I have come to understand that I like the process of thinking about interesting science fiction technologies and their impacts on the worlds and cultures much more than I like the actual writing.  The planning part of the story allows you to think at a much higher level – you can think about society and galaxies as a whole, rather than individual characters, their motivations and aspirations.  So far, I haven’t been very proficient at creating a compelling connection between the impacts of the government, technology geography, etc. of a world with the individuals who would interact with them.

I have tried and tried to write at this high level, but I’m not sure if can be done by anyone who is not a science ficition master.   Writing at this high level, I find myself trying to emulate Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, and obviously failing miserably.  I am going to continue to capture any interesting thoughts or ideas that I have hoping that in the future I may be able to pull it all together but in the short time I am going to be pursuing a new medium to serve as my creative outlet

I have been tinkering around with a couple of different means to achieve this goal, and I haven’t found something that I am particularly proficient in yet. At some level, I think that I have spread myself too thin – pursuing writing, guitar and even pencil drawing from square one all at the same time, moving from one to another as I realize that it’s not living up to the idealized vision I had in my mind.

For example, I got this great idea that I wanted to learn guitar. I purchased the equipment, bought the books and tinkered around with the guitar for about 3-5 days total, and then gave up. I still haven’t figured out why I haven’t tried harder – perhaps it is is because I had unrealistic, almost romantic thoughts that I would be a rock star within a matter of days and when that didn’t happen I became extremely frustrated.

It’s hard to stay motivated in the learning of an art such as music when starting out is so much about failure. You can’t put your fingers in the right place, can’t read the music and simply can’t make the instrument sound the way it should. To be completely honest, I thought that there was something wrong with my guitar until a friend came who had been playing for years. He picked it up, and within seconds it sounded amazing. If anything, this only made me more intimidated to really put the work in because it turns out that I was the problem.

As I get the ball rolling on learning learning the ‘art’ of creative writing, I am really reminded of these sorts of failtures. I must realize that I am not going to put a story down off the top of my head and win a Hugo Award. I have to try, and I have to fail before I can succeed.

I think that Geoffrey Ballard summed this up the best- “Failure is the mechanism of learning”.

In order to help me get on the right track, I have signed up for a creative writing course at a local college. I haven’t written any fiction seriously since high school (7 years ago) and even then it always seemed like a chore to me. I hope that this will help me with the structure to create an interesting story. Also, it has been a good 3 years since I have learned in any sort of ’school’ setting and I am hoping that learning in a more structured environment will help me succeed and help prevent this writing bug as another failed creative effort.

I’m going to try my best to share some of my journey on here – win, lose or draw!