Writing about writing seems a little strained, but my whole thinking is being taken up by this short story I’m working on, which is problematic. You see, one of the best ways to improve a story is to get away from it for a bit. A solid week of not working on it, of forgetting it, can do wonders for the creative juices. You can see the thing afresh when you get back. Blemishes you were blind to earlier introduce themselves, and ideas you never really flushed out of hiding will suddenly be speaking in complete sentences.
So, a while ago, I had this idea for a character and a story; I wrote a few notes down for it and moved on. Then, when Tim from Secret Fire Books opened submissions to his fantasy anthology, I eventually settled on using that idea. There were a few other ideas I considered, but this one had the allure, that gleam of the grail, as it were.
One idea was a short story already written, but it was a tad too long and didn’t really fit the theme. On the other hand, I hope, next year, to start publishing Eden, which means more for me to say than, I think, for someone else to read. Eden is my starting point, the first time I said I had enough to actually write, not just a short story, but a whole novel. Anyway, the idea did cross my mind to write a short story within the world of Eden and submit it; if anyone liked the short story, they might turn around and pick up Eden: Storm of Monsters (coming soon).
I didn’t go down either of those routes. I wrote something new. I wrote something I am rather fond of. I wrote something, but I don’t know what it is. I have tried to take snapshots, as it were, of a larger story, and I have ended up with a sort of introduction. It is, as it were, the origin story of this character. Some origin stories can be very good: there’s a reason Batman’s gets told again and again. I just am worried that telling an origin story is not necessarily the same thing as telling a story.
That is, then, the little unease I feel: Does the ending work if it’s not entirely an ending? I have completed what I intended to complete; I have shown why a character is what he is. I have tried to write a legend, which is what Tim asked for. I like what I wrote, which is what I asked for. So why do I have this nagging feeling like I’m missing something?
I need to get back to this story, but, as Chesterton points out, you have to leave a place to come back to it. Yet, I find I can’t pry my mind away. I try to work on other projects but keep getting drawn back into this one. I can’t even write a blog post, it seems; I am just thinking about thinking about my story.
