Thursday, April 21, 2011

This Other Thing

I should be revising a novel; instead I burned a week on one of the worst short stories I’ve ever written. That’s probably not true. I’ve probably written worse, but this one is closer so it feels uglier.

I do this a lot. Write bad stories. Sometimes I even submit them. Sometimes I submit them repeatedly. Then, one day, I read them and I see that they are bad and I feel ashamed about that, although, truly, there shouldn’t be anything shameful about producing bad art. Not giving up your seat on the bus to an old lady – that’s shameful. Failing at art? Hell, least you’re focused on something outside of your own personal comfort, right?

And yet...

I don’t know. I wish I could better identify a bad story early on – like before I even start writing it. Time trickles into this jar beneath me and I can’t get it back and more time just keeps falling and I know this shouldn’t make me all antsy, but it does. I believe I have some great writing within me, but it takes so damn long to extract that I could die before I ever hit the main vein. That’s what this is about, of course. Death being what everything is about. Even love, I think. Although that’s probably one of those simple statements that sounds profound but is really just simple.

I’m a bad reviser. I try to correct every little thing and I obsess on those things too much and just end up making things fake and inaccessible. I can’t seem to shake the belief that all things CAN be corrected with the right effort. I’m not talking writing, although it applies in full to that. I’m talking about my state of being. My mistakes ... well ... I don’t ever believe things are ruined. I believe, if I just work at it, I can fix what I broke. This, I think, seems admirable. Or, at least, that’s what I’d tell someone who told me they don’t give up on fixing what they broke. But sometimes shit is just broke. It’s trashed. And all the tape and glue will never make it anything more than this wad of tape and glue that somewhat resembles an unbroken thing.

I wish I had more time, or started earlier, which is the same thing in a way.

I wrote a story about a rainbow because I dared myself to. It’s pretty good, I think. Then I wrote a story about two women who are married and have no genitalia – because someone suggested I should write such a story. That’s the horrible one referenced above. I would’ve thought the results would’ve been the other way around. Then, again, I thought Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was going to better than 30 Rock. Sometimes premise and potential are nothing. Sometimes it’s just about knowing who you are and not trying to be this other thing.

This other thing. Whatever that is today.

3 comments:

  1. I guess we've all had our fair share of bad stories. I used to take the Jack London approach--submit every story no matter the quality or lack thereof--but I've long since abandoned that practice. It sucks to waste time on a story, but I decided that if I can't stand behind a story's quality, then I don't want it read. Plus, it sucks to promote a story you don't believe in.

    Positives can result from writing bad stories, though. For instance, once I wrote a bad story--mainly to get the idea out of my system--and knew I'd never use it. Several months later, while working on a novel, I realized that the characters in that story would be perfect minor characters in the novel, which was cool.

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  2. I very much believe that we have to write bad stories to get to the good ones. Or at least, that I do. I think every story I've ever published contains some element pillaged from a story that will never be published. And yet, since it's very rare for me to get enough time to write more than a few hundred words in a day, those bad stories irritate the hell out of me.

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  3. I think every writer has written something horrible before--be it a poem, short story, essay, novel, or something else. It's part of being a writer. In fact, I'm sure most writers have written several, if not more, of these less than perfect pieces.

    But I think that these are the ones that shape us as writers. Within every bad piece of writing is a lesson to be learned.

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