I don't usually dissect posts unless I'm locking horns with someone over a serious issue. In this case, I'm completely on your side. In fact, I feel that our similar miseries give us enough in common to be like brothers. I'm using this normally hostile approach because I want to comment on everything you said, either in full sympathy or constructively, and chime in with my own painful experiences where applicable. (I guess this short prologue should also serve to ward off those who don't care for emotional threads.)
Do you guys ever just feel like failure is your only option? I mean, seriously. Does it ever seem as though every course you take seems to be the wrong one, just dropping you off into oblivion? Because right now, I feel like I can do nothing but fail.
Sometimes I feel that you reached into my head and wrote my thoughts as your own. This would be a case in point. When I read that, it resonated sharply. I've felt exactly this way for the past year. I used to have hope, and things used to work out to enough of an extent that I felt everything was alright. The events of the past 5 years derailed that outlook, but it wasn't late last year that hope vanished, and I sank into complete despair.
I believe that it is impossible for anyone who has not been sent into our kind of situation to understand what it means, and how deeply it affects and crushes. "Broken spirit" is just one more term to be defined, for most normally functioning individuals in our society.
The first thing is my writing. I never would have imagined that writing would be as hard as it is. I mean, I always knew it would be a hard thing, but not nearly so much as I'm finding it to actually be. I was thinking about it when I walked home today. I think it's so difficult for me because I've always been a jack of all trades, at least *somewhat* naturally good at... well, pretty much everything. For years and years now I've been adrift, completely unsure about what I actually want to spend my life doing. I've hated every job I've ever had, and my side interests shift constantly as a result of my ADD. The ADD was bad when I was a kid, but it got better as I grew up, so it no longer affects me socially or whatever, it just makes it difficult for me to stick to things for a long period of time. As in months. But now I think I'm at least being *fairly* consistent with my writing, and I was even beginning to feel like I'd finally found the thing I was going to do with myself, the thing that would at least help me feel like I was actually working toward something.
Then it got really fucking hard. I mean, shit, I knew it would be hard. Writing papers in school is one thing, as is writing news articles or short stories; but writing novels? Writing poetry? It's easy to be an amateur and toy with the idea of writing, but actually attempting to be a professional is insanely difficult. Every last little thing that you could let slip before suddenly becomes a major impasse. Every little plot hole, every little unbelievable twitch in the character's nearly-flawless course of action... fuck. *One* thing can send this cascading shockwave through an entire story. One little bit that you missed, one little scene that you thought would work within the boundaries of your characters' emotions and motivations that turns out to be just off the mark... and hours are wasted. Because of the whole jack of all trades thing I've just never known difficulty like this before. I've never *tried* to get into anything this much to actually experience what it really takes for a person to *really* put their all into a craft. And it's like slamming my head into a wall. The breakthroughs are satisfying and almost opiatic, but the struggles are just so hard.
So hard that you realize, in horror, that you can never break through the walls alone, and that you
are alone? Once upon a time, it was easy for me. My interest in early 8-bit micros gave me an edge in the budding IBM-PC marketplace. I could do things very few other people knew how to do. I could make primitive hardware sing and dance, where everyone else produced silent stills. I was in demand, and feeling great about myself and the future. My fall was a long and painful one. It seems that while I was very technically adept, I completely lacked the skills to stay on top of the winds of change, and I failed to reinvent myself to go along with the enormous paradigm shifts the PC industry has undergone in 20 years. That's my failure. I stayed with it through the 80s and early 90s, but after that, the decline seemed somehow inevitable, outside of my ability to prevent. Now, I sometimes wonder if I will ever be able to get the kind of job I even need a college degree for. And working at anything menial makes no economic sense, because all it will do is perpetuate abject poverty. Between child support and a mountain of debt, I have to cough up so much cash every month that it's better to let what I have left evaporate and declare Chapter-7 bankruptcy, than to get a low-paying job and have some court force me to make hefty payments on this debt till I die. The only "honorable" solution is to have a high-paying job, and make real payments on all this, so that it gets paid off in a reasonable amount of time. Failing that, and I don't see any way that it can't fail at this point, I have no traditionally acceptable options. I have to let the whole thing implode, and then stumble my way out the other side.
