Prose

I'm trying to write more prose. I've only start one thing of prose lately, but I intend to carry through with writing more. After finishing 100+ page book of poetry over a 6 or 7 year period, I feel the need to put my thoughts into another form. I find prose challenging. I write it very slowly. I also write poetry slowly. My prose velocity means that it is highly unlikely that I ever write a novel. I wrote slowly because my hope is that I can feel the impact that each word has as I type it out. 

That sounds stupid because it is.

I kind of picture it like a piano hammer striking the strings inside the body. 

I've written short stories in the past that didn't take too much effort. It's as if I've conditioned my brain into overthinking language. Writing can feel like a trudge through a swamp. It also feels unnecessary to write every word that enters my field of thought. My language needs space, which is maybe I struggle with the visual density of prose. Maybe writing papers in college and grad school killed the joy of prose.

Here are some things I mostly avoid when writing prose:

1. Dialogue: I just don't like writing it. 

2. Character names. I always forget character names when I read and watch movies. As long as I can tell who's who, it's all good.

3. Action: When I write prose in the non-non-fictional realm, I feel this urge to have nothing happen. It's like reality is already filled with so much insanity that I want to write things in which the drama is purely in the act of continued existence. At least this applies to what I'm writing right now. Everything has already happened or will happen, but right now is just existence. Don't come to my prose looking for drastic acts or sexy shenanigans. There will be no conniving, just more thinking, but hopefully the blood of thinking.

4. Narrative resolution: I think there's only one story in which I've "resolved" the narrative, and that one was resolved by a world-ending storm overtaking the protagonist's home while playing Madden. 

5. Characters that are writers. Self-explanatory. 

After a productive period of poetry during the first month of quarantine, I found myself struggling to create until recently, which I'm forcing. I need to do that from time to time. I hope this is not something that I start and then abandon. I once wrote 30-40 pages of a novel on a Saturday before quitting the next day. I think I needed to do that to commit myself to writing poetry. I was in college at the time, still living in the dorms. All I can remember is spending an entire page describing the protagonist walking around an empty strip mall parking lot. I remember thinking that was my favorite part. It was the last thing I wrote before giving up the novel.