I need promises like I need a hole in my head.

I’ve got a horrible track record for resolutions. Or perhaps a wonderfully efficient way of rationalizing my way around them. Whichever way you want to look at it: I suck with promises to myself. I’m better with actions, and anyone whose observed my state of mental and physical health lately can tell that this isn’t necessarily saying a lot.

Regardless, I got up (late) and lazed around (hey- Penn State’s back in the freaking Rose Bowl!) and now I am in the middle of my “go sit somewhere and write for just an hour” intention.  I’m taking a break because my MC just theorized that maybe there’s a hole in his head from which, at night, all the ideas he has about the kind of person he is, all his dreams, and everything he wants to be trickle out to be replaced by whatever blows in from his immediate environs. Or whatever someone else stuffs in there for him. Just imagine it being loads more eloquent and poignant with woodland creatures rustling in the copse below him. Also, there may or may not be cannibals.

Of course I had to stop. I wasn’t writing fiction anymore, was I? Well, the cannibal part maybe.

I both love and hate these moments. You look up and break your own heart to see what you’ve written there. Something couched in fiction that is so nakedly you. Gut-wrenching and elating at the same time.  There’s a moment of “HFS, did that come out of me?” countered by “There is no effing way that came out of anyone but me.”

I know that this is the way of ‘fiction’ writing, that the best of it is peppered with these moments for its creators. I know this, but it doesn’t make it any less thrilling or heartbreaking or elating when it happens.

So yeah, I do better with actions than with promises. And what just happened, what I just made to happen has reminded me that this whole writing thing–  regardless of whatever happens or doesn’t happen to the ‘product’–   the very act of the thing is worth it to me.

~ by weltschmerz on January 1, 2009.