The New and Improved Cynical Idealist

I'm a fraud! A fraud I tell you!

Today is the 2nd day of my 2 days off before I switch to the graveyard shift for a week. My preconditioning to the night shift schedule usually involves me staying up til about 7 or 8 in the morning, but sometimes, whiskey or just plain old tired get ahold of me and I don't make it. I made it to about 4:30 yesterday. In my eyes, that's close enough for me. I woke up at about 12:30 today and went about those routines I'd mentioned earlier. That said, it was about 1:30 or so that I got to sit down and say to myself 'let's write.'

With laptop on lap, and fingers eagerly perched atop the home row, I stared at a white, blank screen. Nothing. Not one thing. Granted the story I'm working on has been kind of an uphill battle, but the idea is there, the plot is there, and the ending is there. But in this instance, the words just weren't. I couldn't place it. Most times I write, it's for a flash fiction or some contest, with a clearly defined prompt and guidelines that I am obliged to follow. Give me 3 words I need to use, and I'll give you 297 more words to put around them.

a shoutout to "Daily Flash Fiction Challenge"   by Arakun the twisted raccoon Which I'll say, if you haven't entered it before, give it a try, it's harder than you think to pull off a story in 300 words.

This story I'm working on however, isn't for a contest, or a prompt. It's just me, an idea, the occasional sip of alcohol or coffee, and my ability to put the idea to paper. If this were a NaNoWriMo sprint, I'd be smashing out a couple thousand words a day. They'd be haphazard and chock full of grammatical fallacy, but they'd be there.

I don't know what to call this, the lack of a metaphorical fire under the @$$, or what, but it just wasn't there. It's not block - the idea is still there and flowing - branching and evolving with other sub-plots and struggles in my head without any problems. Each time, invoking a new drive to research the subject matter further, dive into the unknowns and untapped creativity of this mind of mine, and yet I'm stared at with a blank white screen.

A whole day wasted. Well, kind of. I came up with great dialogues (at least in my mind.) and those aforementioned sub-plots, but the loquacious rambling of the story getting drafted just didn't happen. There are times when I'd be bitter at myself for this, but I have taken a very long time off the habit of daily writing. It's possible that I'm just expecting too much from myself too soon, and I told myself as much. Then I sat down after making supper. One word drooled out, then another. Then a whole sentence. A few minutes in, I had a couple paragraphs.

Then I sat back, read what I had wrote, and thought to myself: 'where'd that come from?'

It wasn't how I intended that particular chapter to go, but then maybe that's what the problem was. I had kind of a linear direction for this story, stifling it's and the protagonist's ability to write themselves. I don't know if anyone else writes like this, but I've never sat down with the exact outline of a story and followed it to the letter. Sometimes the story just needs to do its own thing.

It's a dangerous idea, I know, and can take you down a rabbit hole with no real ending and no real segway back to the original plot line. Still, it's kind of how I've always done things. I don't know, maybe I'm completely wrong in doing it the way I do. I was always told in literature class the methods of story development, and none of those lessons ever said, just sit down and start throwing words out there. What do you think? You're all far better writers than me, what's your take on it?