3/21/10

Blues

I'm tired of writing.

Just like that, with minimal work left on this draft, I'm tired of writing. It's not the writing, actually. It's the editing, the constant rigmarole of duking it out with the outline and losing brain waves wondering if certain subplots are interesting, necessary, and/or worth keeping.

I heard someone, an author, answer the question of what he would tell other aspiring authors. His answer? A paraphrase, "Don't do it if you can help it. And if you can't help it - do it with everything you have." (Maybe it wasn't an author. It may have been an actor, or a musician. I can't remember.) I remember thinking that was an awful response. "Don't do it"? How cruel!

Now I understand. Writing is cruel. It was a few days ago, and I was growing weary with this work I have taken on. A thought, a whine, popped into my head. "Why, oh, why am I a writer? Why did I choose this? Why was I chosen for this?" It's the epitome of a love/hate relationship. For something I love so much, it's so much work. But it's not like I can stop. It's not like I can decide that it's "not for me."

Because it is for me. I'm a writer, and it's past whether I like it or not. It's something in my blood, something that spins around and around in my head like a merry-go-round. A demented, assaulting merry-go-round. But it's there, there and unrelenting. Unrelenting. It's not always a bad thing; it can be a good thing. Love is unrelenting. But the thing about writing is that it, too, is unrelenting. It won't give up on me, even when I write wearisome blog posts about it.

So I'll go back to writing. I'm almost finished with The Girl With Violet Eyes. The hardest part of stories for me, and you can ask my friends about this, is I have severe troubles with endings. Awful trouble. Endings is why I'm not published. And an ending is what I'm coming up to. It's staring me in the face with fierce, red eyes with vertical slits and yellow streaks in the iris.

I'm at a crossroads with this ending, and I think my solution may be to write backwards from this point. The ending, the real ending, is written in my head already, or enough of it is. It's that little post-climax, pre-ending that I have trouble with and that I really don't want to deal with right now (hence the blog post). If I work backwards, I'll have everything figured out exactly by the time I get back to it.

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