Begin again and again and again ...

I love starting new stories. The clean paper has so much potential: characters and dialogue hanging on the rim of my mind, settings that are hazy and beautiful, all perfect in their incompletion. Like fragments of a dream that are illogical but perfectly comprehensible to the sleeping mind. The problem begins as soon as I try to drag those lovely ideas unto the paper and force them to fit my words. No finished story is ever complete; it always lacks the wonder of my half-formed ideas.

What happens in my writing process, then, as I become disillusioned with the cold, black words that are trying to encompass my images? Typically, I start strong, with powerful evocative descriptions and glimpses of the story to come, and generally a sense of wonder and excitement. As I continue on, however, my writing starts to lose force. I slog through the bits that don't feel as natural and then suddenly stumble on a new scene that feels fresh, a new start. At the end, I have a story with a great hook and some later lovely passages, but one that doesn't quite hold together, and doesn't fulfill the promise of its first pages.

Enter revisions.

When I was little, of course, there was no persevering. I started, and when the shine began to wear off, I stopped. I got bored. I have an abundance of ghosts from my childhood, stories that were started and then abandoned, lost.

(I also like beginning new books. These I always finish, but when the temptation is on me I'm liable to pick up another novel, which leaves me reading an awful amount at the same time. I can easily hit six or seven works in progress at once.)