February Focus: Day Nine
I finished two short stories already this month. I’m not going to share them quite yet. In fact, one of them isn’t going to be shared at all. That’s because I wrote it about a subject that is still just for me. They aren’t perfect and they certainly aren’t anything special, but they are exercises in actually finishing something I start. I’ll never be able to write a perfect ending to any of my stories if I don’t practice finding them.
I’ve deleted several stories I’ve written over the years, if you can even call them that. Most of the time they were just scenelets with no beginning or end. Just a moment in time that always stopped when I was done. I wanted them to be something more, but they were far too esoteric to be shared widespread. I had people read them, but when they were done, I never got the sense that I did it right. Like I wasn’t being read, even after reading me. I figured an open-ended conclusion would be enough to allow a true beginning to take place, but perhaps something more definitive than that was needed.
My first draft never went anywhere because I wasn’t writing with a specific ending in mind. There were pieces of where I wanted it to go, but I wasn’t writing to it. I was building to something that I still don’t know what it was or what I was trying to say. So I’d rather put it away and be satisfied in never picking it up again. That’s an ending I can live with; one that doesn’t always have to be perfect but should at least make sense. It’s on-brand for me to not finish what I start, so why shouldn’t my real shot at a first draft meet the same fate?
All these stories I seem to write never come with happy endings. I seem to finish things off with chaos or confusion. That’s just been what makes sense. It makes sense my mother, who was saying for years she’d lose her mind, had that exact thing happen. It makes sense to leave a bad vacation early after almost missing the flight there to begin with. It makes sense the one I loved for years would keep loving me in secret, even after telling the world publicly they loved someone else.
Bad endings are all I know. But if I keep trying, I might change my life tangent and find a good ending after all.
I’m not sure when or how I’ll be sharing these stories. I’m reading a book on Flash Fiction, which are about writing micro-stories: ones that can be told in a few hundred words, all the way down to simply just a sentence. These exercises I feel will help flex my mental muscles even further and allow me to choose words carefully and precisely so I may narrow down just what I want to say. It’s what makes the most sense right now, one might say. Reading another’s words on how to do this may actually be the key to help me. So that one day I’ll be able to confidently close the book on a job well done. Maybe I’ll get some inspiration on how to end these entries, too. They always seems to be the hardest part to conclude.