My Plight

A few weeks ago I received a couple of my short stories in the mail from my mentor. Seeing all the pencil marks all over the pages with words like "cut," "no," and exclamation marks, my enthusiasm was a bit deflated (among his feedback, “avoid passive voice!”).

I couldn’t bring myself to look at the stories. I was afraid if I started reading them, I would grow even more discouraged. What if I find out my writing is awful? So I put the stories away—out of sight, out of mind.

I knew I had lost the momentum for my stories. I felt detached from my characters and experienced great difficulty attempting to write from their points of view again. Yet—I had the obligation to bring the story out and the characters’ voices—to finish the story. That’s why I’m in this creative writing program after all—without external, artificial deadlines, I can’t seem to get anything done.

With the impending deadline, and my guilt—I took the stories out last night and began to make corrections, all the while hoping that my writing isn’t as bad as it appears to be.

I know I have to trust my mentor. Some of my stories were initially twenty-five pages long—and now they’re down to ten pages (imagine long lines crossing through entire pages—what that does to the ego when you’ve spent days, even weeks writing those pages). I hear in almost every writing workshop some variation of the phrase, “Murder your darlings,” so I’m trusting that. Having read a handful of writing memoirs, I understand that this is the writing process, the editing process.

I have to say—during some sections, after cutting the lines/pages that I was instructed to cut, the ideas did come out clearer. It was somewhat consoling, at least consoling enough to propel me forward.

But I know there’s a balance too. Taking the advice of the mentor, but not growing too dependent on him that I wind up losing sight of my own characters. I have to remind myself of where I was when I was writing them—or where I want them to be going.

“You think aloud in your writing,” my mentor had said last winter when we had met up at a coffee shop downtown to discuss my writing. He told me that it’s good to think about the characters’ background and such—except, it isn’t necessary to write all of it down.

I’m instructed perpetually to condense, condense, condense. Don’t take a page to say what you want to say: convey it in a few sentences, convey it by showing an emotion, convey it with an image.

I remember, when we had sat down at the coffee shop, the waitress asked the both of us what we wanted. “A tea, please.” I say. My mentor looks at me and says something like, “You know, to really throw me off, you should have ordered a shot of bourbon or something.” I laughed.

I have to pray before I write. That I, myself, might be thrown off, be surprised at what is possible when I sink myself into something I know I love, even if at this moment I have my doubts.

God, have mercy on this struggling writer…