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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chromnos" data-source="post: 305260" data-attributes="member: 5696">All in good fun Hak! No need to be self depricating about your message-board writing. It is certainly engaging enough to keep us all chatting. It WAS a good article. A well finished and composed piece. That says more about the writer's than anything posted in a thread.Whether or not the premise was faulty is moot. You've got, IMHO, a great topic for discussion. I mean there are alot of arrogant people out there who don't seem to really know what the hell they're doing. But I still think that, arrogance aside, the keys to success or failure in any endeavour is more related to persistence than anything else. Look at Ray Bradbury. I mean he lived in a library basement for quite some time before being successful. Tolkien took 9 years to publish The Hobbit. Buy one of those books that contains Tolkien's original notes. What you will find amazing is not his innate genius. Rather, it is his persistence. His willingness to work and re-work a sentence, an introduction, until it just sang.I mean, the beginning of Fellowship (in J. R. R.'s notes) started out something like- "It was Bilbo's 70th birthday and he had gathered all his relatives together..." Pretty flat writing compared to what it became. We can only imagine the work involved in transforming. Then you've got someone like Lovecraft whose method was to write something as bare-bones as possible and then tweak the hell out of it.I guess what I'm saying is that success and greatness lies not in the beginning- the inspiration. Rather, it is the willingness to go the distance, to do whatever it takes- to finish (follow-through). Swallowing pride is a huge part of this. You can't view your text as sacred. Words are clothes for your idea. Keep experimenting until (with the right set of words) it looks real sharp and the substance of your idea will shine through.So taking into account the article, it doesn't matter if it comes out as slush first off. If it sings in the end, that's all that matters. If Shakesphere started his orginal notes for Romeo and Juliet as "There were these two families in Verona that didn't like each other..." doesn't matter if what we get in the end is something like "Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona where we lay our scene, from ancient grudge break forth to new mutiny...."Same is true with these chat-rooms. All you need to do with a first draft is get the idea across. Where you fish or cut bait is how well you polish up.-C</blockquote>

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