The Crooked Path

I'm working on something that really came to me as a single scene initially, much as that may sound like it's been engineered to appear in my future Wikipedia entry; it has, however, spiraled out into a full short story, a development for which I am very glad given the recent desert of ideas I've been wandering through. It may even be a novella, as soon many of my works seem to jump into horrid verbosity these days--a thing I sometimes wish I could fix, and sometimes revel in. I'm glad to be back on the writing jag, but sometimes, writing is as easy and pleasurable as pulling teeth. You sit down at your keyboard, or hunch over your notebook, and you watch the wonder in your mind become drivel on the page, and you cross-out and backtrack and delete and generally work to improve it, only to find the squiggles and deletions are more numerous than the words you've written down. Your characters are hollow, your plot is going nowhere, and your word count--your precious, precious word count--is either too high or too low given where you are in the story (for short stories the former, for novels, the latter). When it gets like this, I wonder why I do it.

And the truth is, I do it because I love it. Not every piece always synchs up with every other piece, and there's a lot of rewriting and editing and self-critiquing--what Maslow called the secondary creative process--that is just plain stultifying. But when it works, it feels like I've mainlined a dream. When someone else tells me they like it, it's like I've been put into the skin of someone who is much, much cooler than I could ever hope to be. And when it actually gets published and I see it there on the screen, I become convinced I'm about to wake up and discover I've slept through my alarm once more. The good writing, the days when it flows and twists together and I'm fully immersed in the wild ride the story is taking me on, brings my mind to its knees and fills me with endorphins, and leaves me feeling more hopeful about everything else. Nothing is so uplifting as a good story, except, perhaps, discovering with surprise that the good story came from within yourself.

I will say this now, and I will say it many more times before these blog entries taper off into the void: I love writing, and I hate it all at once; but more than anything else, I cannot live without it.