I started my first novel, the story about a grim reaper who falls in love with a waitress in what I guess was probably going to be downtown Milwaukee, during my senior year of high school. I got about thirty pages into it, getting all preachy about religion and the concept of love as being a mechanism to just fill a hole in life, as the perspective was meant to be switched to the waitress, whose story of trying to stay in love with the said reaper converted into human, and I just couldn't figure out a way how to write a female character any good, even if she was more similar to me than I realized at the time (or maybe because of that reason). Along that subject, I had written a lot of poetry at the time, some of which was good but most of it was melodramatic bs most of it revolving around the love lost of a girl I knew once and dated for a few months but ended up losing her number when she moved away and that's all that ended up of that. Most of it also focused on the feeling of despair and hopelessness, the feelings that kind of keep growing when I was growing up. I did not consider myself that social even when I had a group of friends and was in a few groups in school, so that may have contributed to my inability to write dialogue, which I do think is what drives most of my work.... or at least I try to do so.
The second novel I tried to start was sort of a quazi-ripoff of Shin Megami Tensei II combined with Bloodsong (or the Volsunga Saga, if you want to get more technical about it) about this couple in a sort of 1980s style post-apocalypse (kind of like the downtown of A Boy and His Dog if they picked the 80s as their perfect society) who kind of just start off liking each other due to one odd interaction and end up becoming close, yet one of them ends up being killed off in the middle of the story. And almost right after, the other wakes up the next morning as if he did not exist. I guess an obvious similarity is to the concept of Adam and Eve (primarily taken from the SMTII plot as well) yet it also became in the idea process, about the whole kind of absurdity of trying to make "the perfect couple" yet its never given a clear idea why the idea exists. With that one, I kind of just got started and got maybe 10-15 pages in and again, it ends up being where I can't write a female character again. I guess there is a pattern here with my stories being about female characters and cause I never really talked to girls, I don't know how to write them.
And as for my most recent idea, a psychological drama about a girl who investigates her friend's disappearance and becomes distraught as the real world she uncovers, it comes back to that same problem. I even had an ending to the story that I thought would kind of fit with the absurdist tone of the novel, where she ends up getting killed by someone completely unrelated to the disappearance. If any comparison could be drawn for what I was going for, it was probably Twin Peaks. It does take place in somewhat of a similar town... ish but i always thought that it would take place in New Mexico, the town that seems perfect yet is full of some weird, crazy characters, and there is kind of a relationship between the main character Rosaline and the lead investigator of the case which echos somewhat the relationship between Dale and Audrey but I considered the cop to be more of a guy who has done this before but is still kind of inexperienced to the failures. And then I found this fucking movie about a similar idea that ends almost the same way and I almost give up the idea for a while at least as a novel. Then I thought maybe I could do it as a movie yet still write the novel as kind of a backbone to the future script.
I've had other ideas come and go but these were the three ideas that I thought would be the best I could do at the time. I still love them even though the first one is kind of a young adult novel trying to be something more since it deals a lot with really dark subjects and it ends with the main characters dying (another common plot line in my stories, go figure). I am starting to think though that I will never finish these stories ever, that maybe they're too ambitious and high concept for me to make as character driven stories that I cannot do at all that well. But maybe there is that slight glimmer of hope that maybe I can at least do something productive with my writing. And that is my short stories. Again, they're all mainly character driven yet maybe it is the constraints of having to tell a story in a limited amount of time and space that makes it easier to finish. And possibly makes them work I am kind of proud of.
Like Maritza-Pan, which is pretty much just a story about a teenage boy who has an affair with an older woman. There is actually a lot that is going on in it and I'm still surprised I wrote it. One comment I got on it was that I should write things like that. That it was actually good. It was probably the best thing that has ever happened to me, just some random commenter liking a short story of mine. There are other stories, one about a bunch of kids fighting against a bear, which I finished, and another one I haven't gotten to about two brothers trapped in a cave while one of them is dying, that do make me wish I could write better. Maybe there is a somewhat talented writer inside of me. If I will ever be able to uncover it from the deep, viscous shell of a being that is myself is unknown. Or whether it was just a flash in the pan inspiration and I am nothing better than mediocre is a possibility as well. I wonder if I will ever be able to get the opportunity to see the answer to that ever. There is something about being around people, or looking up to people who you know are great at what they do and they inspire you to do the same thing. And yet there is something that also can come out of that in a negative way. And that is the feeling of knowing that you will never be as good as them, not even compared in the same papers that discuss and compare the contemporaries you aspire to be with. Where it seems to come easy to them, despite the knowledge that they did have to work at it. There is only so much work you can put into something, maybe comparing a marble statue to a plastic imitator, before you realize that it just isn't going to be the same.
So should I just give up trying to write, as there is no way I can see in the near future that I will be able to finish any of it? Maybe, maybe not. I may never be labeled among the great writers of any period, not that I even bother to try, but if I can at least figure out my own voice, maybe that's good enough. Until I can find that one spark of genius, I have to dig through a long pile of mediocrity to get there. Let's hope that I live long enough to finish digging.
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