Sometimes I think I would like to write fiction. Stories seem so substantial, so important, such complete little worlds. They take longer to read than poems, they can be optioned for movie rights (okay, seldom but still) and they can be published in collections which are several hundred pages long, and if you start a story and kind of just keep going for like ten years it can grow up into a novel, which are even MORE substantial than poems. Plus fiction's appeal seems more universal - to the reading public I mean - than poems. Whether any of that matters is anyone's guess.
I love to read stories.
I am not very good at writing them, I have been finding out this week. Or finding out again, I should say.
Parts of fiction I can do. I can write a paragraph that sounds reasonably unmoronic. I have a few paragraphs in the story I'm working on - yes I've been trying to write a story this past week or so - that I like. But the rest of my story is kind of a mess. I wrote one very quick lame-o first draft, just to feel like I had a plot to fall back on, that it had some sort of a direction. Then I went back to the beginning to revise and make it sound like an actual story.
But I am at the point I usually get with a story, where I think, should I finish this? What is the point of finishing this?
But, however. I'd really like to write a few decent stories in this lifetime. I just keep putting it off. It's kind of fun, though, moving people around and making them say and do things, and being surprised sometimes when they say something you didn't really have to think about for that long - they just kind of say it and it takes you off in another direction, and that's fun. But plot - jeez! It's like math!
At times when writing fiction I think, be patient, just keep writing it. It takes time, a different sort of time, and it's a different proces.
Other times I think, oh go write a poem enough already.
Well, we'll see. I think it's just going to take a long time if I want to finish a story, because I write fiction slowly. I write scenes and then I cut them, or I have an idea for what I want to happen and then it changes completely. Due in a large part to the fact that I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to fiction. Still, there it is.
Well, we'll see.
It's summer now and I'm glad. I finished Divisidaro and it was great; the first Ondaatje I've read. A very lyrical writer; I read somewhere the book was a series of intimate moments, strung together, and that makes sense.
