Ramblings on writings

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about what my passion is. When I say "passion" I mean that one thing that I am always thinking about, drawn to, wishing I was doing, my inherent talent- not just, "Oh I love potatoes!" (Which I do, but this is beside the point.)

I think my passion is stories, or more to the point, creating them.

I love stories. I love writing them, I love watching them, I love reading them, and I love being immersed in them. Now, I work in a library, which is filled with stories, but I'm not exactly passionate about curating stories. Sharing them is better, and I do a lot of that in my line of work, but I think my real passion- the thing that drives me- lies in creating them. This is something that I don't do much of anymore, either in my daily work or on my off time.

I used to write all the time. If I was at home I was on my computer, music playing, my fingers attacking the keyboard as I tried to get all the words in my head out into coherent sentences. I have a back log of tales that I've created, some of them pretty good and others in need of a thorough edit, but I also have a folder on my computer of stories in progress and they don't just complete themselves. I can't seem to complete them either. The closest thing I've got going for me in regards to my passion is this blog, which is kind of just stories about me and sometimes my dog but is more often me ranting about things that probably aren't important to anyone other than me. It's not very creatively fulfilling if I'm honest, but it's better than nothing.

For those of you unfamiliar with my lone published work, Rosabel, it's a story about a girl pirate. It actually started the same way the song "Yesterday" by The Beatles did- I had a dream. And when I woke up the scene that I had dreamt was so good I jotted it down. Then I started to write. And write, And all I did when I wasn't writing was think about the characters, and where they were going and where they had come from. In the end the scene I dreamed wasn't even in the finished book but the book was finished.

Was it the next Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? No. But I'm still proud of it, and I can say that I've published a book. I cannot, however, say I did it for the money because it's cost more than I'll ever make on it! Still, I felt really creatively fulfilled with that story.

Then my friends started to clamor for a sequel and the well of inspiration dried up like an old prune.

The thing is, I think I write best when I don't have to go after inspiration. It's like the story writes itself. I'm also a lot better at writing dialogue than I am descriptions, which I attribute to reading and studying a lot of Hemingway when I was in high school and college. (If the description of the table does nothing to move the plot along then please don't give me paragraphs telling me about the nails and the screws and the type of wood used to build it. It's a table. I got it. Let's move on.) 

I also have a problem with editing...as in I think I may be addicted to it. I'll sit down with the purpose of writing and then spend an hour going over what I wrote two years ago and changing three words and adding or subtracting a comma or two. Even this blog isn't immune. I edited the second sentence in this paragraph twice before I even got to this one (and I just edited this one, too.) Blame that on being a perfectionist, I guess. 

I've thought about really writing a book about growing up with diabetes. I actually have a NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) story that I've been working on for several Novembers now that I think would be a really great book if I could just finish it. Some of what I've written I think is pretty good, some is just snippets of larger scenes to come, and some is just something something, something happens here place holders so I can keep some kind of a time line going. In short, it's a mess. I know what it's like to grow up with diabetes. I should be able to pound that story out. But for some reason I just can't seem to get it to gel. Maybe it's because it's been a while since I was a teenager, or maybe it's because I'm not sure I like the development of some of the characters and changing them would mean changing entire plot points. Whatever the reason it isn't getting done and I think I only added 1000 words to it last November because I got too bogged down in editing what I'd written the year before.

So where do I go from here with this? I honestly don't know. I'm afraid if I force myself to sit down and write then the joy I find in it will be squashed and it will feel like work, which is the last thing I want to happen. Would I like to be able to make writing a career? Of course I would. But as I mentioned earlier I work in a library. I know how many writers there are. I also know how hard it is to get a book deal, or get something published, and how expensive it is to publish things yourself. I also know that sometimes the things that need to be written (for example, books about kids with diabetes that don't harp on the diabetes thing and show them as normal and capable individuals) need to be written by someone, and I really don't want that person to be Lurlene McDaniel.

I guess maybe it's time to invest in a club.