Why in the name of all that is sacred and hallowed do I feel this great need to finish every story I start to read? Is it the artist granting his fellows due respect? Is it to learn how not to write as well as how to? Is it my father’s DNA of frugality that insists I waste nothing that’s paid for?
Only two books in my life have I laid aside at least halfway through, and one I know I shall pick up and finish some day. I have even pulled out the bookmarks that marked not only my progress, but to me, my failure and guilt.
I am midway through another story here, and I’m very tired of the first person pov of a neurotic office worker who puts himself as well as all around him down in a fast-quipping manner that’s way overdone. Many of the stories that aren’t set in Kuala Lumpur find themselves in this same office building, with the same Gen X bored and frantic disillusionment of evidently someone who feels his story must be told because it’s gotta be different, and it’s not.
Please don’t tell anyone, but I may just be able to skim through and past a few pages here and there if I summon the Great Literary Spirit to help me. As an aside, I wonder why I reverse this in my writing, and have fifty stories started but only less than half of them finished–even in the first draft meaning of finished.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
I know what you mean. But I will put down and never finish something I’m reading with few qualms these days, especially novels on impulse because (yes) the title and blurbs looks great.
I think as we get older we do realize that we don’t have to do what we don’t want to do, and we gradually learn to adjust.