I’ve been struggling with a short story for the past week or so, which most certainly happens, and which is more annoying each time it does. You get used to things flowing, you know? And when things flow, everything is grand. The sky is bluer, the sunlight cleaner, and the breeze fresher.
Then the writing powers reach out and swipe your inner sense of “how this story is supposed to work” and you’re left in this dismal little shack of self-doubt wondering how you ever thought you could tell as story.
Such is the life of a writer of fiction.
But I wrote a lot of words over this past week, and as of yesterday the fever broke (actually, I first wrote that the dam broke…so perhaps what I meant was the damned fever broke). This morning I think I get it, and I sat down and rearranged the story and began writing it in earnest for the first time. It’s flowing now. Thank goodness.
The turning point was, naturally, when I determined what the story was basically about. Odd, eh? Until that point I was just kind of floundering along, but once I understood what this character was using me to say, suddenly the fog lifted. That’s a lesson I guess I need to learn with every story I write. Perhaps that’s a lesson I need to learn with everything I do in life.
What does it mean? Why am I doing it?
Anyway…I hope to be done with the first draft of this thing by tomorrow or Friday.
Yay me!