From Sizzle to Fizzle

After work last night, I went to Aladdin’s Eatery here in North Raleigh for dinner. Lawsy mercy, how I love that restaurant. I was there on opening night and I go usually once a week for either lunch or dinner. They feature fresh, natural food, the staff is courteous and knowledgeable about the dishes, and the friendly owner (his name is Tom) talks to everyone and makes them feel welcome. While I was eating my Chicken Lentil Soup, I was making notes on my current mystery - a story of redemption. This particular piece, well…I’m kind of stuck at the moment. Pondering this impasse over a glass of delicious Lebanese red wine, I thought I’d drag out some of my older stuff once I got home and see if there was anything worth revising to fit my current work (hey, when your brain stops creating, you’ll resort to any measure to get it going again).

After an hour of searching my tiny apartment – mind you, besides my bedroom closet there is only one little coat closet and two cabinets for storage in the whole place - I finally found some of my previous “inspirations” stuffed in a ratty, torn, cardboard box marked “Junk” shoved just far enough under my bed that I couldn’t reach it. Hmmm, that says a lot, doesn’t it? It will tie in later on, though.

I was pleased to discover, upon re-reading these potential best-sellers, that two of the five pieces were actually good, and of those two good pieces, one was really good, no, make that Really Good. I’ll just talk about those two today; the other three, well, back to the hidey-hole for them.

The first piece contained a compelling opening paragraph and four fairly complex scenes or set pieces, I believe Alexandra Sokoloff called them when she spoke at a recent writer’s conference in Raleigh. These set pieces mark the progression of the action leading up to the final climax. I had a lot of filling in to do for “Frères Jacques” but I had a skeleton, the bones, of my tale established in my mind and on paper and the twist was really cool. The writing was terse: clean and efficient. It matched the emotion behind the murder. What I had of my story was workable into an actual book! Woot Woot!

The second piece has a working title of “Baby’s Breath.” Wow, who knew I could write like that? Certainly not me! The murder scene was all the more chilling because I had written this one in a soft, feminine, loving voice. Pages and pages of the macabre (as in murder technique, not monster physique), gently wrapped in velvet layers of words as soft as a newborn’s blankie.

What happened? This stuff is actually good! Why did I stop working on it? What made me go from sizzle to fizzle? Last night, I figured it out.

As writers, we all have a special something deep down that drives us (yes, we are truly driven) to write. A fear, a hope, a dream - some kind of an intensely personal, powerful need that relentlessly pushes us on to write. It was that very drive that scared the hell out of me. I felt big and bold and strong while writing these stories; I felt wide open and surprisingly free from boundaries. However, when that immediate euphoria left, I feared that very wonderful feeling, I feared that drive. I'm a girl...I shouldn't be thinking like this. So I doubted. I doubted that I had any talent. I second-guessed my writing style and convinced my self that I shouldn’t be writing like this!!!! I was afraid to trust in, enjoy, and ride the wave of that strength because I always felt like I should be writing ‘nice’ things – not about horrific, violent murder, and the depravities of humankind. I was frightened by the way all my words would come so fast (what if they ran out? I’d be a failure) and the ideas would continually pummel my brain (what if I run out of ideas? I’ll be a failure) and my characters’ emotions would be so strong that I felt I could barely contain them on the page (what if I can’t convey the depth of their soul? I’ve failed). So I stopped. I didn’t take my stories to their conclusion because the conclusion wasn’t ‘pretty’ enough. I felt like I was writing too strongly, more like a man than a woman (whatever that means). So, I drew back and tried to write neat and tidy, more...feminine. I tried really hard to pull it back, to scale it down but I felt so boxed in that my storyline became weak and cramped and pinched-feeling. My story fizzled, and so did my appetite for writing.

Georgia O’Keefe just came to mind. I wonder if she would have continued to paint had she tried to force herself to fill in paint-by-number kits using only primary colors instead of embracing her unique, delicately overblown style. She opened herself up to her painting and allowed her vision to freely flow. She damned any societal consequences; by her self-truth, her colors remain beautifully vivid and her style is still unusually bold to this day.

This is what I figured out last night: how to keep the sizzle going. Like Georgia with her blank canvases, I have to paint my pages with big, bold, wide-open slashes of color. I, too, am finally able to say, “Damn the Consequences’ and write it as I feel it. I am not a pastel person. My spirit sizzles, my writing will, too.