To myself: “Why the fuck can’t I get anything going? Why isn’t anything coming out that is worth reading? I wouldn’t read this crap that I’ve just written. Well, I’ve only written 120 words in an hour, there isn’t much there, anyway.”

I’ve had this discussion and similar ones like this for the past two months of trying to rewrite my novel. It hasn’t been for a lack of trying. I think I’ve written about 1000 words of shit. As you can probably tell the novel rewriting is going as great as I planned. I can plan forever and thought that everything was going to go great, but it hasn’t. I could ask people what they have done in the process of the rewrite, but I know that the best way is for me to just figure this out on my own.

The Two Creatives Are Finally Helping Each Other

As I looked on my calendar, I dreaded the thought of the writing on the novel. I’ve been in denial for the past couple of months because I’ve been doing the same thing over and over again that I didn’t know where to go. I thought of just scrapping the novel and starting a new one. I got busy with self-projects and didn’t concern myself with ever actually finishing up what I started in the beginning of early last year. So the natural thing for me to do was to spend time with family and stick to my photography.

While I was spending more and more time with my photography, I noticed me getting away from wanting tons of gear. I have been so involved in reading anything photography and practicing what I’ve been learning. I always thought that the writing would enable and increase the value of the photography. What I’d learn last year about writing gave me a sense of knowing a great deal about the arts that I’d thought would supply the life and motivation of the photography.

But things have changed. The light bulb went off a couple of days as I was sitting in front of my computer at around 4 ‘o clock in the morning wondering what I was going to do about this situation. I noticed that the first chapter was the one holding me back. Not so much of it being first, but what I was focusing on. The story that I initially wanted to tell was from a bird’s eye view of the story. I knew that this approach wasn’t in my best interest, crap, after two months of nothing getting anything down of substance I came to this conclusion. But, I think that I would be spinning my wheels even more if I wasn’t doing photography.

There are so many ways to take a photograph. We can get a wide-angle view of the chimney and the sky or we can get a piece of an interesting pattern of an imperfection in the street and anything in between for that matter. We can be selective in what we want in the frame and for most photographers that are at this stage they are telling the story the way they want it to be interpreted. I look at all of this as a deliberate use of knowing what is important and letting it speak for itself, in photography that is called the composition.

So, as I was juggling with being too rigid with the order and makeup of the first chapter, I thought to zoom in alittle. Get closer and tell a story that gets to the point rapidly. So that is what I did. I’m still in the process of writing chapter 1. I feel tons better with the new direction that I’m going in. The thing of the matter is that I’m in an exciting place in my life that I have two passions and they can compliment each other–and the amazing thing also is that they can help me look and live my life in a way I didn’t think what was ever possible.