With November Looming, I’m conflicted about the value of lighting myself on fire writing another book right now.

The thing is, I see so many flaws in my writing, so many qualities that need to be improved, I’m not sure that writing another novel is the way to go. I’m half convinced that spending some time honing those skills first would be much more useful than the time I’ll spend editing the novel later.

Worse, I’m worried that I’ll set all my current works aside as hopelessly flawed. Some of them are already feeling that way.

And maybe worse yet, I’m not sure on the best approach to hone some of the qualities I need. See, the ironical part here, is that workshops and seminars and cons all want you to bring current work to show. I already know what’s wrong with all my current works.

How many of you have encountered similar stages in your writing? How did you work through them?

Has there been better advice given to anyone trying to accomplish anything?

Over at flexbandit, donkeybandit was discussing how his blog helped advance his career, which is an interesting enough topic in itself.

But he linked over to an article titled Quantity Always Trumps Quality. While I’d argue that always is a dangerous word and balance is probably in order, there was a great excerpt about making it happen.

Check out this excerpt from the book…

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality…

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

I love XKCD. This is only one of many reasons I think it’s an ingenious comic.

The elders, or Fra’as, guarded the farmlings (children) with their krytoses, which are like swords but awesomer.

Jonathan Harris, while a bit of a slow speaker, has some great insight into capturing stories and also in telling them in innovative ways. Check out some of these alternatives to the traditional page.

I wondered at the wit and cleverness some authors have in voice and dialog today. I’ve said before that I can articulate scintillating colloquy while talking or IM’ing with friends, but never in my writing voice.

And then I realized that’s not entirely true. Occasionally I’m surprised by shorts or some of my alternate writings. It’s mostly just RHUNE that lacks punch and wit. And then it struck me. 

I’m limited by my grasp of their culture and language; nothing I would say in real life fits nicely into RHUNE’s world, or I struggle to interpret wit into the language of their people.

Doesn’t it seem odd that we can become trapped by our own imagination? And yet, all over the world people end their own lives because they can see “no way out”; they become limited by their perceptions and fail to see the broader spectrum; they loose sight of the infinite possibilities in this world and of their own ability to walk away from a bad situation.

It’s actually a natural process of living. We create mental maps of the world; we look at a collection of atoms and call it a person; we look at a collection of cars and call it traffic; it’s as natural and necessary to cognition as breathing.

Yet, when these meta models of reality start to limit our creative thoughts or our choices in life, this is where they fail us. This is where we need to break out of our own skin and see the world from a new lens.

So I will be doing a little remapping with RHUNE—revisiting the culture and people and giving them some new freedom to express and exude their own thoughts and creative expressions outside the bounds of Wulf’s mind set of how people of RHUNE must behave.

Wish me luck.