Imagine you’re set down on a infinite sheet of paper and are told to walk until you find your way off the paper.
You see no landmarks or anything. All around you is nothing but white horizon. You wander around for a good long while, until you finally see a tree. You run over to it, relieved.
You climb that tree and see a few more trees scattered in different directions. No way of telling which one will lead you where you want to go.
So you pick a tree arbitrarily, but when you arrive there, you find it marks the beginning of a long dark crevasse. Strange scary sounds are coming from the shadows. There’s no end in sight.
You decide to go back to the first tree and choose a different path. That canyon is certainly not where you want to go.
On the new path, you find you hurry along, making good time, but the landmarks start getting farther apart again until you no longer can see them.
Time to backtrack and try a different direction.
At each landmark, there’s a choice between several more.
And through it all, you can’t help but wonder about that dark crevasse. What that journey would have been like. How long would it have taken? Would it have been, in the end, a better route?
Do we go back to it?
Welcome to the life of the writer. Sometimes we have to backtrack many, many times. We waffle. We wonder. We try millions of directions before we find our way off the page. And sometimes it takes a very long time.
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Wendy L. Koenig 