Kick it

For the last month (and some), I've been trying to focus on a single story that I started some time ago. I've mentioned it more than once, because at first it was just another story to be finished at some point, and then it was because I was having real trouble trying to get back into it.

So I mapped the bigger sections out. I managed to break it down into chapters. I had a list of what, who, when, where, that sort of thing, but I made sure I left enough… ambiguity, leeway, blank parts in the story so it would still like I was making a story and not painting by numbers. I can’t think of a better way to kill a story than to have everything pre-thought out and half scripted. It kills the joy.

Which is an odd thing to say, because I wasn’t finding very much joy in being able to write this idiot story. I’d ended on a particular part, and couldn’t find an intelligent way to move forward. It didn’t flow. I think I’ve started this next chapter maybe twenty different times, and still no dice. It wasn’t working. Maybe I should have decided to do something different, like pick the story up from a different place and backfill later. Maybe I should have written the parts that came easier and slowly fill in the gaps/chapters at a later time.

I didn’t do that. I kept pushing, kept trying new things and generally tried to bull through. It’s just words, gosh-darn it, and they should go down in a form that I like and suits with the story.

Finally it happened. I sweated, swore, bullied, threatened and ordered a bunch of semi-coherent words to get down on the page, and by Freya’s pigtails, they came! I did a quick word count to see how much I actually managed to barf out. Six-hundred-and-some words! I know it isn’t a lot in the grand scheme of things, but they were six hundred (and some) words that hadn’t been there for the last however-long.

It isn’t a big win when you consider the story is currently at 19k words and feels like it isn’t anywhere close to being done. But it is a big win for me. I’ll take it.