I Write

I had a dream. No, nothing as monumental or earth shattering as Dr. King’s dream; but it was a dream, a real dream in the fall of 2007. I’m not sure what triggered it. I have a pretty good hunch; but you never know with dreams. It was a simple, though not very pleasant dream, about a girl and a soldier. I don’t remember many details, just the overall story arc. The dream was brutal and weird, but it stuck with me.

I don’t remember if I expanded the story while I was awake or asleep, either could be possible, or maybe even both. I’ve done it many times before, especially when I was young. Always needing hours to fall asleep, I would lie in bed and make up stories or remember snippets of a dream and weave them into a story. Sometimes, I even continued expanding the story after I fell asleep and then expanded it even more the next day, or night as it was. I would continue until the story ran its course and I had nothing more to add, and then it would go away. As easily as it had appeared, it was gone, forgotten, never to be remembered again, even if I tried.

And so it happened with this dream. But this dream, this story, didn’t let go, week after week, month after month, it continued and refined itself in my mind. It wasn’t about the girl anymore, but about her son. I’m not sure when the change happened or how. By Christmas, the story was so big and complicated I started to think about writing it down.

That was a strange development. Never before had I even considered putting any of my stories on paper, they were just little pass-times to occupy my mind until I fell asleep, always gone as suddenly as they had appeared and hardly ever mourned. But this was different, I knew; this had depth, history, meaning; and characters, characters who were people I knew intimately and whom, I felt, I would kill if I didn’t capture their story on a more permanent medium than my mind. Call me crazy, call me Ishmael, I don’t care; it was a feeling, an urge, that is hard to describe and maybe even harder to understand if you’ve never experienced it. I did, and it didn’t let me go. Some might say it’s a calling, others, an obsession; but whatever it is, I followed it and, though I never aspired to become a wtiter, I sat down and started to write.

I started with an outline. As I wrote, I kept getting caught up in scenes that suddenly flowed out of my fingers onto the screen. It felt good whenever it happened, but it definitely distracted from getting the outline done. By the time I did, I had quite a few files with partially written scenes from all over the story. The story was big, and it was still not done, there were so many characters and events, it boggled my mind.

I took a break from writing in spring 2008. I’m not sure if that was a good idea or not, at the time I thought it was as I was a bit burned out. But, though my writing stopped, my plotting did not, and by the time I took up my pen again in June, the story in my mind had changed enough to make my outline almost obsolete. That was okay, though, I could still use the scenes I had written and use the outline to remind me of the basic series of events.

I sat down to write, but immediately ran into one humongous dilemma. I didn’t know where to begin. The story I had in mind actually happens over a time span of six to eight years about twenty-something years after the events in my dream and involves a steadily increasing cast of characters. It was so huge. And had so much background information I couldn’t just cover the time span I considered the main, or actual, story. I knew I had to explain the characters, describe how they got where they were and why. It took me weeks to decide; all the while I continued to write scenes. It looked like a patchwork with huge gaps in between completed and partially completed scenes.

I finally made up my mind, there was nothing about it, I had to start at the beginning; but which beginning?

It was hard to decide, each of these events were important, but my dilemma was that what happened in between them was not. At the time, I wasn’t even sure what exactly happened during those time spans. It was like a hurdle race, the hurdles, the highlights, were the important parts, and I knew exactly what happened in those minutes, hours, or days. But in between, while the feet are pounding the ground, it was just a matter of getting from point A to point B, from one hurdle to the next. Funny, writing this now, I realize that most of the story I had at the time was like that. Important events separated by unimportant time spans. Maybe not quite unimportant, things happened during those times, but the important thing about them were not the details but that time passed.

I tried different approaches, even wrote multiple beginnings, and after hours, (or days?) of contemplation and multiple conversations that showed me this story was worth telling, I finally decided where to begin.

So, I started to write and as I did, details started to fill themselves in, details of what happened in between the big events. But the more I wrote, the more my son’s comment, I wasn’t writing a story but a saga, became true. I didn’t care; I just wanted to get it all down. I wrote and wrote and when I got stuck and didn’t know how to continue where I was, I skipped ahead to another area in the story. It went well, at least for some time.

And then it came to a screeching halt.

I found myself re-writing sentences and paragraphs again and again, unable to match my words on the screen with the pictures in my head. I knew I shouldn’t let myself get caught up in the details, but I couldn’t help it. It was frustrating. I worked for hours each day, producing no more than a few sentences each time. The highs of writing just as fast as my fingers could move across the keyboard were gone and I was left to battle for each and every word. As days turned into weeks, my frustration turned into despair.

I wrote the above (minus the last paragraph) in late 2009 in one sitting and then filed it away incomplete — I guess it wasn’t ready to be finished.

It is 2015 now and I am still struggling to finish the first draft of my story. I have attended writer’s workshops and college classes in the hope that my problems were caused by my inexperience in and lack of knowledge of the writing craft and subjects my story touches on. I would like to say they have helped, at least some.

I now know what part of my problem is; I have allowed my inner critic to become an intricate participant in drafting anything I write — even writing emails takes hours now. On top of that I have spent most of the last six years doing what, during a workshop I attended, one of the speakers called ‘The Writer’s Dance’, finding anything and everything to do but write my story, and paying for it with a daily guilt trip. But knowing the problem does not equate to solving it.

I am not giving up, though. The story has not let me go, and it continues to evolve, at least in my head. Details, I previously did not know existed, reveal themselves bit-by-bit, filling in background information and the story itself. I will continue to fight to put it all down, and maybe in the process discover what it takes to become a writer. Until then,

I WRITE

The other day you told me, “It finally sank in”,

You have only months until you new life is to begin.

You said you were nervous and not quite convinced,

You had what it took to handle this college thing.

I heard your apprehension and knew quite clear,

That school itself wasn’t your biggest fear.

With no one to help tackle

The surrounding life’s hassles,

The thought of being on your own had you all frazzled.

But Son, look at your past

And you will learn fast,

You have all the skills you need

To be successful and complete.