Of all the feelings in the world, there is none that quite matches up with finishing the first draft of something you’ve written, especially when it’s something you weren’t sure you’d finish.

I’ve written 62 plays of various page count and in various stages of completion, of which 32 have been produced or workshopped. Every one of those, at some point or another, has felt impossible to complete. (And, you’ll note, I have 30 that I am theoretically still going to work on “when I get time or inspiration.” We’ll see about that.)

Some time during all that, I’ve also written about two dozen short stories. It might be more, but I’ve got 22 saved on this laptop — and, now, a 23rd. One that I started last August and worked on in the course of five writing sessions over five weeks. One that, throughout the process, I almost turned into a play. Maybe that seemed easier. I write one or two plays a year, but in recent years I don’t write a short story every year. Every time while writing this story, it was sorely tempting to turn it into a play.

Yes, there is a pride in doing something you didn’t know you could do. I didn’t know I could finish this story in a satisfactory way. (Satisfactory to me, anyway.) Now I’m just going to let it settle for a bit, give it a polish within a month, and send it out.

And, in the meantime, write something else.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 28th, 2018 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.