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babarnettThis week I started a major rewrite of a short story I wrote about three years ago. It was the first story I had critiqued when I was at the Odyssey Workshop, and I got lots of great feedback and ideas for turning it into a stronger piece, but unlike everything else I wrote there, I never felt ready to tackle the rewrite until recently. Most ideas I can just dive into with abandon, but there have been a few like this one that feel a bit more...special, I guess. Or maybe fragile. I'm not sure.
Whatever the right word is, these stories tend to set my expectations-for-myself bar even higher than usual--so high that, when I sit down to start the story, I have this petrified moment where I'm convinced that I have no idea how to write anymore. There's this great idea and a few words on the screen, but there's also this growing dread that I can't write the story because, hell, I can't even start the story.
And then I get over it and start writing.
Something keeps me there and writing despite the strong suspicion that I'm a hopeless hack who should give up now. While part of me is frozen in terror, waiting for the big bad writing monster to finish me off, another part of me--the part that will survive the horror movie that is a writing career--is desperately looking for what I like to think of as the "in" to the story.
A while ago (a longer while ago then I thought once I went searching for the entry) I made a post babbling about how much I agonize over the first few sentences of a new scene or chapter. That agonizing stems from the same thing I'm looking for at the start of a new story: that elusive "in" that will let me into the story and let the wordage start flowing. Until then, I'm only skirting around the edges of the story or scene.
With the short story I started working on this week, fear and high expectations were certainly part of my problem getting started, but another part of the problem was that I had trouble finding the right door to get inside. There were so many possible ways to start. With my POV character, a soldier, in the middle of battle? After the battle with another soldier ragging him for crying? Or with him going to see the unit's chaplain...which is where I ended up starting. But even then, I couldn't quite get the door open. What does my character focus on first? On what the chaplain is saying to him? What the chaplain is doing? How he looks? Where is the point of focus around which everything else will suddenly click? So I started trying all the keys until one of them worked.
And now I'm in the story. Later, I may decide that renovations are necessary and I need to move the door that let me in. Or I may just need to change the locks. But I'm already inside, so that's ok.
Whatever the right word is, these stories tend to set my expectations-for-myself bar even higher than usual--so high that, when I sit down to start the story, I have this petrified moment where I'm convinced that I have no idea how to write anymore. There's this great idea and a few words on the screen, but there's also this growing dread that I can't write the story because, hell, I can't even start the story.
And then I get over it and start writing.
Something keeps me there and writing despite the strong suspicion that I'm a hopeless hack who should give up now. While part of me is frozen in terror, waiting for the big bad writing monster to finish me off, another part of me--the part that will survive the horror movie that is a writing career--is desperately looking for what I like to think of as the "in" to the story.
A while ago (a longer while ago then I thought once I went searching for the entry) I made a post babbling about how much I agonize over the first few sentences of a new scene or chapter. That agonizing stems from the same thing I'm looking for at the start of a new story: that elusive "in" that will let me into the story and let the wordage start flowing. Until then, I'm only skirting around the edges of the story or scene.
With the short story I started working on this week, fear and high expectations were certainly part of my problem getting started, but another part of the problem was that I had trouble finding the right door to get inside. There were so many possible ways to start. With my POV character, a soldier, in the middle of battle? After the battle with another soldier ragging him for crying? Or with him going to see the unit's chaplain...which is where I ended up starting. But even then, I couldn't quite get the door open. What does my character focus on first? On what the chaplain is saying to him? What the chaplain is doing? How he looks? Where is the point of focus around which everything else will suddenly click? So I started trying all the keys until one of them worked.
And now I'm in the story. Later, I may decide that renovations are necessary and I need to move the door that let me in. Or I may just need to change the locks. But I'm already inside, so that's ok.
