Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance but to do what lies clearly at hand.
—Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle, philosopher, satirist, essayist. 1795 – 1881
While not aimed at writers exactly, this quote is germane to the writing process. The end of a story, novel, essay, or poem may seem something dim and in the distance, and while we have to be mindful of it, we need to focus clearly on next words before us and how they fit and carry forward our thoughts, ideas, and emotions, how they advance the story at hand as it lies clearly before us on the page.
For example, writing three pages a day, you can have the entire draft of a 547 page novel written in six months. If you take off weekends off, that is still approximately 328 pages, double-spaced. Not a long novel, but certainly a respectable amount.
Granted, that doesn’t take in all the preparation work you have to do beforehand or along the way. Or the rewriting afterwards. But it is a way of thinking of a long piece of writing as manageable steps and helping you to see more clearly what lies at hand, or at the edge of your fingertips and imagination.
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