Gone about as far as they can go
Jul. 23rd, 2006 01:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pjthompsonFor some reason, I've got that song from Oklahoma on my mind:
Everything's up to date in Kansas City.
They've gone about as far as they can go...
Which, I guess, is how I'm feeling about these old stories of mine set in Dos Lunas County, in rural Southern California. These are contemporary fantasies and I've loved writing them. I even have a coterie of local readers who still ask me now and then to write some more—but I've never been able to make a go of them in the "real world." One, they're too long and novelistic; two, they may not be genre-y enough. As in, a plot you can stick a fork in. They're mostly about internal journeys and magical stuff and a safe, sweet place where bad things don't ordinarily happen. People get sad, sure, but they rarely get hurt bad. Much of my other fiction is dark, sturm und drang, so Dos Lunas has been a haven of sorts. A kind of wishful daydream, maybe. A collection of "darlings," I suppose.
The thing is, I've gone about as far as I can go with most of them. Or maybe I'm just stubbornly holding on to stuff I should let go of. I've been contemplating for some time turning them into a real novel, told in a series of stories from different POV's—and they do hang together in an overall story arc. But that issue of having a plot you can stick a fork in always keeps jabbing me in the rear, that danged pesky conflict stuff. Yet every time I think I've consigned them to the trunk once and for all, they never stay there. Six months or a year down the line, they open the lid and tell me I need to do more work.
And I do. They inch closer to something like a "final" form, but it's a painfully slow process. (I wrote the first of them five years ago.) I don't know if I'll ever get there. But there must still be value in the effort, because they keep insisting, and every time I try yet again to make them better, I learn more stuff. And maybe that's the point of all this effort.
Not everything you write is going to be for the larger world, pro level and fighting to break in. Some things are just about learning to be a better writer, about working and applying the newly acquired skills to the next project. But who knows? Maybe some day I'll learn enough to turn even these stories into a marketable commodity. Or I'll learn to be content with not making them marketable.
Everything's up to date in Kansas City.
They've gone about as far as they can go...
Which, I guess, is how I'm feeling about these old stories of mine set in Dos Lunas County, in rural Southern California. These are contemporary fantasies and I've loved writing them. I even have a coterie of local readers who still ask me now and then to write some more—but I've never been able to make a go of them in the "real world." One, they're too long and novelistic; two, they may not be genre-y enough. As in, a plot you can stick a fork in. They're mostly about internal journeys and magical stuff and a safe, sweet place where bad things don't ordinarily happen. People get sad, sure, but they rarely get hurt bad. Much of my other fiction is dark, sturm und drang, so Dos Lunas has been a haven of sorts. A kind of wishful daydream, maybe. A collection of "darlings," I suppose.
The thing is, I've gone about as far as I can go with most of them. Or maybe I'm just stubbornly holding on to stuff I should let go of. I've been contemplating for some time turning them into a real novel, told in a series of stories from different POV's—and they do hang together in an overall story arc. But that issue of having a plot you can stick a fork in always keeps jabbing me in the rear, that danged pesky conflict stuff. Yet every time I think I've consigned them to the trunk once and for all, they never stay there. Six months or a year down the line, they open the lid and tell me I need to do more work.
And I do. They inch closer to something like a "final" form, but it's a painfully slow process. (I wrote the first of them five years ago.) I don't know if I'll ever get there. But there must still be value in the effort, because they keep insisting, and every time I try yet again to make them better, I learn more stuff. And maybe that's the point of all this effort.
Not everything you write is going to be for the larger world, pro level and fighting to break in. Some things are just about learning to be a better writer, about working and applying the newly acquired skills to the next project. But who knows? Maybe some day I'll learn enough to turn even these stories into a marketable commodity. Or I'll learn to be content with not making them marketable.
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