Finishing this

Feb 03, 2008

I have always wanted to write something beautiful; something moving and so profound that it brings tears to people’s eyes and have them say something like, “Wow, my soul has been moved,” or, “Hmm, there’s something I’ve never thought about.” I want to give people a work of great literature, something that will marvel them; I want to hand them a stack of my writings and tell them, “Here. Here is something marvelous, be marveled!” But I don’t think I’m very good at this writing business. I don’t do so well with getting the right words on paper and making them sound perfect. First of all, I’ve never finished a story. I have about a dozen unfinished once-upon-a-times saved somewhere in the dark crevices of my Word file, which in a weird way explains the pile of unfinished scarves in my closet and the pile of moldy sacks of bread I buy every week despite the fact that I still have the ones from the weeks before.
Let’s just say that I’m good at beginning but horrible at ending anything, let alone a mere story. Within a few weeks of beginning a story I get tired and bored. The characters don’t make sense anymore and the plot gets murkier as time goes by. And then that’s when I begin to question myself and what I want from the words I’ve written down. Soon enough, I’m finished with them all; I want to have nothing to do with Tracy and her dog, Lou; Mary whose OCD had even affected me; Madame Mirage who hated performing on stage. However, I wonder if ending and finishing is the same thing. Is to finish something ending it as well? Does one have to end something to finish it? Hmm, there’s something I’ve never thought about.