This is pretty much the posi­tion I keep find­ing myself in, though rather than the sim­plis­tic loss of one word — a sin­gle usable key that fin­ishes off a thought prop­erly — it is more… how did my wife put it, “I think you are try­ing to write for a uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sor and some­times that can hurt a brain. Some­times it’s fun to just read a fast and punchy story.”

I think she may be onto some­thing. Epic, that is always how I have seen sto­ries and plots in my imag­i­na­tive world: the uni­verse is com­ing to an end, the human race is dying, a world will implode if a fish isn’t saved — okay maybe not that last one com­pletely. But indeed, I have always sought to bring clash­ing forces together (phys­i­cally and metaphor­i­cally) and I think that it may have alluded my mind into think­ing about writ­ing in a dif­fer­ent way, an unfor­tu­nately all too seri­ous way.

Take this for exam­ple. The fol­low­ing is an attempt to start a short story and to say it feels like I am try­ing too hard is an understatement:

“The cock­pit was rick­ety, spar­tan and ancient. But it con­tin­ued on like the steel trap of an igno­rant mind. Rings scarred every con­sole; tes­ta­ment to the count­less cups of caff that had been bal­anced upon them through long peri­ods time. A hand would hold them when hot, only to slip from them when the pilot passed out, leav­ing the caff cold.

A drum­ming echo infil­trated the cor­ri­dors of the ship: a heavy, metal­lic heart­beat that kept the titan ves­sel alive and mov­ing per­pet­u­ally for­ward. And that it did, chug­ging along like a loco­mo­tive warn and tired by a thousand-years of track.”

So, I start with this and then where do I go? I’m for­ever stuck with a bar set so high that every sen­tence has to become some kind of attempted poetic prose (is that even pos­si­ble?) From here, the tran­si­tion to dia­logue becomes hack­neyed and cheap.

How does one go from, “-chug­ging along like a loco­mo­tive warn and tired by a thousand-years of track” to “Where are the cheesy puffs, Brian?” It’ this kind of ‘lev­el­ling’ that I’m hav­ing dif­fi­culty with. I’m out of prac­tice, I know that, but I feel like I’m becom­ing my own worst enemy. I’m climb­ing moun­tains — and describ­ing the epic jour­ney — to cook eggs, and there is sim­ply no need to get so… grandiose.

I’m not sure when this hap­pened to me, when I became so obsessed with per­fect­ing every sen­tence to the point they turn into… well I don’t know what they turn into, but what­ever they are it’s too much and I need to scale back and sim­plify. I can do nor­mal (well, I say nor­mal but I do write in my own way), but I’ve become stuck in this place of try­ing to be too good, try­ing to prove something…

I’ve lost my abil­ity to just write, cre­ate, imag­ine and get it out there. I’ve become a one-upper, but I’m try­ing to one-up myself and my pre­vi­ous sentence.

Well I say ‘have’ but I think I’m get­ting passed it a lit­tle. I re-wrote the above scene in a more approach­able man­ner and although it’s for­mu­laic (to me) I think it’s bet­ter. Here is a snippet:

“Quint shrugged and tossed the chunk of use­less tech onto his bunk. Putting the cig­a­rette out on a side table, he turned from the spar­tan quar­ters and left them behind. A cor­ri­dor loomed ahead; one that split into a Y and led to the mess hall and the cock­pit. He opted for the cock­pit and set warn boots to the rick­ety cat­walk below.

A drum­ming echo infil­trated the cor­ri­dors of the ship: a heavy, metal­lic heart­beat that kept the titan ves­sel alive and mov­ing for­ward. Quint had grown accus­tom to the dron­ing sound — some­times hum­ming a made-up tune as he wan­dered the ship, look­ing for some­thing to occupy his bore­dom. Of course there was always some­thing to do, some menial task that required his atten­tion else the ves­sel failed one of it’s count­less equa­tions and ran­domly sucked all of the oxy­gen out of the tin can tub.”

Let us see where this one takes me…