Thoughts on writing: Skeleton King

Writing in the abstract has always come easily to me. When focusing on ideas rather than memory, I write storms: that is, when I’m in the right mood and willing. Truth is easy to write in nonfiction. Your quill is dripping with it. And the abstract is a beautiful surface to work with. My one problem is: I get attached. I hate to edit and change the abstract. I hate to change words that flow like rivers and sentences that end like waterfalls.

I’ll admit. I’m a bit attached to the truth in the way it presents itself first, but with fiction the truth becomes more sly, more fickle to present. What does someone notice about someone when they first meet them? Is it that their eyeliner is applied asymmetrically or that their eyes are the color of the door to their childhood home. Or is it that they keep sneaking looks at the clock, tapping their wrist as if it would speed up time. Perception is a tricky substance, and we slide between something aiming at realistic and a little cheesy. Then again life is cheesy sometimes. A guy once told me he wanted to meet me ever since he saw me: he remembered my blue eyes from the first day he saw me. But I don’t know that that’s something I’d write. I prefer the slow build. Friendships that start a little romantic and blossom.

That is… when I write romance at all. Sometimes what I need is friendships or adventure. Sometimes the stories wrap themselves in philosophy and twist my pen into a political instrument. And sometimes I write about love. Or twisted love. Or family. My pen seems to find itself indiscriminate when it comes to genres, although my eyes are much more particular.

Yet either way I miss the ease of writing before I felt nervous to do so. Before perfectionism took the reins and drove the horses to death. And so stagnant I sit on a mountain of ideas like a skeleton King. Each idea lacking the flesh to push it forward, rolling around like a cloud waiting to drop rain at any second.

I want to be a writer, but I can’t fight the skeleton war.