Inspiration, too often, is the faraway flicker of a light at the end of a path shrouded by heavy fogs and mist. Even if you chase it, it darts and weaves, seeming sometimes puckish, if not downright malicious. One wrong step, and you could end up in a bog, mired in doubt and convinced that you’ve been led astray. Meanwhile, the little light that you’ve been following winks out, leaving you in a desperate darkness, with only the tatters of a half-finished story.
Even as I’m writing this, I feel stymied. My brain is circling back on itself, asking questions: What are you trying to say? What kind of writing even is this?
Every time that question dive-bombs me, I duck and cover, trying not to get hit by the inevitable shrapnel.
These same questions orbit me when I sit down to write, too. It’s easy to play with the words and the sounds and the images, but suddenly, usually around one or two thousand words in, those questions zero in on me and deploy their cargo again.
What kind of story are you writing? What do you want to say?
I don’t know. And when that becomes evident, the hollowness of the whole enterprise shows itself, and then collapses in like a house of cards.
Much like now, I feel like giving up on the whole thing.
Why write, at all, if this is the constant? Many have advised taking a break, coming back to it another time, if it isn’t fun anymore. It’s not that it isn’t fun. I love to write. I just love having written, as well. I like having a project that I’m constantly working on, but I also like it when there’s visible steps for that project, leading up to a sense of satisfaction with the project’s end. Too often that feeling does not manifest for me, while writing, and disappointment and discouragement ensue.
“You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very dangerous. Because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything. Because doing anything results in…it’s actually kind of tragic because you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is. And there were a couple of years where I really struggled with that.”
—David Foster Wallace
I have three folders, full of 100+ unfinished stories. Some of them are no more than fifty words, some of them are over 11,000. At one point, I even wrote a brief summary of each one on an index card, bought a little recipe box for them, and intended to draw them out at random to see which ones I could finish.
The box lives in the bottom drawer of my desk, and has gathered dust there. But the Trunk, such as it is, gathers more and more scraps of stories to it, like some kind of hungry monster. I very rarely revisit the things which go unfinished, perhaps out of resentment, perhaps out of fear.
For example: I just started, out of nowhere, to write about a young man who is sitting in the center seat of an airplane as it makes its final descent. There has been turbulence the entire flight, he notes—so bad that they didn’t perform drink service, and now he’s got a craving for those mini pretzels. A woman next to him laments that she doesn’t have her Valium, and then the man in the aisle seat is sick, into the aisle.
Why did I just write approximately 460 words about someone vomiting on an airplane? Where could this possibly go? What the heck kind of theme can I work with involving this?
And so it is named: “vomitonaplane.docx” and sent without ceremony to a folder labeled !!SNIPS. It was just a twinkle in the eye, barely even the beginning of a fiction, but its life was cruelly cut short by either my indecision or my inability to manifest it into being.
I’ve been working lately with the idea of writing a novella-in-flash, to kind of combat these kinds of questions. I have the beginnings of an idea about the body. The first flash piece concerns an arm that grows out of the well of the main character’s backyard. It grows longer and longer until it can knock on their doors, their windows.
The second piece will be about eyes that appear incongruously, in varying locales, and appear to be watching the main character. The third piece will be about a different body part—I’m thinking hair. Then, the sinew tying them together will be the “stories,” or the flash pieces where the main character encounters them. I would like it if it symbolized a sort of haunting, or the refusal to let go of someone, and they manifest physically, as in these cases.
The first flash piece is done. But why have I suddenly lost enthusiasm for the project?
It’s fear. It must be fear.
“Have no fear of perfectionism. You will never reach it.”
—Salvador Dali
Some days, writing feels like spinning around in a dark room with no lights at all to guide you. Eventually, you have to strike out in some direction, or else remain still in indecision.
You might as well make a move.
The walls are closing in on you anyway.
When the Will-o'-the-Wisp Won't
But I would like to read this novella soon! By end of business tomorrow, maybe.