A step back

I'm 15 pages into my play and I'm realizing that, while it's not bad dialog, and the characters are shaping up, nothing is happening. It's boring and the themes are common. My imagination is limited by my refusal to try anything difficult to write. This is not a problem that I have with my novel. I have villages, adventure, drama, unique concepts and mechanics.

But my play about middle-class white people problems makes me want to puke. I've put hours of work into something I'd never pay to see. I know what I hate about them - they have no real struggle, no life in them. I'm not even using them to say interesting things; I just want to express a general longing for more. Which coming from a family of successful adults is a pitiful effort. It makes them sound whiny. This one goes into the "fix it" file. Maybe someday those characters will have something to say, but not from a place of strength and opportunity. I have to let them wander around in my head for a while until they have more to contribute.

In other news...
We've been waiting for weeks to have our first (and hopefully only) sonogram, but now an ice storm has pushed it back to Wednesday. I would love to say this is the most exciting appointment of the pregnancy, but we are leaving the gender a mystery until birth, so this is just a little check-up, with strange gray slices of baby-shaped love.

False Analogy

I was going to draw an analogy between cooking and writing, but the similarities are minimal. Cooking can take hours to prepare and minutes to eat. Writing takes a lot more time than reading, but that's the general difference between creation and consumption. An artist will take months to paint or sculpt something worth displaying in a gallery, but the average person will merely glance at it, or at most stare for a minute or two. Fine details are for geeks and fanatics.

If you write something that is entertaining but isn't very good, very few people will notice the mediocrity and even fewer will be able to explain the shortcomings. You have to be comfortable with the speed of your improvement or you'll never keep going. Writers that create "young adult" fiction are often treated as grade school teachers. "Sure, you're published, but all your fans are children. Let me know when you can communicate on an adult level." This is often a style choice, or even a marketing decision made by the publisher. It really says nothing about the writer other than how accessible they want their books to be. 

There is always a gap between the writer and reader, and it is up to the writer to build most of the bridge. You have to decide by the end how far you are going to reach before your concept is compromised by the accommodation. Factors that will affect the reach of your work include: limited scope, artistic freedom, literary allusions, grammar grade level, idea complexity, image density, tropes (used honestly and ironically), verbosity, etc and so on. It's all part of your style, and learning how to follow your instincts while consciously controlling these factors is the great challenge of creative writing. And it's loads of fun.

The more I read, the more I suck

This is how I write: "Rubbish rubbish rubbish. Rubbish better rubbish. Oops, I think I stole that bit. This is crap. It's just like that thing I read, but awful. Everyone will notice the similarity and think I stole it. I better start over."

If I compare my writing to my old writing, I'm much better than I used to be. If I compare myself to published authors, I'm crap. My hurdle for the day is to finish my crap first draft, no matter how crap it is.

The Merciful Silence (a very short story)

Elliot entered the apartment building through the disused side door, avoiding a likely confrontation with the seventy-two year old woman that lives in the apartment below him. Climbing the stairs to the 5th floor was a small price to pay for one more day without having to explain the shouting match she heard last night will be the last. He'd told her this before, but this time was surely the last time she'd have to hear angry exchanges with Lauren; the last time Lauren would say "I'm leaving, and I'm never coming back!"

Elliot opened the door to his quiet, sparsely decorated apartment. Looking around he notices a gap on the wall above the couch, a frame was missing, but he couldn't immediately recall what had been there that morning. Hanging his coat next to the door, his eyes next fell on the empty space where the doormat had been. A short tour of the bedroom, bathroom and refrigerator revealed that she had broken her promise and had returned, but only to collect her things, and a few of his. Elliot's cat, Ebony, meowed piteously from the corner of the living room where her favorite wicker chair used to reside. "Sorry deary, it was her chair." he tried to explain. Lauren's clothes, furniture, toothbrush and feminine products were gone, as expected, but so were the good towels, the 600-thread-count bed sheets and the shower curtain, leaving only the clear plastic liner. She had done a thorough sweep of every room, removing any and every object that might give her reason to return again. Still, she left him with a painful sense of finality, and that would have to be enough to carry him until he could replace the coffee maker.

Writing and cooking

Wow, day two and I'm writing again!

Today I'm writing a play for a contest at a local community theater. I've been tossing the idea around in my head for a while now, and I've only recently decided that I really, truly want to be a writer. I suppose I'll write plays and novels and never make any money at it, but that's usually how it goes. I've never had more free time to do so in over a decade, so we'll see how long it lasts before I have to get a job again and burn all my energies making money for someone else.

A strange note on careers.
I never really wanted to be anything as a child except a baker. I generally liked cooking and baking, and I watched the early cooking shows on TLC before they got their own channel. This is the closest thing I ever had to a dream career, but I never went after it because no one ever told me that there are professional cooks who make a living cooking good food. There are the TV cooks, with their merchandise and cookbooks and DVDs. There are chefs with expensive restaurants in Big Cities. There are chefs who work for national chains that come up with a hundred ways to sell a burger and fries. But I've almost never seen the kind of cook I wanted to be until I saw Jamie Oliver trying to sell american kids on the idea that food can be healthy, fresh, and fun to cook. He is only six years older than me, but he inspires me with every attempt he makes to put a dent in our grease stained culture of bad food prepared a fast as possible. If I could go back and choose a new path, I'd start with a being like Jamie Oliver.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Oliver