Why I’m Stuck

Note:  This became a question/answer, except I didn’t write the questions (Sir was sitting here asking me questions and making me type the answers…)  Sorry for the weird format.

This is an on-demand writing…  I’ve been sitting in front of the computer for almost an hour… looking at shoes…  Sir finally came in to see what I was doing.  Now he’s supervising me (so I can’t sit and look at shoes… I’m not even a shoe person!  I literally own three pairs of shoes and wear one of them…  but you know… Zappos!)

So he told me to pick a prompt from a creative writing website and go with it.  So I pulled up a prompt list and read through and rejected them all.  He said to pick one anyway.  I told him I couldn’t.  He picked one and told me to write.  I started crying.

Sigh.

So, instead, he says… Write about why you’re stuck.

Because clearly something is there but I can’t articulate what it is.

He says that I don’t have to tell what it is, just write about the stuck place.

So…

It’s a stuck place.

What I think when I look at the prompt is… I can’t write about that.

Because… because… I don’t want to.

Because… I have no ideas.

The prompt doesn’t give me ideas, it’s just a cliff.  It’s like… you write the prompt and then there’s a chasm and you have to build the bridge over the chasm, and I don’t have anything to build with.

I don’t know where other stories have come from.

I last remember being able to write to prompts… in college… in narrative nonfiction… I hated it, but I got some good writing done.  But it was nonfiction… it wasn’t fiction.

I don’t want to write narrative nonfiction.

I can… I just… I will do the same thing that I do every day.  I’ll just talk… I won’t story tell.  And that isn’t the same thing.  I can talk without a prompt, so what is the point of using a prompt?  I did it in college because that was the assignment.

I don’t want it to be an order.

Because it … feels bad.

It feels bad in my chest and in my stomach.

and in my throat…

and then I cry.

Because I feel sad.

And scared.

I don’t know what I’m scared of.

It will be work.

It won’t… flow.. because… it’s gone… because I killed that part of myself and it’s gone and if I try to find it again then I’m just ripping open all the wounds again and I have to grieve for it again so it’s better to avoid it and not force myself to see how much I’ve lost all the time…

I don’t know how I killed it.

Because I didn’t used to know what good writing was.

Now I know and I can’t be good enough…

I don’t want to write shitty…

It’s too shitty…

It’s more shitty than other people’s shitty and it would hurt and be embarrassing and I don’t want to…

I don’t want anyone to see me fail…

I don’t want myself to see me fail.

I’ve only written Black Fire since he died.  I think I wrote a couple of chapters last year.

I have to write a shitty first draft now…  🙁