howells. Another anxiety (misplaced, it turns out) ran deeper than the narrative mode: “It is not a boy’s book, at all. It will only be read by adults.”

William Powell
The Anarchist Cookbook
As an adult convert to Christianity, Powell regrets his youthful work. “The book … was a misguided product of my adolescent anger at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight in a war that I did not believe in,” he wrote in 2000.

Arthur Conan Doyle
“The Final Problem”
After killing off Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle declared defiantly, “If I had not killed him, he would certainly have killed me.” But he lived to regret it—or caved to the pressure—and brought him back to life ten years later.

Courtesy:         http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/author-regrets-2014-2/

There now, I feel better all over more than anyplace else, don’t you? Specifics aside, have you experienced regrets?  As shown above, true writers keep writing. Why do you suppose that is?