The World is My Discarded Oyster

I'm going to continue getting distracted from my assigned task. It's just who I am as a person. I keep finding other things to talk about. And in a way, that's what today's post is about.

How I let myself down all the time.

It's not as pathetic as it sounds, not really. I just build up all these great ideas with such potential and then… meh. I focus on something else entirely.

I'm going to tell you a story. About a story. I wrote this last spring. You can see all the posts about it here. It was the adventures of a small town sheriff when faced with a larger and modernizing world. Okay, fine.

But the world, man, the world.

It was such a cool world. Essentially, the world was flat, and at some point a great cataclysm had shattered it into pieces, with each continent floating along through space, separate from each other. It's a kind of Discworld type science where it doesn't actually make sense, but everyone just accepts it and moves on. So you have all these fragments of the world, and someone starts sending airships to the other continents, and then these giant cable cars are strung between them on thousands of miles of massive cables.

There was so much I could have done, with the exploration and industry, and just… adventure.

But then I… didn’t.

For some reason I just focused on a handful of characters, in one little town, on the last continent to be reconnected to the others. And looking back, I don't know why. It was like I had this huge story to tell, but it seemed too ambitious, so I just hid in a corner of the world and refused to look outside. The majority of the events in the story could have taken place anywhere, and I just really wasted the whole Shattered World setting.

I should probably go back and fix that.

And then I did the same thing with my story "Losing Daylight." I had this grand plan in mind with all of these intense images with the wind and the encroaching darkness and it was going to be amazing. But then I put in basically none of that and it was a far cry from amazing. Mediocre, at best. It's like I just wimped out partway through and left out all the intensity. It was supposed to be nachos with five cheeses and jalapenos, but ended up room temperature white bread with off-brand margarine. I can still picture the badassness in my head, but it never made it to the page.

This is something that I'm starting to be worried about now. That I'll come up with all these great cosmic ideas and then be too afraid to use them, instead opting for a simpler, safer route.

"So, don't be afraid," you might say.

Sound advice, but easier said than done. Imagine creating this vast complex world, full of life and death and science and art. You're on a tiny little pinpoint of solid ground, of boring plots in boring places, and all around you is the swirling madness of unbridled creativity. Imagine jumping straight out into the yawning gyre as it threatens to swallow up you and everything you know in your tiny little safe world, and trying to tell the story of all of that.

Would you jump? Or would you stay secure in predictability and turn your back on the firmament of terrifying possibility?

I'll see you Friday.