Old work, new work
While staring through the window and dreaming about my new novel (and doing some planning) I find images from my first novel stealing into my mind. I ask myself if that's because I'm afraid of stepping into the new or afraid of letting go of the old? I also find weaknesses in the first.
Just now, in this wonderful book by David Bayles & Ted Orland:
I found this:
How to make me feel better in just a few words.New work is supposed to replace old work. If it does so by making the old work inadequate, insufficient and incomplete - well, that's life. (Frank Lloyd Wright advised young architects to plant ivy all around their early buildings, suggesting that in time it would grow to cover their 'youthful indiscretions'.) Old work tells you what you were paying attention to then; new work comments on the old by pointing out what you were not previously paying attention to.
This is Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House. You can find out more here.
2 comments:
Definitely a hard one to negotiate. I just hope I get to keep trying again and again for the rest of my life to get it right with yet another book.
I love the Frank Lloyd Wright quote.
Isn't it what all we writers hope for ... enough time and talent and tenacity to keep going?
And I love the ivy FLW words too ... perhaps eventually going out of print is our ivy equivalent. Although definitely not too soon!
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