A Writer's Notebook, Day Six-Hundred-And-Seventy-Two

I continued work on that short story and feel that it is starting to have a real shape.  It is still hiding a great deal, but it seems to be playing with that in an interesting way.  The center of the story is about the character dealing with the fallout from something, and their is an assumption that the reader already knows that context, but the focus is not actually on what happened in specific, it is off in another direction, with the unwillingness of the character to be direct about what happened being a central focus of the story itself.  I feel very much that I am discovering this story as it continues, though I have a sense of the ending, and feel it may be rather grim, but I am having a great deal of fun writing it and am excited to see where it ends up going, with new ideas coming to me that I am eager to begin working on tomorrow.  I hope it will work when I am done, and that it might be a story that is also relevant.  It is not clear to me how it is going to end, but I can sense that the character is quite a bit different than I had expected, and I am struggling to see how to capture the quality that the story seems in many ways to be driving towards, but which is not yet clear to me.  The story has a real center to it, and their is, as I said, a lot hidden in the story, and I think the place that it is heading is very much towards a revelation about that character, but I cannot say in all what is there and what it will be, but I also see their are questions about redemption and other difficult topics that are being raised.  It is unfolding, and I am not yet ready to see the entire thing at this point, but, despite being eager to work on the story and discover more of it, I am still comfortable with waiting and allowing it to progress. 

I am finding that I am writing more narrative poems in the past few days, and I suspect that some of this is a result of working on fiction, which primes that part of my writer's imagination.  It is not as if I have not written narrative poems over the weeks and months preceding this, and narrative poems have always been a particular penchant of mine, but I see the ways that the poems are using story and know that some of it is drawing from that same energy.  It is interesting, still, to think of the differences between following the impulse in a poem and in a story, though.  I had a thought about a person having a dream that makes them certain they have a great destiny and the idea of them waiting for that to come true, and the idea that someone does show up, but it is someone who only comes because they know about this guy, since he talks about his dream to anyone who will listen.  I had considered it as a story, and I may write that in some form, one day, but I wrote a poem that followed that general idea, yet, what it turned into was more about the nature of the dreams and was far different in many ways than any story would be, even one that followed those same events and with much of the same detail, it would not work to write that same piece as a prose story if it were not to shift, not in terms of what is focused on but in the intent of that focus.  I think I may write that story soon, if only as an exercise to see what happens and how the two are similar and different.  It might be an interesting project, if it works, and it might be that I would consider writing more stories and poems in those kinds of pairs as a larger work, but, for now, I am glad to have gotten so much work done today, even if it means I am up until this late in the morning.