i have been . . .

. . . working on fiction. Short stories. By working on, I mean I have been writing voraciously inside my head and have yet to transfer that onto the page. There is a mental block with fiction writing for me that stems from my long affair with disliking revising my work. I would have to say that the one thing I pulled from my MFA experience is the embracing of revision. Poems no longer scare me. I can write a shitty poem and feel confident that I will be able to go back and make it less shitty. And then again. And again. Sometimes I even go back a version or two. Whatever. The point being, revision is that epoch of a piece of writing that pushes it over the edge. This can take time. I don't always see the revisions at first. I have a poem that I am in love with (always a dangerous prospect) and it has only seen one begrudging revision, and even that felt somehow dirty and cheap. (Why? Why did I force that one? The thesis, of course.)

With fiction, however, the concept of revising a story blocks me. Perhaps it is because there are so many more words, and the threads of events feel so much denser; mess with one early on and you pretty much kill where the story landed the first time. Perhaps this is really just me experiencing my usual procrastination. I don't know. What I do know is that inside my head, these stories are alive and vibrant, the characters vying for attention, the conversations taking off, the points of view establishing themselves, the tone and the pacing are practically dancing. . . and all I need to do is sit down and write them out.