I remember now why I stopped writing stories and never finished any of the songs I tried to write. I get an idea in my head and it seems so crisp and clear, but by the time I’ve got it even partially down on paper it just seems stupid.
I have a really hard time with this, and I think it’s a two part problem.
First, I can’t seem to get across the emotions and feel of the story as I sense it in my head, it’s that interface between mind and output where the breakdown is. I often feel like there’s a bottleneck in there, I get these ideas and then try to squeeze them through, but I just can’t get to them all, and by the time I get around to it I can’t remember exactly how it was supposed to go and it just doesn’t come out right.
This is the same reason I hate getting in arguments with friends and family about anything, or getting into political discussions of all sorts that take place in anything vaguely resembling real time. I mean, I know why I think Ayn Rand is a horrible hell-spawned demon and Objectivism is an excuse for self centered people to feel good about being douchebags, but if you sat me down and asked me to explain myself, I’d have a hard time getting my point across. I’d get flustered, confused, and twisted up, and may the Flying Spaghetti Monster help me if you actually argued with me and forced me to defend my position!
The second and much worse part is when I come back to my writing a day or a week or a year later. Then the self doubt starts. My old website was swallowed by the death of Geocities a few years ago, and there’s a big part of me that’s not sad it’s gone. I really hated going back to that thing and rereading what I’d written in the past, I always felt so lame. I made a personal rule that I would never delete anything on there, as it was a valid record of my mental state at the times I wrote there . . . which were usually at my very highest highs and very lowest lows, so the content was either “IAMS!OFUCK!INGAW!ESOME!!!” or “Life sucks and I suck and everything sucks and I’m sad.” Later visits made me cringe, but I didn’t want to murder past-Ian by erasing his writings. He had legitimate thoughts and feelings, it was just present-Ian that felt weird about it all.
That’s the most extreme example, but even other things, like the short story I’ve begun work on, suffer from the same problems. I had this great kind of weird fiction/science fantasy thing going on in my head, an idea that’s been floating around for a long time–sorry for the vagueness, you’ll get to see the finished product someday, I hope, just not yet. I wanted to convey an eerie sense of mystery and cosmic dread and massive confusion and general weirdness, but it just doesn’t seem to be coming across the way I want it to. Now I don’t even want to look at it, to be honest with you.
I think it was in the Harlan Ellison biopic I watched a while back, they were talking about writing techniques. Specifically, they mentioned some writers (maybe Ellison, I can’t remember for sure) taking the time to actually type out entire novels by their heroes, just to get the feel for what it means to write a great work, and get a sense of how excellent prose is put together. I feel like I need something along those lines, but I don’t think it would count for the 250 words project!
I’m going to have to train myself to push past all that. I want to treat this exercise in self flagellation like carving a statue out of a block of marble. The difference is that first I’ve got to construct that block of marble from heaping piles of the dog crap I write, and then carve that away to reveal the beauty I think is actually I hope maybe if I’m really lucky in there.
