What I'm Writing

You heard me, writing.

In the past, I occasionally posted "What I'm Writing" updates here, most of which were stories and novellas which would ultimately remain unfinished. Though at first I might have had a spark of a great fiction concept that excited me - enough so to shout it to the blogosphere - for whatever reason I saw very few of those concepts through to fruition. Getting publicly excited about ideas that would never go anywhere seemed like an increasingly pointless exercise, so I ended the updates. I decided that I'd abandon that practice until I finally had something significant to mention.

And it seems that time is now.

Last summer I revived my concept (yes, yet another concept) for a Chicago-based short story collection that used Lou Reed's New York album as a framework. I first kicked a few stories around several years ago, but like so many other writing projects I simply let the rest languish. Then just about a year ago I had a sudden inspiration - which I'll discuss explicitly in the near future - that threw me back into the collection. Suddenly it seemed like the collection had real potential, and I set a concrete goal for myself: I would write the first draft of each of the remaining twelve stories (for fourteen stories in total, one for each of the songs on New York), one per month, over the following year. With my first attempt at a story collection (circa 2005) having turned out to be a unsatisfying hodgepodge of styles, voices and themes, with the new collection I thought it would be best to create all the first drafts first, before even beginning to edit. This way, I hoped, I could polish the stories, one after the other, and create a steady tone and what I hoped would be a more unified collection. And besides getting an even tone, I knew that this method would greatly increase the likelihood of ever gaining a finished product - if I tried to write each story one at a time, from first draft through endless revisions, the challenge of doing so over and over again, fourteen times, would have been overwhelmingly daunting. I’m not a highly productive or motivated writer, and it doesn’t take much of an obstacle for me to abandon work that once seemed promising.

This week, I finished the first draft of the fourteenth and final story in the collection, and I'm quite pleased with what I've come up with so far. The next step is to transcribe the stories from longhand (written in composition books, mostly on the train to and from work) onto my laptop, and then the editing can begin. Transcribing will probably take a while, but I'm sure it will feel worthwhile and not so tedious, since I have fourteen vivid stories (or the potential for such) to work with, and I'm eager enough to see the final product that all of the labor will have real meaning.

It's been a long, drawn-out process, but one that has really excited and engaged my imagination. During the past six months I've had, for various reasons, periods of erratic sleep, and while lying awake in bed at night I've often found myself working out story ideas in my head, which not only fueled my creativity but also helped pass many long and restless hours until I finally fell asleep or it was time to get up. My current job is also fairly uninspiring and has few intrinsic rewards, and I'm grateful that I've had my writing - and this story collection concept in particular - as a critical creative outlet.

It's been a slow couple of years, but I finally feel like I'm a writer again.