why i can't write fiction
While I've been working on getting dark country ready for release, I've taken a bit of a hiatus these past three weeks or so on new things, using that morning time, when I get out of bed early enough, to do some promotion stuff. I had also paused on the spell poems project, since I felt a hesitation n where I was going and what I wanted it to be. Since I feel like I am knee deep in writing these days anyway (editing older work, revising some other bits, writing blog posts, and creating a lot in general (this includes some new visual things.) I feel less guilty not writing everyday--at least in small stretches. After a month or so I usually get anxious that I need to move along with things--that if I want to get through my rather large list of inspirations and potential projects, I'd better get a move on. But I give myself small breaks in between stretches of productivity.
When I come back to things, I usually find that ideas are flowing better if I was stuck. That I have, maybe not even consciously, been working on the kinks in my head without knowing it. My funk last week (spawned mostly by economic anxieties as I get older and retirement inches closer in the next 20 years) had me writing--not poetry--but a little bit of horror genre fiction that I thought might eventually be a novel over the past few days first thing in the morning and enjoying that process. (all of this spawned by the feeling that fiction writers at least occasionally have things like advances and movie options.) But looking at it after the initial bloodspill onto the keyboard, it's competent, but I don't like it as much as my poems--the freedom that having very few rules in terms of structure and plot allow. It's ok, but nothing special (I've often thought I am harder on the fiction of myself and others than I am of poetry.) I was about 6,000 words in when I looked at it again last night before bed, and well...meh...
I kept thinking my plot was decent, but wouldn't this be better in verse? More poetic, whatever that means? More fragmented and circular in its logic? So I filed it away and maybe will go back and rethink it as a different genre. I love world building and narrative, but I like it on my own terms. From the time I was 12 and trying to write a horror novel inspired by Stephen King and his ilk, I've made vague, unsuccessful gestures toward fiction. In college, I took a workshop and wrote these long, Faulknerian studies that made no sense and prompted the instructor to say I'd be better suited for poems. Later, when I was stalled out on verse in my summer off from the elementary school library job, I filled notebooks with stories I thought might be worth some income (hilariously, I never even typed them up, much less sent them out. ) From the time I was just beginning to publish and write a lot of poems in 2001 or so, I was devoted to my main genre--even if over the years, that meant I wrote a lot of prose poetry--a lot of things that told the sort of stories I would tell if i were writing short fiction or novels. I am also led predominantly by image, by sounds, in a way that I feel is underused when I'm trying to write fiction. It makes the fiction seem flat and the voice uninteresting to me once I've gotten everything out on the page. The story-building process is enjoyable, but once that has worked it's magic, it feels less alive for me. How do I tell a story that is still readable? Isn't it more interesting to feel the story, to build it from parts? Rather than to lead the reader on a well wrought path, to set the reader loose in the forest and whatever happens, happens.
The good news is my rather ho-hum efforts recommitted me to spending what valuable, so very limited time time we have as mortal humans on a dying planet on poetry rather than trying to beef up my income with mediocre fiction, no matter how much the spectre of old age and instability haunts me. There is no market for poetry. No income beyond tiny bits here and there and a lot of silence in the canyon. No way out I suppose, even if you do the things fancy poets do like win awards and residencies and well-placed reviews. Even success never looks quite like financial stabiliy. Maybe just embracing this instead of fighting it will put my mind at ease and stop those intermittent panic attacks. Today I woke up and over breakfast, wrote a really good piece in the spell project and felt the blood rush into my limbs again. Sort of like treading water and enjoying the lake while it may still swallow you yet. But oh, the woods are dark and deep...
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