What If, My Muse

So here it is February already, well over a month into the year, 6/52-nds gone (unless my deficiency at fractions has misled me), and my resolution to write 11 short stories this year is faring poorly. Which is not to say that I haven't been writing at all, per se, or doing things related to writing. I certainly have been thinking about it an awful lot. I've tarted up my sister site where I've got a couple short stories posted, and I added a few more. Sure, all of them were written back in my creative writing hey days in the 90's, but I may have tweaked a word choice or two before I clicked "publish" and moved on.

I've also pulled out all of my old journals where I used to lazily jot down story ideas and have gone through them with (the literary equivalent of) a fine-toothed comb to see if anything there is worth writing. And sure, there are a few possibilities.

I started writing one such story in January, an idea I had years ago, essentially a horribly complicated Möbius Strip of interwoven characters and plots which sounds like it will be a good one but probably not the best story to start with. A page into it and I gave up. I felt like trying to lift 300 pounds of free weights after a decade away from the gym. Too much for these poor, tired, neglected muscles.

I've got another story I want to jump into, but it needs some work before I can start. I used to think of story ideas like uncut diamonds (a poor metaphor, but bear with me). I'd come up with something and need to turn it around in my head over and over, whittle away at it to see if there was a workable gem underneath, sometimes shifting characters about, adding plot elements, taking them away, turning the whole thing on its head and looking at it from a different angle, again and again. Sometimes, most times in fact, after all of that thinking, there wasn't anything left. I'd whittled it down to nothing. And then I'd move on to another idea. And believe me, back in the day, the ideas were aplenty.

Sadly, that's not the case anymore. I've realized something, as I've been thinking about writing these 11 short stories: I've lost the ability to actively "What If."

For those of you not familiar with the term, this is the ability to look at a situation—could be anything from a glimpse at a stranger in a shopping mall, a scene in a movie, maybe even a random memory just passing through your head—pause it in time and think: "what if something different happens now?" This is how stories are born. At least, that's how they get started in my head. I used to do this constantly, so often that I didn't bother writing most of them down because I took for granted that I would have an inexhaustible supply. Ideas were born from the most minute things all the time.

I think part of it had to do with the general distractedness of youth. Time spent in front of TV and movies where you're inundated with changing images every 3.5 seconds leads to a natural state of attention deficiency. That combined with a natural propensity for mental wandering led me to see most things around me as series of "What If's." I allowed (in fact, encouraged) my mind to wander freely. If I saw a couple arguing in a parking lot I would immediately construct a scenario explaining how they ended up there or where they would end up next. If I saw an old building, I would think of what it was like back when it was new and who might have lived there. Or even who was living there now, and why. I wrote an entire short story based on the fact that one day, in an elevator at school, I noticed that the colors behind the buttons had changed. (Someone had replaced the light orange bulbs with a slightly darker orange.) All sorts of scenarios ran through my head on any given day. Whenever I needed a new "rough diamond" to work with, I just grabbed the next one that came by. Invariably my mind would catch on a detail somewhere and simply venture down a different path that always started with "What If?"

And dammit if I'm just not doing that as much these days. I was aware of this decline in my creative process as I started on this "11-stories-in-1-year" resolution. My "What If's" lately (over the past decade) have been fewer and farther between. And believe me, I've been writing them down. I don't take them for granted any more. Now that I need them again for this little project, I find myself struggling. Can I recover the automatic mental divergences that I used to take for granted?

So, here I am with a year 6/52-nds gone and a big fat ZERO stories written so far. I chose the number 11 mostly because I knew that November would be a month off for me as I intend to do NaNoWriMo again and work on a novel which leaves 11 months left to write stories. If you assume one per month (which is, itself, quite aggressive considering that at my peak I was churning out maybe 6 a year) then I'm already behind. Inauspicious beginnings.

Then you have my inclination towards procrastination. Case in point: I had a couple hours set aside to write on this lovely Sunday afternoon, all of the weekend chores done, and K and I quietly working in our respective offices. I've got the above mentioned story that I want to work on fresh in my mind. The laptop is charged. Nothing to stop me.

And instead I write this long blathering missive whining about the loss of my creativity.

Figures.