Last night I went through all my old saved documents from the past couple years. Most of them are fragments of or ideas for stories, which I must have abandoned at some point. For some, I remember getting excited about them at the start and then gradually getting disillusioned. But I didn't delete them, so something must have made me think they were worth keeping. That, or I just forgot about them.
The post below this one, "Miriam Finley Travel Writer," is one of those. I'll post more in the next few days. I don't know what to think of them. There are some that I really like and think are worth pursuing, but strangely they all have one thing in common, which is that I have no concept of whether they're finished pieces or total rubbish. Maybe that's why they were all relegated to the back burner in the first place.
What makes a story be "finished"? Anything other than the writer's decision, which I imagine comes from the writer's gut, can't be right.
I'm all for writing workshops, but one danger of them is the students who try change a person's story. What I mean by that is this: even if David Foster Wallace submitted a published story to one of the workshops I was in, the other students would rip it apart. It seems to be very easy for people to criticize someone else's writing, as long as it's unfinished. Almost whenever I show a story of mine to someone, they have more ideas for how it could be changed than what they think about it. Why do we treat published work differently than a draft? I read literary magazines and am constantly amazed at the garbage that gets published. A lot of it reads like someone's first outline. And yet, it's there, in prestigious and widely respected journals.
This has gotten off-topic, sort of; mostly I'm wondering what to do with all these unfinished (?) pieces. Honestly they don't seem that different from what I read in lit mags. But they don't feel finished to me. Thanks for indulging, if you've read this far.
No comments:
Post a Comment