Writing Is Easy...It's Writing Well That's Hard

I’m just over 2300 words into the project I mentioned in the previous blog entry. There is still more to the story, but I might not pursue it further; at least not exclusively. There is a clear path ahead for awhile; I know what happens for the next few chapters. But there’s not much to the story that’s overly engaging and there’s not much more I can do to poor Bria without either going over the edge or becoming repetitive. My dark side isn’t really all that dark, so what has happened so far is about as bad as it gets. I think I’ll just save it for when I’m in a bad mood.

Of course, that leaves me in another writing quandary: what to work on instead? I have a couple of books in the works, but I get depressed every time I work on them. They’re just not original enough. Oh, there are parts of them that I haven’t seen in other places, and the beginning of one of them is great; but the stories tend to draw back toward the been-there-done-that pack the further they go along. It is my constant challenge to re-think every scene that comes up, and to change it or scrap it if it seems to blasé.

I want my books to be full of the unexpected. I want main characters to die. I want to show that the bad guys aren’t necessarily as bad as the good guys want you to think they are. I want to show that the good guys aren’t really all that heroic. It’s all about being in the wrong place at the right time and determining what they can do about it. And sometimes failing.

But not all the time. Because what I really don’t want is to end the book with the bad guys winning. That would be different, but it would suck for the reader; no one wants to go through the trials and tribulations of following a character just to have them die at the end with all of their goals unfulfilled.

So a good book to me is one that has anti- (or at least non-stock) heroes and sympathetic villains and twists that keep the audience guessing until the very end, when the heroes win, but not necessarily because of something they have done or achieved. It doesn’t have to be a clean win. Pyrrhic victories are certainly allowable, perhaps even preferable to an “everything is all tied up tidily now” ending.

See why I have such a hard time staying motivated to write? It’s much easier to say “Screw it” and go play football on the PS2. Illinois has won two national championships in the time it has taken me to write the 2300 words of my project.