The Dustbin Of History
After several years and a great deal of work, I finally have a momentous anouncement to make concerning my career as a Failed Writer:

I've now officially given up on my in-progress manuscript.

Yes, it was only a matter of time really. When you're 60,000 words into something and you're still introducing main characters, you have a problem. Not ever getting around to (or even deciding on) the scope and course of the central plot in all that time is also somewhat problematic.

Plus, when it's been more than 18 months since you've done any serious work on it, I'd say the writing is on the wall. It's on the wall, it's in the car, it's under your chair, anywhere but on the page really.

The manuscript is a mess, but it wasn't all horrible. There were a few decent paragraphs in there, suffocated under great fetid blocks of unnecessary descriptive verbiage and blustering, context-less exposition.

Whenever you meet some hack writing teacher, they will always tell you to power through the first draft and that real writing is re-writing. Yes, I saw Finding Forrester too.

But for obsessive-compulsives, this is a virtual impossibility. Mix that with a little ADD and you've got someone who needs to re-read everything just to remember where he left off, but then can't leave what he wrote alone. So for every one productive writing session, I have three nitpicking, fine-tooth-combing, useless revision-sessions of work I will probably completely revise later anyway. It is vitally important to get your commas and verb tenses all correct before you delete something wholesale. It's just good manners.

The other problem is that--like everyone else whose first grown-up read was a Tolkien book--I was trying to write fantasy-style fiction. It seems easy because you get to invent the cultures, the history, the settings and the context. Yeah, turns out it's a festering pain in the ass, the whole thing. You know what the hardest part is? You have to invent the cultures, the history, the settings and the context!

So my convoluted fable about misogyny and religion, my Life of Brian meets Norma Rae girl-power anti-religious screed will never see the light of day. At least not until I become a better writer and I'm able to write fantasy elements that aren't completely cheesy. Really, it's impossibe to pull off unless you take it completely seriously (which I'm sorry, I can't) or you're Terry Pratchett, which I am obviously not. He's English, for starters. And he wears hats.

Fantasy is out then. The other thing hack writing teachers tell you is "write what you know." I've decided, then, that the next thing I write is going to be a real-life account of this guy. He's got brown-ish hair, right. And he's sitting in this black leather chair. And he's typing something on his keyboard. The words appear on his Samsung SyncMaster 712n flat panel LCD screen. And he's got half a Coke sitting next to his monitor. And his desk is kind of brownish laminated pressboard. And he's got... um... papers and stuff all over his desk. And... uh...

Crap. "What I know" is boring as hell. How do you people read this stuff?

All of my failures now I can blame on my blog instead of my kids. It's a miracle invention whereby I can procrastinate and write at the same time.

So I'm out of the Not-Writing-Novels business for the moment and I can go back to my first love, Not Writing Short Stories. But fear not, adoring public, soon I'm sure I will have a new long-term project to ignore.

Look for it on bookshelves that exist only inside of my head.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 10.0 (an earth-shaker)


Pops

- posted by Pops @ 1:02 PM