I haven’t written much this week. Two book reviews (Glass Soup by Jonathan Carroll and Terrorist by John Irving) but that’s about it.
Not sure exactly why. I got up at the same time every morning and putzed around at the computer, noodling at several different possible projects without actually accomplishing much of note. I edited a short story (mentioned earlier) and submitted it, so I guess that counts for something.
It’s not for want of ideas. Nope, no shortage of ideas. I have a couple of open documents with ideas…but they don’t have stories. That got me ruminating on the oft-asked question: where do writers get their ideas? My response is that the question is defective. Ideas are everywhere. Ideas are mere conceits, nebulous concepts. Taglines. What readers really need are plots to animate ideas.
I have at least three short stories stuck in the middle of plotless-land. To my mind, they’re deucedly clever notions, but I haven’t yet figured out the right way to exploit them yet. Guess that means they haven’t ripened sufficiently yet. It would be a mistake to force them. In fact, I don’t even know how to force them. If a car runs out of gas, you can put it in neutral and push. Not so with a story, at least not in my experience.
I have several things up in the air at the moment. I was invited to write a proposal for a story for an anthology which I’d really like to be part of, so I’m giving that one due consideration. I’m hoping to write an essay for an ITW collection. Other nascent projects whipping around in the ether like neutrinos.
I guess I’m reluctant to tackle something brand new until I hear back from my agent about my last round of revisions. I have my NaNoWriMo novel to edit, another book that I’m thinking about writing from scratch, and another that I wrote 100 pages as a proposal for a series that I haven’t gotten any bites for that I think I can salvage as a standalone. All of them are like embarking on gruelling treks, and I don’t want to get started on one thing until I’m fairly sure I’m finished (more or less) with something else.
CSI was interesting last night. It was a meta-episode, severely self referential. A reality TV crew follows the CSIs around while they investigate a case. “There are too many forensics shows on television,” Grissom says disdainfully to the producers at the beginning of the episode. Another character comments about how a crew filming them will condense a 6 hour experiment down to 30 seconds of film. And, at the end, Grissom addresses the question about whether programs like CSI are teaching bad guys how to keep from getting caught. “Everyone learns from science,” he says.
I have a Storytellers Unplugged essay to write for next Friday and no idea whatsoever what to write about. Any suggestions?
