It doesn’t seem to matter how many times nor how insistent I may be that writing’s just not worth my time and effort any more. If there is something left undone, a story that isn’t quite what I want it to be–regardless of what others want or seem to want to read and publish–it’s going to be there to annoy me until it gets its due.
Two days after declaring Crows a disaster, I went back into it this morning. It’s weird; I can use all I’ve learned from classes, reading, writing, critiqueing and just watching people interact, and yet I’m not always sure what a story’s trying to ask me to say. Crows changed dramatically in the end–just a simple paragraph but one that lets me in on the secret it’s been building to reveal. Suddenly, it turned from a fairly literary horror story to more strictly literary with a grotesque ending, though from an action/plot point of view, it remains the same.
The difference? One final act by each of the characters that changes who I thought they were; who they thought they were. And there’s my resolution and characters affected by this brief episode in their lives. What’d’ya know…a story.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology