The Best Intentions

By Keith Fisher

Have you ever noticed that each of us spends our life telling others and ourselves we are going to do better next time? Doesn’t matter what it is, we are constantly vowing to complete a task, or do a good deed.

We promise we will visit our aged relatives, we promise to spend more time with our children. We swear that this will be the year when we finish our novel.

In 1993 my wife and I invested in a used video camera. It was a bulky affair, gigantic by the technology standards of today, but I digress. About that time my grandmother discovered we had it and told me to visit her so she could talk to her posterity on tape and tell all the family stories and legends. I promised I would.

As the years passed, I visited my grandma often but I never seemed to remember to take the video camera and tape her interview. A few years later, we bought another, smaller video camera, but I never took it to Grandma’s.

Grandma never forgot her request and I continued to promise, but never seemed to remember to do it. In 1999 Grandma was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and her mind quickly faded. I remembered my promise but it was too late. I had failed in my duty. What could have been a wonderful blessing for my extended family was lost.

Shortly after the diagnosis, Grandma gave her grandchildren copies of hand written-stories and family group sheets she had been compiling for years. Almost as many years as she had been asking me to come and interview her.

When I received her gift, I browsed through the papers and found familiar information. Some of the info was new, however, and I filed it away for the future. My grandmother died in 2005 and I was asked to speak at her funeral. I went through those records looking for something I could use that would give her a voice at her own funeral, something that would express her love for all of us. I found some of those things in the stories she had written down.

After her funeral, I once again remembered her request. Tears flowed when I realized how much greater her gift would have been if everyone could see her speaking to them across time and from beyond.

Now I sit here trying to revise and edit five books in order to get them submitted to the publisher. I’m reminded of my procrastination and wonder why I allow so many things to distract me from my goal. Many of those distractions are vital in my life. Things like family, church, and the day job, but some of them are not.

I can’t imagine what will happen to my manuscripts if they are not published before I die. Perhaps there is a lesson we can learn from my grandma to not wait—to take matters in our own hands, to make sure our stories get published.

Good luck in your writing, see you next week.

Fighting the Urge

By Keith Fisher

I made procrastination into an art form this week. I’ve been writing the family newsletter and I got bogged down playing with PhotoShop. When I worked as a typesetter I could knock out a two-page newsletter in a few minutes, but trouble with Word, and Page-maker, added time to the project, all the while, I could see my edits slipping further and further from my grasp.

You may wonder why I’m telling you this . . . well, it’s Friday night, I don’t have my blog written, and that is my excuse.

Although I have been working on a blog this week and I hoped to be finished last Monday, but well, you know what happened. I’ll get back to it this week I promise. Then again, I noticed that Danyelle Ferguson tagged me for another game. Maybe I’d better do that instead.

I saw a sketch on The Carol Burnett Show once, where a writer was trying to plot a story. He kept typing and striking out what he wrote. In the mean time, the characters were behind him acting out what was on the page. It was hilarious—the characters had to stop what they were doing and switch. I don’t remember all the particulars, but the writer killed one of them, then changed his mind in favor of killing someone else. The actor fell dead only to stand up and push the other actor down.

The sketch ended when the writer finally got tired of it, took two aspirins, and walked away. The characters were left to deal with two large, white, tablets crashing down on top of them.

Sometimes things go that way, and there’s no harm in taking a chocolate break, but we need to remember to get back in the chair as soon as possible. It can be hard to continue a story after distractions take us away from it. We can’t give up and drop large, white, tablets on our characters.

Now that I’ve said it, I need to practice what I preach, instead of taking aspirins, I think I’ll toss the other stuff, and get back to my characters. They’ve been beckoning to me since I drifted off into regions far removed. Good luck in your writing, and let me know what it is, that steals time away from your work.