Roughly a year or two ago, I got a bug in my ear to try my hand at writing fiction. On a whim early one morning after dropping Sydney off at her weekend babysitting job, and before Liz and the kids woke up, I started to outline a story that I thought might eventually morph into a novel. I had no intentions of ever publishing said work, but I thought it might be fun to go through the process. Initially it was fun… words flowed rather freely, characters developed into more than just a name, and the story seemed to just come together. However, that didn’t last. Life around me devolved into a mix of chaos and depression, and the book project got kicked off the stove — it didn’t even merit a back-burner.
Several times over the last eight or so months, I have pulled up the program I use to typeset the book, read through what I have written, fixed a few typos, been fairly happy with the overall effort, and stopped without being able to really push the story to the next evolution. Once or twice I was able to break free and crank out several pages or even a chapter, but I quickly found myself at a spot where I knew the general direction I needed to go, but couldn’t find the path that would get me there in a manner I felt would be worth the journey. That’s where I am now. It kind of feels like driving across the Texas panhandle on the way to the painted deserts of New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona… Amazing things (like the Grand Canyon) lay on the other end of the drive, but the passage through Amarillo is boring and long without much to break up the view on the horizon.
Having read Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, and suffered through seemingly endless passages on Napoleonic battles, inner-city slang, and the intricacies of the Paris sewer system, I refuse to burden any unfortunate reader who may happen to encounter what I write with that kind of pain. So… my story languishes until I can come up with a creative way of traversing the wasteland. One might reasonably suggest skipping it, but like Hugo, there are critical components of the story that can only be told through that journey. Unlike Hugo, I don’t get paid by the page and don’t benefit by afflicting readers with a tortuous slog through boring back-story. In fact, I have a counter-incentive… every word I write is non-reimbursed effort, so I have strong incentive to make that journey as pleasurable and direct as possible.
One of these days, I’ll be sitting in Sunday school, work, or somewhere else where my mind is supposed to be occupied with weightier things, and a viable path (or at least it’s beginning) will become clear. However, that hasn’t happened yet, so my pet project will continue to sit roughly 1/3 complete for the indeterminate future. It doesn’t help that the odds of more than blood-relatives ever reading what I write are astronomically low… Aside from the sick pleasure I get in putting words on paper (so to speak), and my near obsessive need to finish what I start, there is nothing pushing me to complete it.