LOOKING BACK AND AHEAD IN YOUR WRITING By Dan Griffith

    Time is wonderful. It's the silent and invisible force that both impedes and propels lives and writing.  The remembrances of people who have now changed or gone, experiences shared, places visited or inhabited, and even sounds and smells - all these draw us back to live in the past.  Whether painful or pleasurable, real or imagined, those memories are substance for our present life.

    I mention "imagined" because we remember a lot of what we experience through literature.  I include story telling, reading, and drama all as literature.  Our view of life and our world is indeed founded largely on literature.  Therefore, it's significant what we import into our thoughts through literature and just as much - or perhaps more - by what we put out through our talk, writing, and actions.  We probably dwell more in what we write than in what we read; we contemplate both the form and content more seriously.  In that sense, what we write becomes a second life for us.

    This second life as a writer has its own cost of living.  Do you dream of being a writer.  Florida Writers Association provides a solid basis for finding and acquiring the necessary requirements for this writer life.  It's just as in our first life where originally we mostly depend on others and gradually grow into an interdependence.  FWA provides a family of "writers helping writers": members living together through groups and the Florida Writer magazine and the website and many other sharing occasions.  We look back through the experience of other writers and look forward to our own achievements.

    Of course, each writer is unique; so each writer must work out their own writing life.  Growing takes time.  Too many writers presume on more skill and discipline capability than they yet have and more publishing industry knowledge than they show.  Begin small and rise slowly.  If you would use the force of time advantageously, you must be both disciplined to work and humble to learn.

    FWA has learned this from observing writers and from its own experience.  Dreams and plans necessarily take time.  Goals are how time draws us into the future. "Not what I wanna' be and not what I'm gonna' be, but I'm glad I'm not what I was" should be our song as writers and as people.  It's our song for FWA.  Use time patiently and expectantly.  Look back for your substance; look ahead for your potential.

The following poem is one quoted anonymously by Winston Churchill in the U.K. House of Commons, probably about early 1942.

"For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,

seem here no painful inch to gain,

far back through creeks and inlets making,

come silent flooding in the main.

And not by eastern windows only,

 when daylight comes, comes in the light.

In front, the sun climbs slow . . . how slowly.

But westward look!  The land is bright!"

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The foregoing was excerpted from the poem, Say not the Struggle Naught availeth,

by Arthur Hugh Clough – (1819-1861)

    Dan Griffith is the current president of The Florida Writers Association.