Returning To Me (A.K.A. Who cares?)
I am finally sitting down to work on it again. The book, the first draft of which I last touched over a year ago. I have been avoiding it this long because of the very pain it gives me as I open this up and prepare to go to work.
This book originated as a tale I started telling my wife over two years ago. I spent eight months telling her a story the entirety of which I can never hope to get on paper. Still, I enjoyed that time, telling this story to my wife, and I sat down to put it on paper and share with others besides her. I had always been better orating than putting on paper, but having already done the first, I thought the latter would be easier handled. I was wrong. It was difficult, and having already told the story, albeit this part being eight months earlier, I still found it difficult to put the words the way I wanted to in order to get the story across.
I probably wouldn't have succeeded at even going that far, if not for the fact that I was informed that several people were interested. One in particular. As such, I worked on getting it out on a regular basis and getting it to this person so that we could discuss it, I could get her input, and I could polish it up to share with the world this little world I created.
I outpaced her, providing more material than she was reading at the speed that she was covering it. Still, I provided a joint ultimatum. I would finish the first draft by Christmas so that it could all be in one piece and we could work on it together. I missed my deadline for myself by a little bit. I finished it by the end of the year. She missed the deadline. It is gathering dust on her desk, over a year later.
This would be bad enough if it weren't for the fact that the ending sucks. It sucks because I took a couple of the aspects of what was going on, jammed them on and capped the end, so that while it looked horrible, it would give the idea I was working on for when I reworked it with her. Why did I cap a crappy end on it? Simple. I sold out to a lie. The lie that someone was actually interested. A lie that I clung to.
I minimized my own work for the sake of what I thought ultimately would be forward progress. It wasn't. The couple of failures I recognized were affirmed by the only person who actually has backed up their own claim of interest (thank you Lisanocerous), and I am left with working on it on my own, as I would have been originally.
What is the problem? Without interest, what is the point in writing it? If my creations will never see the light of day, why let them gather dust on pieces of paper when they could be doing the same thing inside my head? Yet, all things being said, I will continue. I have a new reason. I will prove that if nobody else cares enough to walk through something that is this important to me; if nobody close to me can understand that they play the roles of friends and family with reasonable facsimile, while most of them don't know the slightest thing about who I really am; if my willingness to surrender myself has made it unnecessary for anyone to bother to know what's going on in my head, then fuck it. I will prove myself for once by myself. I will reach beyond those people who are comfortable with minimizing the reality of me, to those who don't know me well enough to do that yet. I will prove to the strangers out there all of this that I can't show the people who claim to know me.
Finally, I will do it because I have come to know these characters so well that I can't help but declare that they have the right to live, even if those closest to me refuse to acknowledge the most minor of possibilities that I can provide that life.
So that is what they will get. Fiction or not, this will be their life, or something close to it.
This book originated as a tale I started telling my wife over two years ago. I spent eight months telling her a story the entirety of which I can never hope to get on paper. Still, I enjoyed that time, telling this story to my wife, and I sat down to put it on paper and share with others besides her. I had always been better orating than putting on paper, but having already done the first, I thought the latter would be easier handled. I was wrong. It was difficult, and having already told the story, albeit this part being eight months earlier, I still found it difficult to put the words the way I wanted to in order to get the story across.
I probably wouldn't have succeeded at even going that far, if not for the fact that I was informed that several people were interested. One in particular. As such, I worked on getting it out on a regular basis and getting it to this person so that we could discuss it, I could get her input, and I could polish it up to share with the world this little world I created.
I outpaced her, providing more material than she was reading at the speed that she was covering it. Still, I provided a joint ultimatum. I would finish the first draft by Christmas so that it could all be in one piece and we could work on it together. I missed my deadline for myself by a little bit. I finished it by the end of the year. She missed the deadline. It is gathering dust on her desk, over a year later.
This would be bad enough if it weren't for the fact that the ending sucks. It sucks because I took a couple of the aspects of what was going on, jammed them on and capped the end, so that while it looked horrible, it would give the idea I was working on for when I reworked it with her. Why did I cap a crappy end on it? Simple. I sold out to a lie. The lie that someone was actually interested. A lie that I clung to.
I minimized my own work for the sake of what I thought ultimately would be forward progress. It wasn't. The couple of failures I recognized were affirmed by the only person who actually has backed up their own claim of interest (thank you Lisanocerous), and I am left with working on it on my own, as I would have been originally.
What is the problem? Without interest, what is the point in writing it? If my creations will never see the light of day, why let them gather dust on pieces of paper when they could be doing the same thing inside my head? Yet, all things being said, I will continue. I have a new reason. I will prove that if nobody else cares enough to walk through something that is this important to me; if nobody close to me can understand that they play the roles of friends and family with reasonable facsimile, while most of them don't know the slightest thing about who I really am; if my willingness to surrender myself has made it unnecessary for anyone to bother to know what's going on in my head, then fuck it. I will prove myself for once by myself. I will reach beyond those people who are comfortable with minimizing the reality of me, to those who don't know me well enough to do that yet. I will prove to the strangers out there all of this that I can't show the people who claim to know me.
Finally, I will do it because I have come to know these characters so well that I can't help but declare that they have the right to live, even if those closest to me refuse to acknowledge the most minor of possibilities that I can provide that life.
So that is what they will get. Fiction or not, this will be their life, or something close to it.
posted by Wanderer at 8:09 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home