Approaching a three-day weekend I find myself in a conundrum. I planned to spend most of the weekend puzzling over a story, but I’m spending the pre-weekend trying to decide how to tell a story that has little action to an audience that craves such things. The trick, i suppose, will be in the telling. Specifically, I need to raise the stakes very high and tighten that tension throughout the piece without having to resort to bullets.
The fact is, there isn’t much to tell in the story so far as stuff happening. The whole piece is a cerebral thing, designed to show the movements of a person through a particular world as a way to move the world story along through the eyes of someone the readers would be marginally familiar with. In other words, a milieu piece. Sadly, that is difficult to accomplish in the amount of words I am tasked to work with.
And therein lies the fun.
Used to be that I took on these kind of challenges with a gleam in the eye. I didn’t think about consequences so much as opportunities. That way the telling was daring and genuine. It is a strange thing that the way you write ages with you. I recognize that there is no going back, but it would be nice to let go of some of these pretenses and write like I don’t have a care in the world.
After all, I’m doing this out of love.