How to Take your Own Advice

About 20 years ago, I was taking to an old friend about her writing aspirations and goal of being a novel writer. She’d get together with her writing friend and go over short storey ideas on how to progress with their careers. She could write better and beyond anybody I had ever met.

Our conversation started with her lamenting on how she was going to be a novelist one day and everything was going to fall into place. Although I had the attention span of a gnat and couldn’t give this person’s writing the attention it deserved (I’m a visual artist, not a writer), I could see clearly the leap she had to take.

“Why don’t you just write a novel” I suggested.

Her initial reply as I remember it was one of shock and… “It isn’t that easy”

As the conversation went on I told her some ideas like that her first novels might be short, suck and be painful to write… but after she wrote them, she would be a novelist (being published is another concept). With a furry I’d never seen in her, she wrote a seventy pager, then another longer and another with the third with a page count well over a hundred and thirty. She told me her writing on the third book was far better and stronger. That’s about the time we parted ways and I hadn’t heard from her in years.

We reconnected online a few years ago and I saw she had published a few novels and congratulated her. She had surpassed anything most artists achieve in their aspirations.

I told this story many times since then as inspiration for friends, students and especially myself. I often wondered if she remembered the conversation we’d had twenty years ago?

As it turned out a few months ago she dropped me a note and thanked me for that little conversation we had. I’m sure she would have realized this on her own.

Why is this an “important anything”? Stroking my own ego? No.

I think about this idea as I do my own art. I tell myself… “Finish this first big piece, then another and another.