What's The Point?

                Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be as depressing as the title suggests, I promise.

                This week I’ve been doing a lot of writing.  Mostly in work, not because I’ve been skiving, far from it.  We’ve had three reports to go to different senior management groups and they all had to be done by Friday.

                The difficulty with the reports was not so much the content, as knowing what the point was.  That sounds a bit odd, the point was, they were going to senior management and so had to be done, but when I was uncertain of why they were going to managers, it was extremely difficult to know how to pitch the paper.  I had to do the drafts, so I did, but it wasn’t easy, then I passed them over to the man to present them and they all got totally re-written.

                I’ve had similar feeling with some of the fiction I’ve been writing too.  I’ve got story ideas, but I’m not sure where they are going, I’m not sure what the point to what I’m writing is.  It makes it very difficult.  I remember undertaking a writing course where it suggest that every story has a plot and a theme.  Plots I don’t have a problem with, themes are much more difficult.  Took me a couple of years to realised that the theme of “Foreshadows” was identity even though it had been in there from the start.  Now I’ve come up with a follow up idea for “Foreshadows”, I know what I want to do with the plot, I’m pretty sure I know what I want to do with the characters, but I have no idea what the theme is.  Still I am only at the conceptual stages with this follow up, not even figured out a working title yet, so there is plenty to time.

                Also on Saturday last, we were supposed to be going to a CITO event, that is Cache In, Trash Out event.  A CITO is where a group of geocachers get together at an agreed location to pick up ‘trash’, kind of self explanatory really.  On Friday, I got on the website to check the details, but found that the event had actually been cancelled due to unexpected and unavoidable work pressures on the organiser.  So what would have been the point in travelling all the way to Cardiff for an event that wasn’t going to happen?

                The theme to this blog has been keeping to the point, the point of this blog was that in writing, fiction or non-fiction, you need to know where you are going, because if you don’t have a destination in mind, you may never get there.