Balancing Creativity and Logic: A Chess Player's Perspective

Balancing Creativity and Logic: A Chess Player’s Perspective

I remember when I learned to play chess. A good friend of mine, Jeff, taught me how to play when I was 11 years old. I absolutley loved the game but didn’t win a game for 6 months. It was actually demroalizing. However, my competitive juices kicked in and decided that that was unacceptable. In the next year, I devoured book after book and was able to get a chess computer to help with my progress. All of a sudden, I could play well.

Writiing for me, is in many ways, simliar. When I started the process of potentially writing a book, I through myself into it, but not writing. I looked a million videos (some very good, some not so much) on YouTube, I bought materials to review on how to write. I looked at some ideas about new authors. I did way too much analyzing before I started even writing a word. I was exhaused before I even started.

But, I was intrigued. I almost gave up before my competitive instinct took over (yes, I more competitve with my “give this pipedream up, you big dummy” gene, or the devil on my right shoulder. So, with all the data I had accumulated, I started to write. And that was fun!

Until of crourse, the editor got hold of it after my initial draft. Apparently, I really like the word “apparently”, since the first edition had 163 cases of them. Yep. I had to “quit” for 2 months after the first editing response because my ego took a massive hit. Thankfully, I didn’t.

Chess is about effort first and foremost. If you play enough, and study enough, and have good people around you to guide you, you can be great, depsite not being overly talented. And writing, to me, is simliar. Anyone can do it, and there’s always someone who’ll want to hear your story. You just have to plan, prepare, do it, do it again, and again, and then again. And even through they naysayers can be debhiltaking (most of it is from my devil on my right shouler), do it inspite of them!

Checkmate you shitty devil!

Till next time!

Len