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Improvement is Ongoing
This is a choice you get to make.
As a very small child, my parents took me to see Star Wars. I fell in love, and soon all sci-fi piqued my interest. Over time, fantasy got added to that. Then I started to create my own.
At age 9, I wrote and illustrated my first 50-page sci-fi book. When I was 13, I typed out my first 36-page sci-fi story. Writing continued in fits and starts over the years, taking new forms, more genres, and I developed a deeper appreciation for storytelling in various forms.
I had an amazing choir director in High School who taught me to sight-read, which exponentially increased my appreciation of music and the stories it tells. Living with a film major in college exposed me to perspectives about film that made movies and TV more interesting on a deeper level.
Once I started writing full-time, I chose to change my approach. Rather than writing as a pantser, which I did for more than 20 years, I shifted into writing as a planner. The fear that this would reduce my creativity proved unfounded, and I feel that there’s been substantial improvement in my storytelling overall.
Yet there are always new things to learn, because improvement is ongoing. This is a comfort for me. For some, however, this is distressing.
Why does this distress people?
Improvement is ongoing because change is the one and only constant in the universe. It doesn’t matter if you desire change or not. It is. You can’t stop it because it’s constant and a deep part of everything in life.
You change. Period. You are not who you were in the past. Down the line, in the future, you’ll change from who you are now. It’s inevitable. Sometimes it’s glacially slow, while other times it’s insanely fast. But you can’t make change stop. It’s a constant, and it opens the way for new, different, and improvement.
Yes, sometimes change sucks. Certain types of forced change — like anything done to return to a previous past (that may never have existed) — are especially ugly. And for the most part, you and I have ZERO control over them. None. Nada. Goose egg.
What can you control? Yourself. Specifically, your inner mindset/headspace/psyche self. This is how active conscious awareness — mindfulness — puts you behind the wheel. From that, you can examine your thoughts, feelings, intentions, approach, and actions to see if they serve you. Or not. If not, now you’re empowered to work on changing them.
One example of this is learning from past experiences and working on improvement now and going forward.
Improvement is ongoing
One key, important factor in all of this is that there is no end. Aside from THE end, as in death, you’re always open to improvement. That’s a matter of choice and mindset.
I look back on old works I wrote decades ago, and sometimes find elements cringe-worthy. Not because it’s necessarily bad. But because of how my craft has improved over time.
I’ve learned new approaches to introducing characters. With writing as a planner rather than a pantser, my plots have gotten richer and more developed with less extraneous babbling. I’ve improved how I show rather than tell elements of the story.
There is a downside to this. The fantasy series I started in the late 1990s is unfinished. Book 3 awaits editing, but I stopped working on the series in the middle of book 4, somewhere around 2012. I haven’t touched it since. How I wrote in 2012, my approach, my style, is majorly different from how I write now.
Hence, while I’ve experienced what I believe is a great improvement of my craft, I can’t go back to the middle of a story I abandoned without reworking it entirely. And I’m not sure I can keep it cohesive enough to finish it.
Perhaps my ongoing improvement will lead to figuring out how to go back to that series and complete it. I don’t know what the future looks like.
And that’s the last point I need to make here.
Ongoing improvement is a choice
My craft improves because I make a concerted effort to improve it. I study other authors and how they tell their stories by reading daily. Also, I read genres outside of what I write. And of course, I write both fiction and nonfiction, which helps each grow and evolve.
When you don’t choose to put in the effort to get better, ongoing improvement can’t happen. It’s not some magical thing that appears out of the void. Ongoing improvement is the result of the desire to change and then putting in time, effort, and work. It’s a choice you make.
You can’t improve on the past. It has come and gone and can’t be altered. Neither can you improve the future directly because it’s not here yet. What you can do, however, is work in the here and now, mindfully, to improve. That is how you can impact and improve the future.
Your future, specifically. All influence on the collective consciousness of the world starts with your personal, unique, individual consciousness. That’s wholly yours to control, and that control is found in the here and now. Via mindfulness, you can get to know what you’re thinking, what and how you’re feeling, your intentions, the positivity or negativity of your approach, and your actions. Don’t like what you find? These are all yours to change.
Ongoing improvement is a choice. I find that using it opens me to getting better, feeling more confident, and being who, what, where, how, and why I desire to be. That makes me art and how I approach creating it better, too.
Thanks for reading. As I share my creative journey with you every week, please consider this: How are you inspired and empowered to be your own authentic creator, whatever form that takes?
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