This hasn’t gone well…
You know that post,
the one two posts down, about playing chicken, well, I lost that game.
That story petered out… And so did my next promising idea as well.
In all these situations, I’d have no problem coming up with the first 30K
words. And in each case, I had a series of incidents lined up that
promised to carry the story forward. But. But the more I thought
about them, the more they did not seem to have the necessary weight,
if you will, to drive the story forward. I write episodic novels and
you need an overarching story to hold them together. However, the
more I thought about these middle episodes, the more they seemed to
be just that, episodes that existed only to fill out the middle and
carry the story on to a not very consequential end. There are some
writers who just write what comes to their head and trust that
everything will turn out alright in the end. Perhaps it does. But I hate plot
holes, especially my own, so I’m not going to have some character do
something just because I need it done. I have to arrange the story so
as to allow the character to do what I want done, and this requires
planning from the beginning to end. I don’t do extensive outlines,
but I do have to have motivations in mind, and I need to place them into the stream of the story from the get-go. All of which means that even though I have
solid beginnings, I’m not going put a lot of effort into writing without
being fairly certain of a worthwhile payoff. So far, that payoff had eluded me.
As I’ve mentioned
before, I’m not under contract, so that I don’t have to
mechanically crank out a good-enough story to fulfill a contractual
obligation. And since I can’t generate any enthusiasm for these
stories, I can hardly expect my readers will either. I do this for
fun, and typing away just to get enough words to call it a book isn’t
fun.
I don’t think this
is classic writers’ block. I can write, I can come up with
something like a story, but I just can’t come up with a story that I
think is worth writing. I don’t want to rinse and repeat stories. I
have my pirates, my bandits, my storms, my romances, and my familiar
characters (under different names), and I don’t want to just drag
them out, dust them off, and reuse them again without bringing out something new.
There is this term
in Taoism, wu wei, which has several subtle meanings, but can use to
mean that by doing nothing something gets done, or that by acting
only when something can be done, that thing can be done without
(much) effort. I’ve decided to apply that principle to my efforts
to write. Clearly I'm not at a point where I can write a good story, so I’ll give
up trying for now and wait upon some sort of inspiration to seep in when I’m not looking for them.
In the meanwhile,
maybe I’ll read some books. I don’t like reading books when there
is one in my head that I’m trying to work out, so that by giving up
trying to write one, perhaps I can get some reading done. Or maybe I
can start painting again. I haven’t been motivated to paint for
some time, so perhaps now is the time to try something new, or
something old, just to see if my creative juices are still flowing. Humm, might have to wait upon wu wei for that to happen as well...
The long and short
of it, however, is that unless lightning strikes, I’m not going to
try to come up with a story until after the first of the year. It
takes me 5 or 6 months to get a story ready for my proof readers, so
that this hiatus does not rule out a book in 2020. But I can’t
promise one either. Indeed, I can’t promise another one ever. With
more than a million words in print in the last decade, I can’t
complain if the well has run dry.
In the mean time, I
may use this space to yell at the clouds. That’s what us old men
do. For all the good it does.
