Completion
By FashionablyHospitable
Creative people intrigue me. People who write books, who make movies, who create stories that transcend their own lives. People who can take a dream and make it live again in someone else’s head, bringing it to life with words and images.
Sometimes, creative people write sequels. When I was only a consumer of creative work, sequels carried trepidation and anticipation in equal parts. When I finished a particularly good book and discovered there would be a sequel, there was a sense of a continued adventure, a dream that would come again to live in my head. And yet there was always the possibility that the sequel, the continuation of the story, would not expand the glory of its predecessor but rather tarnish it and disappoint me. Better to feel the anguish of all my favorite characters from the first installment dying than to read the sequel and simply feel nothing but an empty sense of dissatisfaction. When writing a sequel, it is terribly important to get it right.
I am no longer only a consumer of creative work. Now, I have dabbled in it myself. I know what it feels like to fashion a dream out of words and pour it onto a page, so that it may travel into the heads of others, living on in their imagination. I know what it feels like to take a raw piece and polish it to perfection, to place every poignant phrase and word in their order, like an architect creating a structure out of bricks. It is effort, and I am always second-guessing myself. But in the end, I have a finished piece that chimes within me and fills me with a sense of completion.
And I often wonder what drives creative people to create sequels. I don’t mean sequels that are merely second parts of the first. I mean sequels that take a story which has wrapped itself up nicely, concluded quite neatly, and spin an entirely new story out of them. What drives people to do that? What makes them look down upon what had been a perfected piece, polished, refined, and finished to completion, and decide to push onward? Is it a sudden decision, once one has finished a story, that ignites the desire to make the dream live again? Or is it a gradual process, the growing feeling that more can be made of something, an inexorable attraction towards continuation that rises like the tide until it takes up piece and person both and flings them forth onto the tracks of a new story?
I have not yet ventured onto the course of writing a sequel. My pieces have not yet cried out to me for a continuation, for a way to live again in new form. For now, I am satisfied with their completion.
Creative people intrigue me. People who write books, who make movies, who create stories that transcend their own lives. People who can take a dream and make it live again in someone else’s head, bringing it to life with words and images.
Sometimes, creative people write sequels. When I was only a consumer of creative work, sequels carried trepidation and anticipation in equal parts. When I finished a particularly good book and discovered there would be a sequel, there was a sense of a continued adventure, a dream that would come again to live in my head. And yet there was always the possibility that the sequel, the continuation of the story, would not expand the glory of its predecessor but rather tarnish it and disappoint me. Better to feel the anguish of all my favorite characters from the first installment dying than to read the sequel and simply feel nothing but an empty sense of dissatisfaction. When writing a sequel, it is terribly important to get it right.
I am no longer only a consumer of creative work. Now, I have dabbled in it myself. I know what it feels like to fashion a dream out of words and pour it onto a page, so that it may travel into the heads of others, living on in their imagination. I know what it feels like to take a raw piece and polish it to perfection, to place every poignant phrase and word in their order, like an architect creating a structure out of bricks. It is effort, and I am always second-guessing myself. But in the end, I have a finished piece that chimes within me and fills me with a sense of completion.
And I often wonder what drives creative people to create sequels. I don’t mean sequels that are merely second parts of the first. I mean sequels that take a story which has wrapped itself up nicely, concluded quite neatly, and spin an entirely new story out of them. What drives people to do that? What makes them look down upon what had been a perfected piece, polished, refined, and finished to completion, and decide to push onward? Is it a sudden decision, once one has finished a story, that ignites the desire to make the dream live again? Or is it a gradual process, the growing feeling that more can be made of something, an inexorable attraction towards continuation that rises like the tide until it takes up piece and person both and flings them forth onto the tracks of a new story?
I have not yet ventured onto the course of writing a sequel. My pieces have not yet cried out to me for a continuation, for a way to live again in new form. For now, I am satisfied with their completion.