I had my second fiction-writing class last night. I’m finding it hard to get enthused. Three years ago I took a screenwriting course through the same organization, the Gotham Writers’ Workshop, and it filled me with such energy, inspiration and hope. There was this story I’d been trying to tell for so long, and I finally found that the medium of screenwriting helped it blossom. Over the 10 weeks of the class, I wrote a complete first draft of a screenplay. I had hope that I’d be able to revise it and sell it and pay off my student loans. But I eventually decided that it was a pretty ordinary story, nothing special, and that I didn’t want to put what would probably be fruitless effort into trying to sell it.
Now I don’t even feel the inspiration or desire. The focus of this course is on short stories, and I don’t care about short stories, either reading or writing them. I like novels, although not all kinds, and I don’t like novels exclusively. Whatever feelings of excitement and hope I felt during my screenwriting class are now gone.
(And if I have to sit through one more writing-course lecture about the protagonist and the antagonist, the desire and the obstacle and the conflict, I’m going to scream.)
I was talking with my therapist last week about the particular plotline I’ve been trying to get down on paper for the last 12 years. She asked me to describe it to her. It’s not really a single plotline but two similar ones: the story of Kirk and the story of “Scott”. What I want to get down on paper is that sense of excitment and discovery and romance I felt when I was in college and dealing with my attraction to guys. Both of those stories involved me confiding my soul and my secrets in a fellow gay student. There’s just this sense of innocence and expectation. And of lost opportunities.
The story of “Scott” (okay, his name was actually Ron) is, for me, the definition of “regret.” I regret ending that night prematurely, and I regret not giving his jacket back to him in person. I regret that I hadn’t gotten to know him earlier that year. I regret that I came out to my parents too soon and spent that year, and the next four, repressing my sexuality. Not dating, not meeting other gay guys, being too concerned with analyzing my position on the Kinsey Scale instead of realizing the dumbly obvious fact that I should just do what made me happy. Had I not come out to my parents so soon (stupidly, impulsively), I would have preserved that safe space within which I could have continued to explore myself and my desires without worrying about retribution.
My obsession with rewriting the stories I mentioned above is a desire to rewrite history, of course. To somehow go back in time and do it over. But you can’t. You can only look ahead. I wound up compressing my 20s into about three and a half years, and now they’re gone. But that’s okay, I guess. Age 31 isn’t bad, and my life right now is pretty nifty. Even if those years had turned out differently, they’d still be in the past by now. But maybe those years would have been richer and permanently rewarding.
I’m not sure what my point was here. I guess I was writing about my lack of interest in fiction writing. Sometimes I just want to reap the reward of writing — that is, the admiration you get from other people. I’ll get jealous that someone else I know has a book out, and I’ll assume that person’s getting all these accolades, and I’ll want those accolades, too. But accolades usually turn out to be evanescent.
My motivations are murky.
