. Spinning .

It seems I want what I have sadly little talent for.  And while I press on to learn the new, the varied forms of narrative to find something I can settle into, I’m only shoveling out more paths that lead to nowhere.  The shoveling is hard work, the learning of new means and methods to tell story.  The program tools that are beyond my level of sophistication in my writing make it a trying of my talents, skills and limits.  Maybe it’s all just window dressing and a sham; maybe you just can’t make, they say, a silk purse from a sow’s ear.

I have arisen with the same discontent I pulled in with me under last night’s covers.  A sad sense of knowing that a yearning is ever out of reach.  It seems the more I rail against the poetry I read that is read and wonderfully accepted by the periodicals and anthologies of just the past few years, the further away I seem to be in mind. 

I want them to be perfect.  I need them as a light to shine the way.  And so I pick my way among them, find a nugget here and there but mostly rock.  My tales are not of struggles of the masses of oppressed, or dreamlike images of a pretty foreign land.  My footsteps follow those that have long settled neath the earth, covered, like the sheets above my head.

Poetry has taken on a torch I want to hold, and yet my words are more likely to be crisped by flame.  What am I seeking, why do I fight, or is it something that I shall never comprehend?  At least I must know this and look up to the light to see more clearly what I am and what I’m not.

I’m back working on a story I wrote a while ago, still trying to get past a certain point and build up to a climax.  But now I’m beginning to wonder if it’s already taken too long to get there.

Told in the first person, a woman’s relating of her day and bits of her life are primarily a character study; that is, if the woman herself is interesting enough.  While I think I may have given a good idea of where her head is at by her thoughts and interaction with her family, it may still be too boring without the addition of some more mini-dramas or incidents that build up to a climax and resolution of sorts.  What I had originally written was dull, an ending unworthy of the buildup of interest, if not action.  While I still can pick out words and phrases that work better here and there, I’m coming to the same point without enough momentum to bring it to a confrontation and a close.

The voice itself may be a problem; it is one of resignation and subtle control.  It is lacking self-confidence, yet is completely in charge of the environment in which the characters live.  It seems too laid back, I’m beginning to suspect, except in its own assumptions, to get worked up to a major conflict.  There may need to be more tension in the beginning.  This is one problem with first person point of view and trying to establish a strong first person viewpoint while at the same time, eventually showing that that viewpoint is mistaken.

Hmmm.  Gotta put more time into understanding this lady, and finding out the best way to give her what she needs, and the opportunity to face it.

There’s never been any question but that besides being informational, story is a form of entertainment.  Books, movies, television, games; all a world where we can, in one manner or another, read ourselves into a different place and time than we take for our present existence.

Do we magnanimously write then for the pleasure of others?  To entertain them?  To gain for ourselves some small amount of compensation in glory or in coin?  Yeah, mostly, especially if self-satisfaction comes under the glory heading.

But wait!  That’s not all!  For no additional cost, we’ll send you on an all-expense paid week or month or year in another world as well!

Fun to enjoy another’s choice of where you want to linger over pages or a screen for a little while.  More fun, I think, to pick and choose, and write your mental trip yourself.  From sunny days of sparkling snowy fields and old stone walls that smile beneath their winter hats, to Mars and New Atlantis and the freedom born of short story where you don’t even have to waste the time to sleep or go to work. 

For me, that’s what my writing is about, but need I justify?

When the left side whispers to the right, "why bother?" it wonders, why, indeed, at all?