Hitting The Doldrums...Again

     I was complaining in my writing class this week.  I could not seem to progress with my book.  I had decided the stories had no merit.  They all needed to be rewritten. There was no conflict.  Why would anyone want to read them?  Even I didn't.  

     I had started this project of linking short stories with absolute certainty that there were enough of them and they were related, and suddenly I was not so sure.  What had happened to the thirteen stories I thought had? Now that I had decided they were all terrible--except maybe the ones that had already been published--I didn't have enough.

     Which characters were worth writing about?  Following? I couldn't decide. Where was the fire? Where was the passion? I had none.

     My writing teacher asked "What was the thread that connected one story to another? Can you find a question you can ask at the beginning of the first story and answer by the end of the last one?"

     I went to sleep thinking about this, and in the magic way the unconscious works,  I awoke with the beginnings of an answer.  These are family stories.  They revolve around the ways the family members connect one to the other, the ways they come together and the ways they split apart.  So the overriding question is can we keep our connections and what happens when we don't? 

     It helped to pose the question. I saw there was conflict, and plenty of it.  I began to rethink the story links, to put together the family tree and watch what happened when a character in one story was impacted by something that happened to a character in another story. Slowly it began to make sense again. I hope I can keep the focus.

     But I am aware that this process is not a straight line; it is a kind of zig-zag.  And I expect I will be in the doldrums again as I go through the work.  The trick is not to stay there.