The story I’m working on, that is.
I know, I know. I shouldn’t give in, I should keep trying. Never give up, never surrender, as Tim Allen (embarrassingly, I can’t remember the name of his character in Galaxy Quest) would say. But screw it. This story isn’t doing what I want, and it’s sucking the life out of me in the disobedient process.
Even this kid appreciates that writing can sometimes be an incredibly frustrating business.
I’m not really sure how widespread this sort of problem is. Writer’s Block gets a lot of press, and is a generally well-known affliction of those in the creative world. This isn’t that. It’s not a lack of ideas, but rather an inability to translate this particular idea correctly onto the page. I’m not sure if it’s more infuriating than genuine writer’s block, but right now it’s doing my nut.
The thing is, I like the basic story idea. I don’t see anything wrong with it (even taking into account that it was partly ripped off by Inception*). But the actual execution of it hasn’t been going well. It took an odd twist early on in the writing, which I wasn’t sure of at the time, and now it seems apparent that I’ve written myself into a creative cul-de-sac.
So I’m abandoning it. Temporarily, I’ll stress. One day I will come back to it, and it will be completed. However, I had been labouring to get it finished and submitted by today, for the current Crossed Genres magazine. That’s not gonna happen, so sorry to all the guys at Crossed Genres. You’ll have to wait, to read and reject my work. Though actually, I have an idea for November’s superhero theme, so maybe you won’t have to wait that long.
This actually happened to me about the same time last year, so who knows, maybe it’s some sort of voodoo (or hoodoo, I’m not honestly clear on the difference) curse. That worked out alright in the end. I left the idea, and forgot about it completely for six months, until I came across the original idea scrawled in my little black notebook (someday I’ll do a blog entry devoted to that little creative lucky-dip) six months later. Now it’s sitting as a first draft, in my “to-edit-and-find-a-home-for” pile.
So it’s not the end of the world.
In the meantime, I’ll write other things. I’ve already started work on a potentially suicide-inducingly dark novel. And have probably just jinxed myself in one line there. Oh well. Also, I’m probably going to post up some flash fiction for the one lovely person who actually reads this blog sometime later in the week.
The writing goes on.
[*I'm not actually accusing Christopher Nolan of plagiarism, that would be stupid. But this idea is also based around dreams, and came to me before I had seen Inception, or even knew what Inception was. So neither Christopher Nolan nor I are guilty of plagiarism, he just has the advantage of more productivity, and a multi-million dollar budget. The bastard.]
