People like to ask other people questions. One question people like to ask me is what I do for a living. If I was a completely honest person, I would tell them ‘I am a cashier/stocker for a mid size Michigan based Hardware Company’. If I was a complete liar I would tell them ‘I am the personal candy buyer for the President, both current and past.’ But, if I was to land somewhere in the middle of those two extremes, I would tell people that I am ‘A writer’. Technically I am a writer, I just don’t get paid for it. I guess that makes me an unemployed writer, but nonetheless a writer.
I have written hundreds of poems, and around 30 odd short stories, and about three quarters of a book. The book itself was supposed to be a massive undertaking over the previous summer. The only problem was, after starting the book, I suddenly found myself with a real job. So, I began to work non stop all summer long. I would go to work and think of plot points, characters, and dialogue. I would come home and use most of my spare time to work on finishing the book. I wanted to complete it by the first day of Fall (which I failed to achieve), and was averaging about 4 hours of sleep a night. I was sleeping on the floor in my office, because I would sit at my computer and write until I was sleepy, and just simply clear a space on the carpet and sleep right there until I had to go to work in the morning.
After three grueling months of exhausting work, my ideas dried up. I suddenly forgot about the book, and dedicated everything to my real job. Then the weather got cold, and it become even more difficult to write a book whose time line spans only a single summer.
I recently went back to writing it, only finishing a few pages before getting the sudden feeling of deleting the whole thing and starting over. Deleting everything and starting over is not an option though, for the book is almost finished. I don’t believe this book will ever be ‘publishable’ and it’s more of an exercise in whether or not I have to diligence to produce a ‘feature length manuscript’. I’ve learned some great lessons in the process though. Setting word quotas or having an outline is just stifling and unrealistically demanding. I had set goals and marks to hit by certain time periods, and by doing so was forcing myself to ‘fluff’ my prose. There are whole groups of pages I had to delete later on just because they were so haphazardly put in place just to stay within a tentative schedule of completion.
Another great lesson I learned while working on this project is difficulties in point of views. I learned the absolute horror show that is first person narrative. The limits it places on the plot, the over use of the word ‘I’ and the very selfish overtones that will naturally be evident in a story about a person told by that very same person.
I do hope though that I can finish this book one day, if only to say that I finished something that I started. But, I must be honest, I have moved onto a new story, one that seems to be going much better than the previous undertaking (and is told through third person omniscient, which gives me much more liberty). But, as long as I’m still writing, I’ll keep telling people that I’m a writer.
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