A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-And-Ninety-One

I have been struggling to try and express the shift I am feeling in terms of my fiction writing, and it has been rather difficult.  In part this is because I am not certain it really is a shift in the work so much as it is a shift in my own relationship to writing fiction, generally.  This is the first time I've really dedicated myself to writing fiction in this way, outside of specific projects, and I think it has forced me to confront my insecurity about knowing what to do with a story.  I mean, a poem has a much broader set of possibilities, in some ways, and it is not hard for me to just write a poem even if I start it without a clue what I am going to write about.  Fiction feels very different in that sense, which is probably just a matter of my own experience and perspective, but I can't help conceiving of it as something that is different about writing fiction.  I feel like that is something I've been breaking through lately, at least to some degree.  In general, I am just feeling a bit more comfortable with writing stories now.  In some way, I feel as if I have finally reached the point where I am taking off the training wheels and riding for real.

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