![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
on the ends of stories
Mar. 2nd, 2009 10:18 pmSometimes you write something and it fits very neatly into the quiet moments and spaces of the rest of your life. It gracefully and without complaint shares time with your day job and its tedious but consuming woes. It doesn't mind when you have to beg off for the night because you've got a baby who wants to be held, or a mountain of laundry so large it threatens imminent collapse with the possible crushing death of unwary household pets in the process. It even doesn't mind if you're seeing other stories, short or long, funny or sad, fast and easy or excruciating to write. These stories are mellow; they know you'll come back to them when you can, they know you'll make it to the end together some day, and it doesn't mind how or when you get there.
Sometimes you write something and it's not like that at all. It hungrily demands your time and attention and doesn't care what else it is you think you have to do. It fills your thoughts, always churning and restless in the back of your mind no matter where you are or what you are in the middle of. Sometimes it's a loud and angry thing, sometimes quietly persistent, like a book you've reluctantly put down at 3am because you just have to have that four hours sleep in order to not be a walking disaster the next day, but you still can't easily find sleep because it's rolling around in your head, bouncing off the day's other trailing thoughts, until finally you doze off and it stalks your dreams instead.
Silence and Roses was like that. It's not in any way an aggressive story -- in some ways, it may be the most "gentle" thing I've written. Writing it wasn't the hostile take-over from the Muse that other stories have been. It was just always there in my head, day and night, talking to me, telling me about where it was going, what it wanted to be, how we could get there together. With all the other stuff going on in my life, it managed to come out on top without being a bitch about it. It wasn't at all easy to write -- it was a hard, hard story in ways I don't think I could articulate, with extra baggage of crisis-of-confidence and performance-anxiety thrown on top. It's been a long time since I've finished something, and some days I do wonder if I've "lost" it (or if I ever really had it.) Also, I think it's the first time I've actually felt bad, as an author, for what I was putting my main character through. And I was a lot less mean to him than I have been to so many others. But I think it's a good story, and I'm happy with how it came out, and the feedback from my First Beta Reader was very positive.
Strangely, when I write a story like that, one that takes up so much of my mental landscape in the undertaking, I find that after I've finished, after I've typed "THE END" and saved a copy to my backup location and sent it out for feedback, even though I'm done, I'm not done. I am still stuck in the penumbra of that story's shadow. Even though I'm intimately familiar with this stage of the process -- work on something else while you wait for feedback, then revise, tighten, send out -- I can't quite disengage from the story and move on to that next thing. It's funny because I feel like my creative battery, which has been running low and having trouble holding a charge for years now, is back up to a sustainable level. I am enthused about the next thing, and I'm excited to start sending this one out and see where I can land it. I want to finish Miledrop and start getting feedback on that. It's not like the story is still churning ideas through my head -- both it and I are well aware we're done -- but it just isn't ready to move aside, and I'm not quite ready to push it.
Well. It should be a quiet night in my head tonight. Tomorrow, or the day after, who can say?
Sometimes you write something and it's not like that at all. It hungrily demands your time and attention and doesn't care what else it is you think you have to do. It fills your thoughts, always churning and restless in the back of your mind no matter where you are or what you are in the middle of. Sometimes it's a loud and angry thing, sometimes quietly persistent, like a book you've reluctantly put down at 3am because you just have to have that four hours sleep in order to not be a walking disaster the next day, but you still can't easily find sleep because it's rolling around in your head, bouncing off the day's other trailing thoughts, until finally you doze off and it stalks your dreams instead.
Silence and Roses was like that. It's not in any way an aggressive story -- in some ways, it may be the most "gentle" thing I've written. Writing it wasn't the hostile take-over from the Muse that other stories have been. It was just always there in my head, day and night, talking to me, telling me about where it was going, what it wanted to be, how we could get there together. With all the other stuff going on in my life, it managed to come out on top without being a bitch about it. It wasn't at all easy to write -- it was a hard, hard story in ways I don't think I could articulate, with extra baggage of crisis-of-confidence and performance-anxiety thrown on top. It's been a long time since I've finished something, and some days I do wonder if I've "lost" it (or if I ever really had it.) Also, I think it's the first time I've actually felt bad, as an author, for what I was putting my main character through. And I was a lot less mean to him than I have been to so many others. But I think it's a good story, and I'm happy with how it came out, and the feedback from my First Beta Reader was very positive.
Strangely, when I write a story like that, one that takes up so much of my mental landscape in the undertaking, I find that after I've finished, after I've typed "THE END" and saved a copy to my backup location and sent it out for feedback, even though I'm done, I'm not done. I am still stuck in the penumbra of that story's shadow. Even though I'm intimately familiar with this stage of the process -- work on something else while you wait for feedback, then revise, tighten, send out -- I can't quite disengage from the story and move on to that next thing. It's funny because I feel like my creative battery, which has been running low and having trouble holding a charge for years now, is back up to a sustainable level. I am enthused about the next thing, and I'm excited to start sending this one out and see where I can land it. I want to finish Miledrop and start getting feedback on that. It's not like the story is still churning ideas through my head -- both it and I are well aware we're done -- but it just isn't ready to move aside, and I'm not quite ready to push it.
Well. It should be a quiet night in my head tonight. Tomorrow, or the day after, who can say?
