Recently I started writing this long story, something a bit more personal than the goofy Apocalipsis. It is shaping up like a longer narrative (dare I call it novel?) and started out as two parallel stories about characters with a few traits in common, alternating between both stories one chapter at a time. The idea was that as it progressed the reader realizes that they’re actually the same person, one of the stories being the character’s past and the other one his future.
I began writing it to exorcise some recent issues, as a way to crawl back up from the creative wasteland said issues had moved me into, using it as a tool to force myself to create something more intimate, in the manner of my earlier photos, instead of hiding myself behind the patina of sense of humor and sarcasm of my other stories.
At first the story progressed quickly – words came easily, phrases started building up, paragraphs just appeared out of thin air. Every so often I’d hit a bump, but with the help of stubbornness and a few screwdrivers I managed to just ride over them, finishing a section and moving on to the next one.
Then something happened and I stopped writing. The flow of words had become a trickle and I just couldn’t seem to get over the current section. Last Sunday, after trying to force myself to put down 1000 words and not managing to get more than 400 out, I just collapsed on my couch to wonder what the hell was going on.
I went over what I had written, reviewing which chapters managed to hold my interest and which ones I just fast-forwarded through to get to the next one. A pattern slowly emerged. Just as it had happened when I was writing, I realized that the bumps in the story were the even-numbered sections, those set in the character’s past. Those were there only because I had sold myself on a gimmick for the story and wanted to carry it through because I liked the idea. Pulitzer delusions, maybe.
The obvious solution was to cut them out, prune them, leave them in the floor of the editing room. Something stopped me, however. Those chapters were the ones that were more self-indulgent, the ones I had been writing as a way to spite a person, or just to fictionalize some recent events. Bendrix, from The End of the Affair, came to mind immediately: a book takes me a year to write – it’s too hard work for revenge.
I had run out of anger.
Off those chapters went. Put together they constituted less than 25% of what I had written, and the result is something much cleaner, something I want to continue building on top of.
It also gives me the feeling that my subconscious was telling me that the future is much more interesting than the past.
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Ricardo Personal, Stories