One of the biggest miseries I inflicted on myself over the last couple of years came from a steadily nurtured guilt over unfinished projects, perhaps in a misguided attempt to gain ‘control’ over my work and, as a byproduct, myself.
I desired willpower, or the illusion of it, but more than anything I wanted to convince myself that if an idea was good enough, interesting enough, I wouldn’t be able to put it down. So, if I squirreled away a piece of work under the sofa, it was just because it wasn’t a strong enough idea. I needed to abandon it to find the proper pearl hiding in my head.
On the other side of the same coin, when my endless story skipping yielded no fruit, I handcuffed myself to my most promising work, rushing to tie the bow on a story or novella in the hopes I’d soon be able to scuttle out of my cave, story aloft – proof I had, in fact, not fallen off the face of the earth. I’d sit and scowl and rewrite the same passage of a bit of work I was sick of looking at by then, because for any worth it must be finished. What’s the point otherwise?
You would think because of this frantic attitude I have a thousand ideas and snippets stowed away just waiting to be unveiled and worked on and polished up. I haven’t. I’ve got a comfortable amount, each redrafted and restarted many times, as though in creating a fabricated clean slate it would excite me enough to see it through to the end – a habit I fall victim to often.
All I needed was willpower! Conviction! A true author – whose passion about their work doesn’t let them rest until an idea is done!
A load of old shit, basically.
One ear full of the stuffy, holier-than-thou and self-titled professionals whose grit and pie-prodding far exceeded my meagre portfolio – I simply wasn’t cut out for real writing; the other a sickly sweet murmur of excuses, assuring that my singular paragraph lost in a notebook I’d probably thrown out would surely sprout wings and fly away for me overnight.
This is all to say, I am much kinder to myself now without letting myself be genuinely lazy. I have a modest but interesting collection of ideas awaiting me, some finished, some an absolute state, some with tweaks to be made – and a lot more patience and understanding to work with them, rather than against them.
I don’t hop, skip, and jump at any given moment, but I know when my energy is waning and I’m about to produce utter crap for the sake of a word count. I don’t fear when I do put work aside, because I don’t ignore it for too long.
So, behold, this absolute masterclass of a transition to tell you I let myself take a break from Chickie this week after some lovely progress, particularly in identifying spots where I’d blatantly gone “eh, I’ll write this bit later”. I am now rediscovering a short titled The Lightning Heartbeat.
From a little digging, it seems like this tale has worn a couple of different masks over the years. It originally started as a man observing strange lightning formations while travelling out to a woodland area to scatter his brother’s ashes.
I believe I stowed it and reworked its kick-off point as I felt I was being cowardly and avoiding character work. I wanted folk to believe the pair had a complicated yet warm relationship while providing no tangible, present moments – simply hinging on recollections and the emotional reactions of one person, and his death just felt unwarranted aside from falsifying that
The Lightning Heartbeat today is a far more, in my humble opinion, atmospheric and brave attempt to portray the worst and the best of two brothers amidst a freak storm and the threat of their inheritance crumbling before their eyes.
Similarly, to a short piece I wrote called The Fall, the central image I’m working towards had stewed in my brain for years. With The Fall it was this enormous cenote on which the other side held a mirror world so incredibly overwhelming to a mere mortal that it easily destroyed them – this changed under the circumstances to be a passing of maternal knowledge and a pond, but the feeling stayed the same for me.
To avoid rabbiting on much more, I will depart with Mavis compensation, and an excerpt.
Through a sheet of rain, Danny circled the house, the ground a glue-trap beneath his feet. In the back garden, with its buckshot fence and steadily encroaching tendrils of woodland, the home’s agony became apparent. One side of the building slumped just enough to be alarming – the ground a sopping, gaping wound, the lower jaw of it compressed with roots and other debris.
A corner of the house was sinking.
It was difficult to tell how deep the root system spread, tucking itself beneath the foundation like a finger parting membrane from flesh, slip-sliding under the home’s pale underbelly. Rotting vegetation and stale water wafted up from the bowels. The rain pelted ever-harder, uselessly trying to wash away the debris.
Danny opened one clenched fist. With speed, he brought the flat of his palm down onto his head once, twice, wincing when his ears sang again and again until the frustration threatening to erupt into catastrophic anger subsided, subdued for but a moment. Dan breathed deep through his nose, droplets catching in his inhale, and stormed back to the front door, head pounding, pulse a frighteningly clear drumbeat.
He felt held together by duct tape.