So, I’ve been posting excerpts of a short story, “Snowed In.” It’s not an example of my best writing, and for all I know it may not even be an example of passably acceptable writing. But it’s fun and I find it entertaining and….I have no idea where to go from here. I’m at a dead stop in the story. Which, considering that nothing has actually happened is quite an accomplishment.
I started this story as a writing exercise: take a moment and write it. That moment was sliding down a snowy hill in a blizzard in Vermont. Did that. The fragment (what was posted as excerpt 1) sat for a couple of years. Then, about six months ago, I went back and filled in the rest of what I’ve got: a couple of faceless protagonists (one of whom seems to be kind of a jerk), a great, creepy, lunatic… something or other (Harold), and Stan, who has my favorite scene in the whole piece. But what is it all? I don’t know. I didn’t have a plotline when I started, or when I picked it up, and despite looking at it every couple of weeks or so for the past few months, I can’t decide where to go with it.
John’s upstairs in bed. Steve has brushed his teeth and has retired his underdeveloped self off to some other room in the house where he rests his insubstantial character amongst the shadows… Harold is downstairs happily munching away while watching some good tube.
But what next? I don’t know. What happens next? What the hell is Harold? I have ideas, but frankly, they all suck. And they’re stuck. All these lousy, cliche ridden ideas are jammed in my brain like so many messy cheezios… I can’t get past them to figure out what happens next.
If you have any thoughts, let me know. I may not pick them up as presented, but who knows? And maybe you can help break the logjam in my imagination.
Sounds like the way they wrote the last two seasons of BSG.
Anyway, I like it. Clearly there are some bodies buried here.