Fiction is Hard
OK, so um,.. Last Thursday I got reconnected with my friend Shafer through blogging. I got to him through our mutual friend Robert. All these people are Texas people who now live in New York city. They're all a little uppity if you know what I mean.God damned city slickers.
Anywho's, so Shafer read some of my blog and decided that I might be a good candidate for a story submission to this site. He has a friend who works for Nerve and she is looking for sexy story submissions. As some of you may or may not know I sometimes write sexy stories. But until this point I have stuck almost entirely to non fiction accounts of shit that really happened to me. That stuff is easy to write and easy to frame. I don't even really do any revisions of that stuff. I just bang it out and post it. Some of the shit that has happened to me is pretty interesting thereby making the storys interesting. But I found out this weekend as I sat down to write a fiction story to submit to Nerve that writing fiction is hard.
Its hard to make it believable.
Its hard to make it interesting.
Its hard to not be too ambitious and turn a simple scenario into a shitstorm of useless details.
Its hard to make up names that fit characters.
Its hard to not sound like a cliche hack.
So I got about halfway through a tale that I think might suck, its about two thousand words right now. That's about two and a half pages. And I spent like five hours on two and a half pages. In comparison that Grace story is like four pages long and that only took me an hour and a half to write. I told Shafer that I would send him something today but I clearly need more time and I shouldn't even be blogging I should be working on the story. I sent Shafer the following e-mail in my mild panic this morning, enjoy.
Hey Shafer
I learned a hard lesson this weekend.
And what was that lesson you ask?
Well in a nutshell ~Its way harder to write a GOOD fiction story than it is to bang out an account of something that actually happened~
SO I have this story that I'm working on and I don't know if its good or not (I suspect not) and I definitely need a couple more days to work on it to give it any chance of being good. Anyways, I hope you didn't tell your friend A--- that I am a good writer cause I sure would hate to make you out to be a liar. I have some questions and I would like to talk to you on the phone. I got your number from Maneesh yesterday so I will ring you tonight and will hope you are available for questioning.
Some of my questions may or may not include
~How many words should this story be?
~Have I already missed the boat by not finishing the story for today?
~How much sex is too much sex?
~What are you wearing, if anything?
~Who is John Galt?
Besides I think it would be soothing for me to hear you voice so write back and let me know the optimum time frame for a line of questioning as such.
Your Brother in Words
Matthew P Coletrain
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