So there won't be a short story today.
In substitution I have a couple thoughts on writing.
Perhaps, unsurprisingly, short stories
are the most difficult of my weekly schedule to compose. While all
three articles are imagined and outlined in advance, short stories
don't function like the other two. Once outlined, video game and
political articles come together easily. But I often find the
outline for a story story is not enough. Though the broad synopsis
will appear clear, the details required to complete it create
contradictions and complexities. The story will have to be altered,
rewritten, or expanded. An idea that was supposed to take three
hundred words might double, or an event that seemed straightforward,
might need a rework to make it understandable. At worst, a story may
end up being unworkable. The idea the story was built around is too
subtle to be expressed in one and a half thousand words, or the idea
was worthless from the start. I think, that is what happened to the
story I was writing for today, but I'm going to take another look at
it tonight. Maybe it will reappear as next week's story.
But that's only half of what I wanted
to talk about.
One of the problems I foresaw and
feared when I began this project was a lack of ideas. Not the sort
of “the well has run dry” problem, though that worry exists too.
No, I feared I had amazing ideas for novels, and wouldn't it be
terrible to waste them on a thousand word story. Obviously you've
seen how foolish that worry is. In the first case, nothing that I've
written is amazing. It's fine, and hopefully improving. That's the
second part. It would be foolish to not write for fear of creating
something not worth reading. The only way that the writing will
improve is if it happens in the first place. So here I am composing,
writing, and improving. And though I've used some ideas that I
thought were pretty cool, and maybe they were not, I hope to have a
chance to expand them if I ever have a career as an author.
I have a similar problem with writing
sentences. I mean, I have an attachment to the original sentence. I
love the first sentence that explains a concept, like the ancients
loved the first born son. As I sit and think, beyond the reach of
paper and pen, I sculpt phrases for concepts. But my memory is
lacking, and they aren't recorded. But... see... it just happened to
me. I had a great sentence, but it wasn't the place for it, it would
have come later. And in the process of getting to it, I forgot it.
Now I have this feeling that the sentence I can't remember is better
than anything I will write in it's place. It's a strange, silly
notion, but I am so bummed right now about that one phrase that is
lost forever. It was going to help me explain this problem more
precisely and poetically but this will have to do in its stead.
See you Friday for politics.
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