Truth is Easier than Fiction
Or why I'm avoiding the eight or nine stories I've started
I don’t know what’s so hard about fiction.
As much as I love writing it, I avoid it like a seventh-grader leaving homework until 10pm. It took me five years to write my last book, and every time I sat down to work on it, it was like…
…like one of those dreams where you’re trying to run, but your limbs won’t cooperate. It’s like trying to sprint through water. I want to sit down and write, but there’s a part of my mind that resists it and pulls like a dog on a leash who doesn’t want to go to the vet. (You know I’m struggling to understand something when I use multiple disparate metaphors in one paragraph.)
It’s not the same with nonfiction.
I can plunk out this newsletter happily on my couch in the morning with my coffee steaming next to me and birds alighting on the feeder. I can throw down the rough draft to a post, like I am now, sitting in a lawn chair in the twilight of my youngest child’s soccer practice. Even when I’m not teeming with some brilliant idea (like Shattering the Magic of Childhood), I can start spewing whatever’s on my mind, and usually that leads to something coherent and mildly interesting.
So in an attempt to harness the powerful ease of this newsletter, I thought I’d share an excerpt from some of my work-in-progress fiction in this post. But reading through the various incomplete pieces, I was just like, man, these are rough. They’ve got some good bones, some potential, but there’s nothing worth sharing — no nail biting cliff hanger paragraph that gives the illusion I am a disciplined, polished writer.
Someday, I’m going to start a website called The Undisciplined Writer. It’ll be full of advice about how to get around one’s lack of motivation and routine — advice I will have to discover first. Ironically, that may never happen, since, hello…undisciplined.
Side Note: I lament the downfall of the term irony. First, sportscasters usurped it as if it were a synonym for “coincidence.” Then, hipsters started wearing things ironically, and the term got watered down further and further until it means nothing. This scene in Reality Bites might help if you’ve understandably lost your grip on irony’s true meaning. Or you can throw your hands up and embrace the notion that the opposite of irony is…
…
Wait for it…
…
wrinkledy!
I’d say the problem is my paying gig.
I sit at my computer a lot of the day editing and writing for dollars, and the last thing I want to do at 5pm is stay at the screen. I want to get up, move, do something with my body and my hands that’s not sitting and typing. I could say I’m too busy with family obligations — soccer games and such — to focus on writing. Indeed, these ARE real challenges.
But if I’m honest with myself, I note I didn’t write over the holidays when I had far fewer obligations and plenty of free time. Although maybe the job thing has some merit, because when did I finish the first draft of my book? When I was barely working. When did I finally get it published, start publicizing it, and plan a launch party? When I was unemployed.
It doesn’t matter, though. The reality is, I have a paying job that I have no intention of quitting. I have children who are now rapidly approaching adulthood, and I have no intention of missing this unique time with them. So either I’m going to find a way to fit fiction writing in, or I’m not.
Fiction, for me, requires intense focus. It’s best done when I have hours of uninterrupted quiet time. To do it well, I fall into the characters, the plot, the story. My outside world falls away. And THAT is the real barrier. It takes a lot of effort to get to that place; it’s even more laborious to pull myself out of it. I find it disorienting to go suddenly from being immersed in a fictitious woman in a town I’ve made up with all of her invented neuroses, back into my house, daily life, and to-do lists. It’s like when your alarm wakes you from a vivid dream, and for a moment, you don’t know where, when, or who you are.
And so fiction is more difficult than this nonfiction casual essay thing I’m doing now. This doesn’t require me to immerse myself in anything but my own brain, which I’ve practiced a lot. Maybe I need to practice short fiction, like I do nonfiction. Hmm…
This newsletter may shortly turn into short stories, with you, my not-so-captive audience, as guinea pigs.
Or it may not. Because, you know, Undisciplined.