In Utero

Having a bit of a crisis of faith as of late.

I've picked my material apart little too much. Too much thinking has weakened my focus and resolve, as well as my confidence in the stories themselves.

A friend of mine was pregnant a few years ago, and on her Facebook she was begging the baby to come out of her in the last few weeks of carrying. I imagine that feeling of wanting something out of herself, to see the culmination of the process manifested and the thing brought into the world....I think that would be very much like what I'm feeling.

The last two weeks, as good as they've been at times, were false labor. The real deal hasn't started yet, and I don't know how to induce the muse. And, lord God, am I scared of miscarrying this thing. I'm so invested in it that I don't know what I'd do.

Of the more than four thousand words I have managed to write on the current project, I'd estimate fully a thousand or more are going to have to be trashed. That's a big portion of what I've produced, and it sucks that I put that much work into something that I don't like and doesn't represent what I was trying to show at all. Its just not good, compelling, or true to the concept. But at least I know that.

A friend of mine is a painter. He works with oil paints and he is very good with them (good enough that a single piece of his work sells for more money than I currently make in a year). One day we ran into one another and I asked him how the work was going that day. He told me it had been a very frustrating day because the light on some flowers he had been painting was not correct and that he was going to have to scrap all of the work and redo the flowers. He said he could tell it really wasn't working for awhile but that he'd kept on pushing through until he realized what was wrong. It was very impressive to me that he could spend hours working on something as small as some flowers; it was more impressive that he would erase hours worth of work because he'd realized he wasn't doing something correctly.

The lighting was off in my story, too. I wasn't representing the events accurately, and now I have to tear what I made down and rework it. But at least I wrote something; I plowed on with the words even when I didn't have clear sense of where I was going. I might have to backtrack a bit, but now I am more sure of what I'm doing.

Hey, you know what? I feel better. Thanks blog! This is exactly why I started you.


Edit:

Later

Well, its been nearly five hours since I published this entry, and I've spent most of that time in my chair trying to start a piece that's been on my mind for years. Turns out it is crap. Another false labor.

But I've kept my butt in the chair, and I've given it my damnedest. There's that. There's also the realization that my central concept isn't bad. I'm going to try something different with it. I might do more tonight, or it might be tomorrow before I tackle this again.

I'm frustrated. No doubt about it. But I'm here, and I'm trying. Failing is much better than not trying and regretting it. That's cliche, but its true.