Lessons learned

So I had an Adventure in car maintenance this weekend. My car had a headlight out, and I mistakenly got the wrong kind of bulb at first, only to find the right one wouldn’t light. I eventually got help and discovered that the reason the problem wasn’t fixed was that I’d carefully replaced a working high beam, and hadn’t ever been testing that. In between, there was an awful long of struggling and figuring my hands must not be strong enough to crank something tightly enough somehow.

I was reminded of a story that an otherwise probably perfectly decent but forgettable junior high motivation speaker told. He described a sky lodge in the summer, when it was hot enough to have the door and windows open, and he was relaxing inside with a drink. There was a big fat housefly trapped inside, and it kept throwing itself at the window screen. Buzz-thunk. Regroup. Try again. Buzz-thunk. Two feet away, the door stood completely open, with no screen. Often, trying harder is just not the answer.

I could have saved some frustration if I’d trusted my senses that the first bulb wouldn’t fit, and the second was seated correctly and gone looking for other causes. I think that’s applicable to writing, too. I can’t count the number of times when I was presented with a problem like “the character isn’t sympathetic” and the solution wasn’t to try harder to rewrite the same scene sympathetically, but to completely change what occurred in the scene. It’s easy to forget, though, when it seems like just a little more effort in the same direction will get you there.