The Realm of Fiction, and Its Forbidding Doors

Read this first.

(Isn't it amazing that even on a bad day Q can write something so good?)

This is an inevitable part of writing. All writers know that. Or if they don't, clearly they have been given the golden key to the gates of the realm of fiction. Writer's block - I might start calling it writer's lock-out - is something that drives me beserk. I've been suffering it since school started...such a long time.

Maybe it was burnout. With two weeks before I moved out, I realized once I got to school the odds of me finishing my current project anytime soon were slim. So in the last two weeks of summer, I charged through to the end of the book. It was a great feeling, no writer's block.

And then it hit. Seven weeks of painful nothingness in the mind, except for phantoms of ideas too insubstantial to hold.

There's a glimmer of hope, though: one of the phantoms is solidifying a little. As much work as Shakespeare class is, I now have inspiration. From which play? Romeo and Juliet. Not at all what I expected. For years I've hated that play. I came to terms with it last week: every problem I have with it deals with the time span. They fall in love overnight? They get married the next day? They kill themselves a day later? Uh-uh.

But then I grudgingly admit that spreading these events over a long time period wouldn't work for a play. Shakespeare had to condense. So when I read R&J, I just imagine there are tidy gaps of time between acts. If I think of it that way, I quite enjoy it.

So yes, my idea, flickering at the edges of my mind, is somewhat based on Romeo and Juliet. But modern. And with a somewhat happier ending. (Not a Disney ending, mind you, not at all. I may not be friends with Will, but c'mon - a happy ending in something based on one of his tragedies? It's an insult.)

I just realized something. The three projects I've finished have something in common. Or the process leading to them did: I wrote rough outlines for all three. Unfinished projects, I didn't.

Yes! Perhaps this is a breakthrough. I must go now - and finish my pesky paper on The Merchant of Venice so I can try to outline this idea...I hope it will not fail me.