Writer Whining

I am beginning to see the light of day again, the piles of work that kept growing are beginning to recede. And now I'm contemplating diving into a rewrite of the last story/chapter I wrote on the novel I've been working on while I've been living in Japan. It's funny. I got really comfortable writing the sections of the book as I went. They're supposed to work as individual stories and also function as chapters, sort of. In the way that the sections of a David Mitchell novel with a variety of narrators does, or the Raymond Carver inspired movie "Shortcuts" intertwine the narratives of various people into a sort of mosaic narrative. Characters who are connected or whose actions create a reaction in another person's story, characters whose stories are related even if they don't realize it. That sort of thing. It's something I became intrigued with after I moved here and my perspective on life shifted. Because there were all sorts of things linking me or people I knew to other people in a world that, for me, had just shifted from small town Midwestern America to something a little more international and far away from everything I knew. And then I come to the fork in the road story that took me several months to finish a *first draft* of and in the end I still didn't get it close to what it's got to be. There's all this *stuff* there, but it has to be completely rewritten, almost from scratch. Not quite from scratch, but it feels like it in many ways. I've done this before, and it usually turns out to produce something much more interesting and satisfying than what it had been in its previous incarnations, but I still get a little down when I write a full draft of a story and am still figuring out how it has to be written once that first draft is down. I haven't had a story flip around in my hands like a twisty fish in a long time, always changing shape, the character's problem and even central being changing midstream. Sigh. Back back back to the first page with this one. At least I have a lot of material to use from the original concept draft.

Sorry to have interrupted the normal flow of entries with writer whining. But sometimes a guy's got to vent.