Charge of the Write Brigade.
The other night I was walking my dogs. I’ve got three. They’re big and strong and one of them seems to suffer from ADHD mixed with Speed. Nevertheless they’re good dogs and mind me pretty well. Being rowdy, I like to walk them at night.
Sometimes I don’t get started until rather late but I like it that way because it’s just us and the night. No pestering pedestrians to gawk at the stranger and his pooches as they pass people’s lawns (don’t worry, I do clean up after them).
During these walks I have an opportunity to clear my head and think on things. One such night I stopped by my wife’s late grandmother’s house and pondered life’s brief stint. Right after as I continued down the path I noticed the beautiful moon and considered when the next group of people would stroll its surface. That’s when something occurred to me.
Think for a moment of some writers of old. Kipling, Twain, Longfellow, Dickens and Stevenson.
Their work still exists. They’re dead but their work is still with us. Every book you pick up, regardless of your feeling for the author, those words were first created by people from long ago. Faces that smiled and cried in the Victorian era. Feet that walked the market places of ancient Greece. Hands that toiled Colonial soil. Minds that were inspired to share stories, ideas, concepts from lives we can no longer fathom, minds long dust, whose children are long dust. Their words are still with us.
Have you looked up at the moon and thought that one day, long after the politics of today have changed a hundred fold, we might step on that ivory surface again? Sure, not us, but people. People with our words tucked in their computer chips. Fun reading while they wait for their lunar test results. Just like those authors of old, will our words last long after everything we know has changed?
Will what you write now, what you edit for the thirty-seventh time, will it be loved by children centuries from now? Will souls thrill, cry or laugh at those very words you wrote today?
Why not? Shelly, Hawthorne, Shakespeare, and the rest are still with us. Sure, they’re all worm food, but their minds still entertain and show us new ways of thinking.
Why wouldn’t yours do the same?
So next time you struggle with that painful critique or review, think on the generations of people who could gain from the finished draft. Those men and women of old had nothing more than you. They had a drive, an idea and the gumption to learn and do what they must to get their words out into the world.
Why can’t we do the same?
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Jack Roberts lives in a small town in the western US. He’s married with four children and six pets. As the scribe of Annabelle and Roland, he chronicles the vampires many adventures through the last three hundred years. Along with their YA fantasy stories, he also has plans for more fantasy and some Sci Fi.Check out Annabelle and Roland, The Site.
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