When I blog, I take it as a serious commitment. "Four to five entries a week," I tell myself, "or it's not worth doing." I believe strongly in honoring one's personal commitments, even if nobody else cares. If you're not true to yourself, you're really not going to be true to others. Or so I have come to believe over the years.
Moreover, my commitment to finding the career I really want has not wavered. I am working through the What Color Is Your Parachute exercises and I expect the results of my Birkman test this weekend, perhaps. So all of that is still going on.
No, what's taking my time is a story I've started to write. It began as a short story...well, no, let me be honest. It began as a paragraph in which something interesting happened to someone. So I wrote it down. Sometimes you have to write stuff like this down to get it out of your head.
Then I came back to it the next day and said "Gee, that doesn't suck as much as my regular writing does" so I wrote some more. In fact, I began to realize things about the protagonist of this story that I didn't know when I began writing it. That's usually a good sign. Writers everywhere talk about their characters refusing to do what they want and wandering off in new directions. It's only when they do this that they are coming alive.
So, for the last couple of days, I've been nibbling away at this story. Even now, it's only three pages, double-spaced, about 1000 words. But it's got some turns of phrase in it that I really like and each little mini-scene ends in a way that, I think, makes you want to read the next one. And I think the protagonist is sympathetic. I am feeling good about it.
The problem is that I know the beginning and the end, but not the middle. And it's beginning to feel bigger than a short story, which probably means I'm being lazy. (The longer the fiction, the less skill it takes to execute. This is not to say that writers of long novels are unskilled. It's simply to say that longer prose has far more room for exploration and error than shorter prose does. Short stories are like the executive summaries on business proposals -- they need to be brief, to the point, and persuasive in N paragraphs or you've lost the reader.)
Anyway, short stories are about 5,000 words. Novellas cut off about 40,000. Novels go from 70,000 to, well, lots. Figure at least 100,000 words for a decent-sized novel. How many does this story require? It's beginning to feel like more than 40,000 to find the right emotional frequency.
And then there are the expectations. To write a compelling story, you must write for the joy of it, not the job of it. I can't care what happens to this story. If nobody ever reads it, that's got to be fine with me. Only by letting go will I place on paper the story that's building in my head. It's a hard thing for a goal-oriented perfectionist like me to accomplish.
Net net: Bear with me. I'll say more soon.
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