berezina replied to your link: Keyhole 11 Available for Pre-Order
I just have a hard time believing that you’re writing about what you truly care about most. What do you daydream about? What do you go over and over in your head?
From two paragraphs, you got that? Kidding, partly; but for real, you need to read the whole story.
And I’d quibble with your premise. Maybe essayists and memoirists, and poets, can more directly address persistent concerns—poets get to be so much more abstract—but for fiction writers, everything has to go through characters, or voice, if you’re writing in a style in which voice = character = meaning. You have to start with tangibles—the hole in the ground in which the hobbit lives, Mrs. Dalloway buying the flowers, the clepto in the ladies’ room. Once you have those things—choices which of course arise on some level from your preoccupations or experience—you have to find what they need, what they’re about. I quote my students a writing version of Louis Kahn’s “finding what a building wants to be.” Having something take flight and be distinct from you, so others can possess it, and feel it expressing, summing up their experience, even though you made it; that’s a beautiful thing. Maybe what I want more than anything for my work.
If you wonder what I go over and over, go back here or here, or to that Wigleaf story you quoted. Time. Being stuck in a place which is itself fleeting. Loss. Sand washing out to sea between our toes. Certain places (New York; mountains everywhere; the turn of the last century). Leaves upturned before a storm.
One of the frustrating things for an author is a lag between what we’ve written and what’s been published. I have a long story that’s gotten upper tier “we want to see more of your work” rejections from places I can hardly sit still for how much I’d love to be published there. But no takers yet, and it’s too precious a story, too huge an investment, for me to self-publish it or put on Tumblr, even though I feel it encapsulates a huge chunk of what I have to say, an entire era of my writing life.
