I’ve started writing a story. An actual piece of fiction that has reached critical mass — more than a thousand words in a row with named characters.
This is a different type of piece for me though. It’s based in real life on real events, but from someone’s point of view that is not mine. It’s an exercise in imagining what it’s like to be someone else, especially someone I don’t know very well. It’s also focused more on the internal character development, as opposed to the dialog that I usually rely so heavily on.
I don’t think that this piece will ever see the light of day, except with a few select friends who I trust with my life and my secrets, because the piece is intensely personal for being from another point of view.
However, it’s good to finally be able to stretch my imagination again. I haven’t written anything but half a poem since January; the words have been bottled up inside me, which is always an uncomfortable situation. I’m always coughing up chunks of dialog or exposition that goes no where, free to roam the wind because I didn’t catch them with my butterfly net and pin them down.
This piece though, has got me thinking about writing another story, with the same starting inspiration, but with entirely fictional characters and fictional events. Of course, some true-to-life events will slip in, but only because I couldn’t make it up better than it happened, and it’s what caused me to open up a text window and tap out a few words here and there until they were lined up into a story.
It’s such a relief to have the words back, to finally pour onto the page what is inside me. I was afraid they would be gone for good, that nothing would come to me again.
I can’t wait until my characters start taking over, when things come out that I never expected or imagined. I missed my imagination taking me someplace new, someplace unmapped and undiscovered.
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