I really need to start writing.

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 03:00:20 GMT

I know, I've been saying this for years. Friends and family are probably so inured to my claims that I will someday write a book that it slips past their ears unnoticed these days, ghostly as those "Apple Maggot Quarantine Zone" signs that no Washington resident can definitively say still dot the shoulders of local interstate highways. But really, I do need to start writing. In less than a month, I'll be forty years old; although I'm not (quite) shallow enough to be depressed or panicked by this fact, I am very annoyed with myself for not producing a substantial work of fiction by now. Looking at so many of my favorite fantasy and science fiction writers, I see that their best works were produced long before the age of forty; far more worrisome is the fact that so many continued to write into their fifties or sixties but generated nothing worth reading. I fear the apparent loss of true creativity that comes with age. I fear my prose becoming plodding and predictable, or strangely disjointed, before I have even created one magnificent flight of fancy. And equally, I fear sitting down and writing that flight of fancy, only to discover that it's too late: I've already lost the spark of creativity, or perhaps I never actually had it at all. The only way to find out is to write.

So why haven't I done it yet? It's not that I don't have a world to write in. I've been building one for years; pages of notes, descriptions, questions, and tidbits outline the the geography of my fancy. These places and their inhabitants have become as real to me as all the distant terrestrial lands I've never visited. And I look forward to discovering them alongside my characters, visiting the sights, sampling the local delicacies, seeing all the joy, fear, camaraderie and cowardice, delight, depression, sacrifice, confusion, love -- all the things that make up a life -- as I build that journey out of words. The world is there. The characters are there, on their marks and ready to depart. It seems the only one not ready to go is me, and I'm not even sure why.

I could say it's because I write for a living, so by the time I get home at night, I don't want to sit back down at the keyboard. (Actually, I say this all the time.) I'm not sure that's the answer, though. I could say it's because no one would be interested in reading it, but not only do a couple of folks hassle me periodically to get my butt in gear and write the blasted thing, I also think that writing just for other people is foolish. If you're not writing for yourself as well, you're not going to put your soul into it. And I definitely want to read it myself, so that's not a good answer either. I could say that it's because I don't really know enough about people to make truly believable characters, or enough about politics or social dynamics or geography or architecture to make a really believable world, but the fact is that nobody can ever know everything, and eventually you have to just sit down, open a blank document, dust off the keyboard, and just muddle through.

So again, no real answers. It's not that I haven't thought about starting a million times, but I always allow myself to be sidetracked. Oh, I should read more reference material on feudal societies, or arctic survival, or agriculture, or the construction of Roman sewers. Oh, I really need to do a few more things around the house before I tackle a writing project. Oh, I should take another look at some books by my favorite authors to see how they handle certain textual situations (I once spent about five hours analyzing other writers' use of the semicolon, heaven help me). Oh, I don't really have time right now, because I need to go somewhere in an hour, and an hour isn't really enough time to get anything written. Oh, I'm almost finished with this videogame, so I'll just get through the last couple of levels first and then I'll write. And somehow, the writing never actually happens.

Why not? Wouldn't it have been so much easier to just write the story years ago instead of avoiding it, over-analyzing it, chastising and accusing and disliking myself for not getting started, not working on it, not being long since done? Why am I such an idiot, or a slacker, or a coward that I can't do the one thing I said thirty years ago that I wanted to do? Where the heck is my book? I don't have any answers. I have an industrial-sized sack of excuses, but no actual answers, and that means no good reason to keep procrastinating. Here's my keyboard, and it can generate words of fiction as easily as it does blog entries.

It seemed an unlikely place to start a war.

There. Now I just need to write the rest of it.

Cindy Lue Grue: Books

I really need to start writing.