A Surrender, of sorts

“Character development she says. Conflict, fundamentals. FUCK!”
All but the last bitter ejaculation had been silent, thoughts that snaked a sneer across my face and pushed the ball point pen deep into the paper. I had been sitting there for almost an hour, writing and rewriting opening paragraphs to stories that could be little more than malformed. I had always assumed that I had never written a story of any length because I was, and am, an unreasonably lazy person; that the seeds of my thought, my creative genius had never grown and bloomed because I hadn’t tended and nurtured the budding lives. Flowers. That’s all these were ever meant to be. Short pretty little pieces of life that, ummetaphorically speaking, fucking preschoolers could care for. It’s not as though I was trying to grow a tree. Flowers! Not even a garden. Just enough flowers to make a bouquet. Or a garland.

At that critical juncture in my journey as an author, I was learning that though the lack of time and care was certainly crippling my writing, I had not—she was right—developed the basics required. My characters yellowed and withered, becoming unsightly ornaments rather than nurturing appendages. My plots were either convoluted, twisting and wrapping in such an impulsive manner that it quickly became root bound, or thin and spindly and unable to support characters or conflict. Most of the time, the conflict never managed to grow more than a few lines, and was too withered and bent to even begun a blooming climax.

My shoulders tightened. My breathing came slow and shaky. My lips nearly parted into a bestial snarl. I was about ready to start throwing things, a prettification of my childhood tantrums that I had never really outgrown. I caught myself looking around for something I could fling (that I would not regret later), and calmed my breathing, closed my eyes, relaxed my neck, and picked up the leafs of paper before me. Three sheets, front and back, covered with opening paragraphs, sometimes two, each story separated by evidence of frustration: scribbles, vulgarities in varying sizes, and tears (both kinds). Calmly, as though I had grown wiser in the minute that had passed, I straightened the pages of failure, and slide them into a drawer.

“Someday, maybe,” I said, though I don’t know if I was speaking to myself or the infant fictions.

It must have been at that sitting that I realized that she had been right on every count. That though my words could whisper like wind blown through the wheat, or choke and panic like a room too small with lights too dim and carpeted walls of green and purple, going down, these tricks, these fancy tricks would do me no good. Blossoms, and nothing more, pretty, useless unless attached to the tree.

And so I sat, giving up, or trying, the poetry that made my prose, to learn the basics, trying first to develop a character, his personality, his past, his ambitions, disguised as self-reflexive meta-writing.

So it dawned on me

I realized as I sat to write that I have no stamina in an authorial sense. I lack ideas that could be extended into something long enough to be a short story, in addition to the sticktoitiveness (i love that word) to turn my poorer ideas into lengthy drivel.

Apparently it took Joyce ten years to write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
And Fitzgerald is not so much a storyteller as a word-smith.
The first two of Bradbury's books were thrown together collections of short stories.

I'm not without hope. I hope.

On a similair but slightly bloggier note, I have retrieved my signed copy of Bradbury Stories : 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales. I saw him speak back at good old Long Beach City College, and got a copy signed. Go me.

So on a less bloggy note, be warned that the next thing I post here will probably be lengthy SOC, so the more linear of you... Well, screw you too.

By the Way

By the way... I'm back, kind of, and shall with redoubled and rehalved effort post my brain vomit here.

Huzzah

Tonight

The night is angry, pressing against the creaky walls of my house with such glowering malice that I can see the darkness pushed against my window, glaring at me. I am quite certain that I will die tonight; that the ominous amorphous midnight will seep into seams and cracks in my walls, my sad card-castle walls, fill slowly, ooze into the wall space through nail holes and breaches in wood and plaster. My walls creak beneath the weight and strain, and I’m sure that the hateful unease is creeping thick and slow through some window left unclosed and into my home, into my study where the warm glow of electronics and the reassuring hum of the heater are not strong enough guardians to protect from the night.
How will I die? My roof sighs and nails click in their holes as my house settles under the great mass of the nighttime. How will I die? Will it crush me? Will my home simply cave beneath the pressure? Will the endless night sky, the pallid moonrays, the uneasy flickering of the stars, the terrifying noises of the sleeping word press down and shatter my house like a light bulb that had been sat upon? Or will the walls give way, leaving only the frame and a viscous flood of terror pudding and me drowning in the mess?
I find myself staring at the words in my book, reading not the author’s tale, but seeing my own as I wonder how much longer the window will hold. Not long, I hope. An angry night is a good night for my climax. Last night had been a dark and stormy night, with howling wind and pouring rain, and I dread a death in such a cliché.