On Bravery Part 4

It is not easy to determine when it's time to quit. It's not easy to figure out when it's time to go home. Of all the forms of bravery it takes to be a writer, bravery with the self, with others, and with your produce, the last use of bravery gets employed with it's time to quit.

There are those afternoons when one sentence, or even one word can take up all our time. It's that vague awareness that the light is shifting, that time goes on and on and that we're just working on one sentence. There is a point, though, when the sentence just has to be considered done. There is a point when the first draft of our story is completed. It's the final keystroke at this point which we much bravely leave and walk away.

But when do we know enough is enough? Perhaps it never is. Walt Whitman never finished Leaves of Grass but rather he just kept working on it, revising it. Although I will never call Walt Whitman one of my favorite poets, I do not think he ever lacked bravery in everything that he did. Perhaps there should have been a point in his Leaves of Grass endeavors when he should have stopped, considered the piece complete and bravely let it go.

I suppose a writer can keep polishing and polishing a given piece. There is nothing wrong with that, nothing at all. Nothing accept for never really completing it. A point has to come when it's time to move on. It's time to work on something new. Hopefully that moment is met with bravery and grace.

What about at the end of the season entirely? What happens when it's just time to quit writing altogether? When does that point come in a writer's existence when he realizes that all of his goals have been met, all of his wealth has been poured onto as many pages as it's liked going to be poured? What happens then?

It's one thing to start. We all know when we started writing. It's like that lover, right? We all remember the first kiss, the first time we uttered those words, “I love you” we all remember the first time we made love. But how many of us remember the last time we said “I love you” to a lover. How many of us remember the last kiss, the last time we made love? It's not in our nature to remember the end nearly as much as we remember the beginning.

So how about the end of the writer's season? Since I am not at that point in my writer's life, not yet anyway, I can only guess at what it's likely to feel.

I think you must employ a great deal a bravery when it's no longer time to be a writer. At this point, a writer must feel good about his body of work, he must feel good about his process from the first moment to the very last. He must be brave enough to walk away. How great will it be to bravely walk away knowing that all that needed doing done got did?