In my last blog post I talked a little bit about being critically receptive to anything that you watch, read, play, etc. I’ve been thinking about that since then and I’d like to expound on that a little bit.

I worked a graveyard shift doing tech support to put myself through college and support my family. It was great because it gave me ample time to do my homework so that the little time I was able to spend at home (between working and going to school full time) I was able to spend with my family.

But I had a lot of downtime at work where I wasn’t doing homework, for whatever reason. I would read, watch movies/tv shows, play video games, it was great. Believe me when I say, there was a point where I had watched almost everything Netflix had to offer at the time.

After a few years though, I started to realize that I was wasting a lot of valuable time though. I did do some writing but not a ton. It didn’t help when I took Brandon Sanderson’s class at BYU and he told us he worked a graveyard shift while he was in school and wrote something like eleven novels during that time.

At first I berated myself, how could I have spent all that time doing nothing of substance? I could have written eleven novels during that time! But as time went on, I started to realize that while I wasn’t actually putting words down on the page, what I had been doing had still been extremely beneficial.

See, as I stated in my last post, I’d spent the time I was watching movies and tv shows not just passively watching them. By that point, I’d had the idea of critically reading so drilled into by my major that I was actively breaking apart the plot of everything I watched. In retrospect, I realized that I may not have written eleven novels, but I’d been studying how a story in constructed, almost without even realizing it. As I finally began really putting effort into completing Penumbra I realized how valuable all that time I’d “wasted” reading and watching things actually had been to me.

Sanderson said he needed to write eleven novels to get to one that was worth reading. He also said that, that isn’t the same for everybody. Patrick Rothfuss wrote one novel and spend years editing it until he was happy with it. I think I needed to spend the time studying story (in many ways inadvertently) until I could write something that I thought might be worth reading.

But that said, only time will tell if I actually do come up with anything worth reading. I’ve mentioned before that nothing is worse than the nagging doubt an author feels that they may be wasting their time, but we all experience it. You’ve just got to keep going, that’s what I tell myself.

On the brighter side, I recently found out a friend of mine was published!

The book is titled Duskfall and his name is Christopher Husberg. He’s a great guy and I’m so excited for him. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, as I’m in the middle of a novel but I’ll be picking it up as soon as I’ve finished what I’m currently reading (otherwise I’ll never get through the novel I’m reading now… since I’m not loving it).

By the time anybody actually ends up reading this, he’ll probably be a big name (he’s that talented) so this may be somewhat pointless, but at least this will stand as a record that I’ve  given him a shout out!