A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-Four-Hundred-And-Thirty-Three

I wonder what it is about writing fiction that is difficult for me at the moment.  I suppose it is likely that it is just a matter of practicing more, and getting myself to practice has proven challenging for me, in a lot of ways.  I think that there may be something more that is in the way.  I had thought it might just be a difficulty with working in prose, but I have been writing a great deal of prose.  Even writing this journal, though written extemporaneously and often at the end of a long writing session, at times, tediously late into an evening, requires me to work in prose.  Even if I dismiss this as just my musings, and not a serious effort (though I do think any writing project to which one contributes daily for years counts as significant in ways that include and go beyond effort), I have written a great deal of prose lately that is more tightly focused, at least in terms of the specific ideas being communicated, and that project has been going quite well in most regards.  Still, I find it difficult to craft fiction with the same ease as these other works.  I think it may well be the need to understand the entire arch of the story, perhaps, or maybe it is the need to get over that and trust the act of telling the story itself?  Maybe it is something very different that I can't even think of.  I know that I have a lot of stories I want to tell, that writing fiction is something I want to do more of.  Writing another novel is an important goal, and I know it will remain important even once I have written another.  I know I can, not simply because I have done it before, but also because I already write as much as I do each day.  It should be simple, or maybe thinking that is just a sign that I don't even know what I am talking about.  It gives me a bit of comfort that so many of the novelists I have heard discussing these matters don't seem to feel they have a good grasp on it either.

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