The Long, Slow Sine Wave of my Work….

Something just dawned on me as I sat down, this morning, to write. For several years I’ve had a hard time writing…the blockade I talked about in earlier posts…and it just hit me what it was all about. Up until some three years ago, I wrote like a dervish. I got up and was able to hit the keyboard within minutes and pound out a first 100K draft in a month. That was my method.

I’ve changed.

Or at least, my current work’s very structure has changed.

All my previous efforts had a “higher pitch” to them, my short stories, my novel-length work. But, this newer effort…it has a longer, more drawn out sense to it. Like the sine wave of its very structure is far more elongated. “Lengthy” doesn’t do it justice, and it’s not so much that I’m describing the pace of the manuscript. It’s like the background…what’s behind the story, the physical effort involved…is what’s at the heart of the matter. Think of the carrier wave that carries content, like radio waves carrying music. The music is what it is, but the carrier wave–that which carries the music to your ears–it’s frequency, it’s pitch and amplitude–have all changed. The content is still carried forward, but it is now done…differently. Perhaps it takes a little longer to “get there,” but get there it will. Perhaps its delivery will be somehow different…but it will be delivered.

This just hit me this morning, and it was like an epiphany.

Cool.