For a over seven years now I’ve been trying to participate in NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month “competition”. For the first six of those years, I failed miserably. There are all sorts of reasons, or depending on your perspective, excuses as to why I failed but the failure is in and of itself the bottom line.

Thankfully, in 2011 that all turned around and I was able to bang out a little over 50,000 words in November. Yes, I wrote a novel. Which is really cool and all, but there was one little problem. It’s not very good; it reads like a guy who writes essays and technical papers who decided to write fiction and maybe read one too many book on how to accomplish that.

However, I’m planning on embracing this sucktastic accomplishment and using it to move on to bigger and better things. There’s a quote out there to the effect of “you learn more from mistakes than from success” or something like that - depending on what exactly you search for you find about eight different variants ascribed to about five different authors. Who said it isn’t that important to me, what is important is the fact that it’s spot-on. I learned more about creative writing in thirty days than I have in about thirty years, primarily because if there was a mistake to be made I made it. Over the next few months I hope to take the raw clay that I threw out on the wheel and round it into something I wouldn’t be ashamed of showing my family, friends, or pets.

As hard as it is to write fiction, I find poetry to be an order of magnitude more difficult. With poetry you need to do the same things you do in a work of fiction, but you need to do it with more economy of word, more emotion, and more impact. To that end, I offer another Borges piece today that talks about the vision of a poet.

The Art of Poetry

To gaze at a river made of time and water
and remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadnesssuch is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there’s a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.

Jorge Luis Borges