The only way I can fall asleep at night is to distract myself with something, TV or a portable game usually, until I pass out from exhaustion.
It turns out that I'm really quite good at creating characters and settings. I've managed to build up this entire fictional universe from the crumbs of a few story ideas I had a couple of years ago. I have some preliminary timelines of major world events, several different organizations, cities, countries... you name it. I've worked out the metaphysical mechanics of the world. I've got endless opportunities for sadistic science fiction / horror fun. Hell, I have really solid ideas for about 6 different novels and a few short stories, all set in different periods of this same universe, and I have great characters that I'm excited about.
The problem? I can't write plot for shit. I mean, I can... ish. But even with extensive character biographies, maps of locations, solid story premises, whatever... getting my characters from point A to point B *believably*, in a manner I can feel really feel confident about, is becoming horribly tiring. I just can't seem to make it happen lately. The first story I was really working hard on has just gone somewhere I don't like anymore. I'm just sick of the sight of it. It was going really well and then it just got horrible somewhere, and I've more or less determined that one of the characters is completely stupid. I mean, he's cool (he's a crossover from another story where he works brilliantly), but just not right for the tale. And Black (some of you may remember the "serials" I was posting here for a while), which I'm working on again, seems to be pretty tight from every standpoint but the midsection. I've got everything in there I want except the fucking middle. It just won't come together and it's driving me insane.
The one thing I can think to suggest is that you have to treat your fictional characters like real people. They have to live in your mind, and you have to let them go where they must, given who they are, even if this means that the story goes off in a completely different direction from what you envisioned.
All this, and I know all too well that even if I managed to become a success with my endeavors in poetry and fiction, there's no money in it. Nothing I've ever loved has been something I could really make money doing, and that's frustrating as hell because I can't take my job anymore. I just can't take it. I know I've been feeling sick because I'm stressed out of my mind and the situation at my job just continues to worsen. Every day there's some new thing, and nobody can understand why I hate it so much. Nobody fucking understands that my life is spent doing things I hate, dealing with shit I'm not properly equipped to deal with. It's just a string of miseries that I can't battle. I spend all day at a job I hate with people I hate even more, then come home and spend time with my lovely wife who hates her life at least every other day, and I can't change anything. I can't help her condition, I can't even distract her from it. Our marriage suffers from the financial hardships of her inability to work (if we can't get this disability case to go through, we're fucked), from an ever-increasing lack of intimacy due to her condition, and the fact that both of us are frequently irritable. And I can't fucking find a way out of any of it. There's nothing to fix it, nothing to make it easier, nothing to point me in the direction of some satisfaction. It's just marking days off on the calendar over and over, occasionally broken up by some good times spent with the few friends I'm lucky enough to have. I just don't know how to do it anymore. It was all so easy six years ago. Even when Julie and I were dating and shit was tough... it was so much easier. I still had crappy jobs, I drank too much, wasn't in the best shape... and hell, I wasn't even doing things as well or as consistently as I am now. But it all felt so open, so full of possibility. Even when I bitched there was still a guy in the back of my head saying that everything would be cool if I just kept at it a while longer. I felt like going back to school was possible someday. My Dad was still alive and I felt like there was always someone I could go to for advice that was actually worth something.
I know very well the feelings you describe. I've been there. About all I can offer beyond sympathy is the observation, born from being around much longer than you, that things
can always get worse. You may not think so now, but believe me, they can. Stick to that job until you have something else. Be more selfish if you have to in order to survive, take more time for yourself even when others clamor for it, but don't throw in the towel. You're in the fight for your life, and self-preservation takes precedence over everything else.
I just don't know where I'm going anymore. Somebody just please hit me in the face with a brick.
That doesn't work. Has that ever worked, the proverbial kick in the ass? Not for me. I can't be intimidated into performing. Can you? You need positive reasons to perform better. Negative reasons only perpetuate a situation, without improving it.
