Beginnings

One of my favorite .sig files is a quote from Chaim Potok, "All beginnings are hard."

Which makes it very tempting to make that a one-sentence post, but I probably shouldn't cop out like that, so I won't. I'm starting this blog in part because I'm tired of not being able to comment on places that only accept blogger IDs, and more importantly because I want an online presence of some form should any of those novels on my hard drive ever pique the interest of an agent.

A third reason is reflected in the title. I have a bad habit of forgetting things I don't see in writing. Even then, lessons I've learned are sometimes re-learned before they begin to stick. I see my friends' eyes start to roll when I rhapsodize about some new bit of writing I've learned or something about life I've taken to heart and I realize they've heard me go on and on about this before -- sometimes three or four times over the course of several years. Some days I feel like I've forgotten more than I've learned.

Epiphanies recur.

The point of this blog, for me, is to record what I've learned about the craft of writing, to remember and to illustrate the lessons so they stick with me longer. The process of taking notes always did help me remember. I was a straight-A student, pretty much, so feeling like a slow learner in the craft of writing  would be harder to admit if I hadn't started feeling like I needed a remedial course in life sometime in my 20s.

But writing and reading are all about learning things over and over, at least for me, in deeper and more meaningful ways. How many times have you read a novel that won't quite let go of you until you realize there was a subtext, a deeper meaning, you'd overlooked? Maybe each time I relearn something I learn something a bit more profound about it.

I'd take that.