What I'm Writing (Or Thinking About Writing)

Wheatyard is still simmering on the back burner - the latest revisions are ebbing and flowing through my mind but remain mostly uncommitted to paper.

I'm also hoping to revive my story cycle on Chicago neighborhoods (whose previous working title Scent of Wild Onions I've grown tired of and am planning to change). When I set it aside last year, I had one full draft of a story ("Washington Heights") and a second that was about three-fourths complete ("Pilsen" then, though I'm thinking of changing it to "Canaryville" - it's an interior story, and the specific setting isn't critical), and back then held little hope for any further work.

But reading Charles Simmons Wrinkles (reviewed here) happened to get me thinking about the Chicago book again. Simmons' book is very fragmentary in structure, presenting scattered shards of the protagonist's life, and as I read I found myself thinking about the conceptual similarities to my Chicago book. True, Simmons' book is a novel about a single character and mine would be a collection of stories about various neighborhoods and characters, but I realized that my book would share some of that fragmentary aspect. So although my book won't be anything like Simmons', I'm hoping that it might at least serve as inspiration for working on mine again.

I have a few more neighborhoods in mind - Hermosa, Dunning, McKinley Park and the (ungentrified) South Loop - and have begun to (very vaguely) conceptualize characters and plots. As was the case with the first two stories, I will still try to have each story draw inspiration from and riff on a single line from each of the songs on Lou Reed's New York album. I'm sure the whole Reed thing probably sounds convoluted, but since the first story arose out of a single line from "Halloween Parade" that popped into my head one morning, I really want to continue with that concept unless it ultimately proves itself impractical and unworkable.

But all of this pondering and conceptualizing might be nothing more than a smokescreen. Because, to be totally honest, that "thinking about writing" clause above is an unfortunately accurate assessment of the current state of my writing. I've written very little over the past few years, as I've rarely found either the inspiration or motivation to do the necessary hard work. Sometimes I think that I'm absolutely, positively a writer, but other times it's almost as if being a writer is nothing more than how I want to think of myself. My professional career is doing nothing for me right now other than providing a regular paycheck, so maybe I think of myself as a writer to have something to identify with. Right now I'm spinning my wheels, and "thinking about writing" is, for the most part, as close as I've gotten to actual writing for quite some time. I'm thinking that I either need to get out of this funk, or else realize it's not a funk at all and that maybe I should quit pretending I'm a writer. Sorry to get all confessional on you, but it's something that's been nagging at me lately.