Despite Myself
It's taken me more than a decade to admit that I like to write stories.
Closer to twice that, actually. At some point in the mid-90s, I quit filling up notebooks with ideas and outlines, quit working on dialogue or striving to capture those telling details that bring a scene to life. Chalk it up to being overly skeptical of the value of personal expression, I guess. I mean, it's relatively easy to convince yourself that the world doesn't really need what you have to offer it, you know? At any given moment, there will always be more creative, more talented, more entertaining writers out there, all struggling to share their grander visions with the world's discerning readers. So why bother? I decided that pursuing other interests would be more rewarding, and moved on without looking back.
But the problem is that I never quite managed to stop thinking those stories up. I just wouldn't write them down, which didn't really do anything but turn my mind into a cluttered dumping ground for wayward snippets. Eventually, I was forced to concede that - surprise! - some of those snippets were tenacious enough to survive in my head over those ten or twenty years. Some even grew stronger during their isolation, no doubt.
Two years ago, I started writing again. To relieve the pressure, I guess you could say. I thought I had a straightforward idea that would be a good "practice run" for a novel. It would take a few well-worn tropes and twist them into new shapes. It wasn't intended to be innovative or particularly fancy. It was just going to be a good story, something I could work on and be proud of. The plan was to finish it in a year and then decide if it was worth the time and energy to do another one.
I was rustier with the verbiage than I'd anticipated, and that straightforward idea ended up going in some strange places. But the thing is very close to being done, and soon I'll be able to share it with more than just my circle of trusted readers. Oddly enough, I'm really excited about that prospect, because telling stories is such a vital part of sharing our world with others, of sharing all those little ideas and deeply-held dreams that bring us all together.
(Not to mention our wishes for the future.)
Why did I ever think such vibrant distillations of my travels and experience would be satisfied to endlessly pace the confines of my overcrowded skull? I guess it's time to heed their call.
Closer to twice that, actually. At some point in the mid-90s, I quit filling up notebooks with ideas and outlines, quit working on dialogue or striving to capture those telling details that bring a scene to life. Chalk it up to being overly skeptical of the value of personal expression, I guess. I mean, it's relatively easy to convince yourself that the world doesn't really need what you have to offer it, you know? At any given moment, there will always be more creative, more talented, more entertaining writers out there, all struggling to share their grander visions with the world's discerning readers. So why bother? I decided that pursuing other interests would be more rewarding, and moved on without looking back.
But the problem is that I never quite managed to stop thinking those stories up. I just wouldn't write them down, which didn't really do anything but turn my mind into a cluttered dumping ground for wayward snippets. Eventually, I was forced to concede that - surprise! - some of those snippets were tenacious enough to survive in my head over those ten or twenty years. Some even grew stronger during their isolation, no doubt.
Two years ago, I started writing again. To relieve the pressure, I guess you could say. I thought I had a straightforward idea that would be a good "practice run" for a novel. It would take a few well-worn tropes and twist them into new shapes. It wasn't intended to be innovative or particularly fancy. It was just going to be a good story, something I could work on and be proud of. The plan was to finish it in a year and then decide if it was worth the time and energy to do another one.
I was rustier with the verbiage than I'd anticipated, and that straightforward idea ended up going in some strange places. But the thing is very close to being done, and soon I'll be able to share it with more than just my circle of trusted readers. Oddly enough, I'm really excited about that prospect, because telling stories is such a vital part of sharing our world with others, of sharing all those little ideas and deeply-held dreams that bring us all together.
(Not to mention our wishes for the future.)
Why did I ever think such vibrant distillations of my travels and experience would be satisfied to endlessly pace the confines of my overcrowded skull? I guess it's time to heed their call.
posted by pf at
12:50 AM
2 Comments:
The best writers are those who can't stop themselves. (I say this vainly, of course, because I can't stop myself, either.) But I think writing the way you're talking about here is a great way to achieve real meaning, which is totally more valuable than ten bestsellers. (Of course, we all still try to write bestsellers, but hey...)
Yeah, the further along I get with honing this first manuscript of mine, the further away those dreams of bestsellerdom seem to be getting. I'm definitely writing for a certain kind of person at this point.
But I'm okay with that, if the tradeoff is that it's becoming more of what I want it to be. And it is - feels like it's slowly coming into focus, which is really satisfying.
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