An Unexpected Muse

As of last week, my Writer’s Block is no longer in existence. Typing out my exasperation with it in my previous post actually worked.

The idea of a museum filled with taxidermied animals never left me. And in the early hours of a Wednesday morning – around 2:30 a.m. as I was getting ready to sleep – a character hit me. All I had was his inner turmoil, imagining him in this setting. Then everything else sort of spilled out the more I thought about how the protagonist got into this situation.

Much later in the evening of that Wednesday, I drafted a brief outline of the short story and began working on it. I wrote for almost three hours that night and then spent two hours the following day to finish it.

It was more of a literary piece – which is what I was aiming for – but the theme I thought I was going to explore ended up vying for attention with another theme: inheritance. Fun stuff. Some stories will certainly take you on some interesting turns once you actually start writing it.

Since I finished the piece, however, I keep going back to tweak it. I added a more concrete scene in the opening page. Thought about moving a few sentences around in another scene. (In the end, I didn’t do it, but I’m still not completely satisfied with the start of that scene.) Changed the final line of the entire story.

I’m also contemplating about maybe writing a second version of the story. Right now, I think I made the right decision to have it in third-person perspective. But there seems to be a strong narrator voice, which I keep going back and forth on. It fits with the detachment and despair of the protagonist, but I’m not sure if it’s too much. Also, the museum setting basically feels like a character too, so I don’t want to spend so much time in the protagonist’s head because of it.

I haven’t written a new story since last week, but now I have this “itch” to write more stories with a rural or small-town feel. I would never personally want to live in the countryside, but I understand why some people would find this type of environment alluring.

It probably doesn’t help that my sister and I are going on a mini-vacation up north next week. Northern Michigan, especially the Upper Peninsula, is quite known for their rural small towns. I have family that lives in the first tiny town once you cross the Mackinac Bridge, and my cousins’ school contained all K-12 students in one building. Granted, the elementary, middle school, and high school each had a section of the building, but still. The fact that they’d only have thirty kids in each grade is something I have a difficult time comprehending.

Despite all that, I hope I can mine some story ideas from my trip. I haven’t gone on any sort of overnight vacation in four years. My sister and I had talked about going up north since summer 2016, but we could never make it happen. (We also haven’t been in that area in almost nine years.) I’m excited for it. Even if I have had to evade all sorts of questions about it from my mom and grandma…because they’re hinting that they want to tag along on our mini-vacation too.