Because I Know You Want to Hear All About It But Are Too Shy to Ask...

I've got this miserable pile of random words that I half refer to as a story. I wrote about it a couple of days ago. Remember? Click here if not.

My plan now is to turn the stinky heap into something readable, and I am dragging you along on this tedious and painful journey. Welcome. And enjoy.

Day 1: You already know that Day 1 involved me giving up on the thing before I revisited my breakfast or melted into a puddle of inadequacy tears (yeah huh it’s a real thing!).

Day 2 (not consecutive days): I took on the role of the much needed unpaid intern and began just typing the stupid thing into Word. While I was typing, I did what any good unpaid intern would do, I silently criticized the awful unfocused-ness that I was wading through and thought about all the ways I could improve it. I didn’t get all the way through the “data entry” part of the chore yet, but when I had to set it aside to go pick up my girls from school, I took along my notebook and wrote down all the things that I, as my other self, had thought about while trying not to fall asleep on my keyboard. Things like: Who are the characters? Which of them are necessary? What are their actual roles? Should I change the setting (seriously thinking about this)? What is the point of the story (seriously wondering this too)? It felt like progress.

Then, having exhausted the literary journal full of short stories I’d been reading in the carpool line, I had quickly printed a story I’d found online to read instead. I just found it and printed it, not really looking at what it was about, just to have something to read. It turns out (you’re going to say, “No way!”) that it’s about the same thing as my “story.” Except that it takes place in Turkey, and even if I do change the setting of my story, it won’t have my protagonist in Turkey. Because I’ve never been to Turkey. Oh, and it’s been done. But I asked the same questions about this story that I had been thinking about with my story. Maybe this will encourage my words to get themselves in order and make sense, instead of swarming like rats in a sewer.

(Coming up – Day 3: More typing. Whee.)