One More Struggle For Writers

Ever been somewhere when inspiration for a new story hits you. You can view the entire story in your head. You see the plot, the setting, the characters, even sensory details. You can hardly wait to get home and start tapping away at your keyboard. You even jot down some notes that will help you remember your vision. 

Hours, or even days, pass before you have an opportunity to write the first draft of this fab new story. You write and write and write until the this first effort is finished. Not a finished product. You accept that but, still, it should be a great story after all that came to your mind earlier.

You know you should put it aside for days or a couple of weeks but you just have to read it. You sit back in your chair and read the story from beginning to ending. You deflate like slow-leaking balloon--a little at a time. The story on the screen, or in your notebook, is not the same as the one you envisioned during that moment of inspiration. What happened?

The what happened? part is not easy to figure out. I think that one problem is that we see so clearly in our mind but when writing the draft, we aren't putting in all those little details that we saw so well mentally. We know what the characters should look like, how they hold their knife and fork, how they dress, how they laugh or cry. We've seen it in our mental images. But molding those characters with all those little bits and pieces in our writing is hard. We're often working with minimum word counts so how much detail about each character can we put in the story? 

Consider this--maybe the story that seemed so great when it came to you isn't as good as you thought it was. Once down in print, it somehow isn't quite the same story. Or perhaps reading the words rather than creating the mental images weakens the whole thing. 

If you have a problem like this, ask yourself what is lacking in the print version compared to the one you created in your mind. Then answer yourself honestly. If you can pinpoint the problem, you can fix it. But mending the cracked version will take time and patience and a lot of probing of your own mind. 

Ask a writer friend to read your first draft. Tell them you need an honest answer as to what is lacking in the story. Or, if there really is something lacking. It could be your own assessment is different from that of another person. One of the reasons I love being in a writing group is to have objective eyes on my work. They see so much that I, the writer, do not. 

As the poster tells us, it IS a struggle to get what's in our head to the pad of paper or on the screen. But sometimes, it flows incredibly well from brain to print and that's when we color ourself happy.