Captivating an audience with words I chose to form a story I had made, from life, fiction, or some place between the two, has always been what got me into the idea of writing in the first place. I wanted to find readers that would love my stories so much that they would compel me to write more for their entertainment. Freshman year in high school my brain was poisoned with beautiful nostalgia for the dying of the analog age of writing. I felt everything had to be written out by hand before it was typed. Senior year in high school hearing Allen Ginsberg's poem America shifted my focus away from fiction to poetry. I got a quicker return on poetry and readers were easier to find; which was ideal for an over caffeinated year round cabin fever sufferer who couldn't write quick enough for stories. I used to try to get everything written down by hand first.This was perfect for poetry. Short lines jotted onto a small piece of paper by hand. Plenty of room to work out a line if it needed to be fixed.
This was not perfect for fiction. It created problems when I would work out a story in my head then try to write everything out by hand. I'd be 2/3's of the way through a story, come up with an idea that I liked that I wanted to add, but it would inevitably require some thread from earlier in the story for it to make sense. The idea of trying to hand write the stuff back onto the page would feel too daunting. I'd shoehorn ideas into the stories to get them finished, then after typing the story I'd be too put off of the disjointed mess I ended up with that editing felt too much like work to be any fun. The stories would inevitably be put away in some forgotten folder on my PC to be ignored for the rest of my life.
I have always felt that anyone who says that they don't write for anyone other than themselves is just too timid to take criticism. Of course I used to fight and defend my work to anyone that offered criticism. In my mind it was just a great way to discuss writing structure and the passage of the writer's voice from the head to the page or spoken aloud. My hindsight sees it more from other people's perspectives; which is that I was the asshole that didn't believe in other people's criticisms. I suppose never letting your work see the light of day is a similar effort to avoid confronting the problems you know are present in the piece.
It's been years since I've tried to tell a compelling story in more than a few stanzas. I feel out of practice with it, but I figure that is probably a good way to get back into it. I can relearn the ways to tell stories in more than a page an a half. I don't have any plan so far, but I am not clinging to the nostalgia for an analog age my brain never really fit into in the first place.
I'm not sure what the next step is for me to get back into the fiction that drew me to writing in the first place. It's like trying to go back to a neighborhood you lived in as a kid but haven't been to in 20 years so none of it seems quite right the way you remember it. I suppose that's the best place to be when writing fiction, not completely sure how it will turn out so making it up is really the only option I'll have.
This was not perfect for fiction. It created problems when I would work out a story in my head then try to write everything out by hand. I'd be 2/3's of the way through a story, come up with an idea that I liked that I wanted to add, but it would inevitably require some thread from earlier in the story for it to make sense. The idea of trying to hand write the stuff back onto the page would feel too daunting. I'd shoehorn ideas into the stories to get them finished, then after typing the story I'd be too put off of the disjointed mess I ended up with that editing felt too much like work to be any fun. The stories would inevitably be put away in some forgotten folder on my PC to be ignored for the rest of my life.
I have always felt that anyone who says that they don't write for anyone other than themselves is just too timid to take criticism. Of course I used to fight and defend my work to anyone that offered criticism. In my mind it was just a great way to discuss writing structure and the passage of the writer's voice from the head to the page or spoken aloud. My hindsight sees it more from other people's perspectives; which is that I was the asshole that didn't believe in other people's criticisms. I suppose never letting your work see the light of day is a similar effort to avoid confronting the problems you know are present in the piece.
It's been years since I've tried to tell a compelling story in more than a few stanzas. I feel out of practice with it, but I figure that is probably a good way to get back into it. I can relearn the ways to tell stories in more than a page an a half. I don't have any plan so far, but I am not clinging to the nostalgia for an analog age my brain never really fit into in the first place.
I'm not sure what the next step is for me to get back into the fiction that drew me to writing in the first place. It's like trying to go back to a neighborhood you lived in as a kid but haven't been to in 20 years so none of it seems quite right the way you remember it. I suppose that's the best place to be when writing fiction, not completely sure how it will turn out so making it up is really the only option I'll have.
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