You can't top that

Part of the reason I started a blog was to get better at writing. The point is to write with enough frequency that certain things became easy. Eventually, my thinking goes, if I can become decent at a few of the baser elements of writing, then writing itself will become easier. The words will at least sound more natural as I hamfistedly put them to print.

Figuring out how to compose a sentence that is more comprehensible than Beowulf read in the Old English was the first hurdle. I’ll let you be the judge of whether I’ve cleared it or not. There were other, tertiary goals, but that was the first big one.

Prior to blog-form, I’d been infrequently fiddling with a bunch of short ideas, which are never to be confused with short stories. That’s the tricky part: making stories out of ideas. It took me a while to realize that. My plan was to write around my subject until a plot and characterization and themes just kind of happened. My college only offered creative writing classes every eighth solstice for a month of alternating weekends. So, lacking access to any greater insight, my way seemed as good as any to begin.

The problem is that I always started with that one thing I liked—sometimes a character, an idea or some kind of conceit—and I’d write until I’d fully fleshed out this particular thing, then I’d continue writing until I was bored, out of things to say, or pissed that my stories weren’t going anywhere. It was most often that last thing.

It was a flawed paradigm that was really only good for two things: making me angry and producing sentences that got progressively worse as the exercise went on. That’s the kind of flat-spin you can’t recover from, just ask Nine Inch Nails, or Maverick and Goose for that matter.

Maybe the worst part is that I’m left with a dozen or so sentences I genuinely like—up to about the first three on any given story.

I could start over, the germ of each idea has held up to repeated scrutiny. There’s just so much baggage there. All that time wrapped up in all those bad sentences. You either try to forget you wrote them, you revise them, or you just keep going and hope that somehow the train wreck untangles itself.

We all know what God says about building a house on a foundation of sand.

He’s against it.

So I never got past that tricky part—making an idea into a story—even once. And I’m too lazy to give the old ideas another try. I also have new ideas I’m afraid to screw up. So my fiction writing amounts to a handful of sentences that might have been something but stand in eternal testiment to the fact that I'm a quitter.

Want to hear some? Too bad, here they are:

Jon was born to the kind of parents who would freely add or sacrifice letters, silent or otherwise if necessary, to create the illusion of free-thought and novelty in the drudgerous and sacred act of child name giving.

Stanley Mortimer O’Brien was a boy given to spurts of intense contemplation. Even as an infant, his mother would often walk into the living room and find him in his playpen, teething ring hanging from the fleshy vice of his mouth, staring at a blank section of wall. During such episodes, he was totally imperturbable; general household racket could do nothing to break his concentration.

Astor Green spent the last moments of his life—thirteen years worth—wishing he had more damn time.

At Maya’s graduation party, with her friends and relatives and parent’s friends and various others gathered around, her mother had delivered a tear-filled speech in iambic pentameter extolling the virtues of her daughter.

By the time Jamie Daniels was nine, he was almost used to getting the piss beaten out of him on a regular basis. There was no reason to think it would stop anytime soon.

I also make up words a lot. That’s one more hurdle to get over I guess.