The Ever-Expanding World of Swords

7. No such thing as writer’s block

Prompt: Go back to your creative hero. In their catalog of work, where is the work that isn’t their best? Post some examples.

[Could they have made the classics if they had skipped the clunkers?]

It’s a package, you can’t have hits without misses.

Looking back at https://pro2.akimbo.com/t/reki-kawahara-and-a-world-of-swords/27597/5, I labeled Reki as my personal creative hero for starting his story as a free web novel online and having it finally transition to the big screen as a fully-fleged anime. Ironically enough, every story arc I have read by Reki always has some semblance of imperfections, whether the character motivations don’t make sense, the plot pacing seems erratic, or focusing on aspects of the story that seem to have no relevance in a future story arcs. The beautiful thing about this works is his brilliance in purposefully leaving the overall story open to intrepretation; when Reki has time, he actually fills in the gaps in his world with more material, and what once seemed to have no place becomes paramount to the world of swords’ overall meaning. He does not box himself into what he has already written, and lets himself improve on his less-than-satisfactory narrative elements that were originally deployed. It’s honestly jarring to compare the aspects of what he was terrible at in earlier stories and seeing how much farther and better he has gotten in current stories.

Next, consider what it means to be in training. What would a grueling training schedule for your craft be like? What’s the effort-filled path from where you are now to where you want to be?

In my opinion, the most grueling part of training isn’t necessarily how much time you spend honing your craft, but how often you perform it and HOW you perform it. If you just write for 8 hours a day, but only sometimes, and you never ask for feedback or look for ways to improve what you have created, you will never really hone your voice. A successful training schedule would be writing just a little bit each day, dedicating time to giving and receiving feedback, and keeping track of what writing skills I have the desire to improve, whenever it be setting the stage, creating memorable characters, or revising older works (despite how painful it might be to revisit) and making them even just a tiny bit better.

What do you think, @mahmoudalkawadri @lainastanford @anne_marie_cruz @barbaraluel?