Sometimes I’m no good—Jillian Grant Shoichet

Today I woke up knowing I’m a terrible writer. The feeling came over me last night, as I tried to plot out an idea for a book. Any book. Currently I have ideas for four, all started – a standard who-dun-it, a historical with a bit of intrigue, a YA novel, a literary fiction – not just “started” but fifteen thousand words in. All with grab-you detail and engaging characters and vibrant settings. All met with enthusiastic response and encouragement from my writing companions.

All not finished.

I have concepts. I have beginnings. In some cases, I have foggy ends. But I have no middles, no guts. And no idea how to change that.

Last night, I sat with a notebook on my lap and tried to plot one of them. Really plot it: this happens, then this happens, then this happens, and then it ends like this. I wrote and wrote, not caring if I could read my chicken scratches (I’ve become so used to a keyboard that my handwriting is illegible as soon as I pick up any speed), not caring if what I wrote was elegant or grammatically correct or even sensical to anyone but me.

After an hour I gave up. I kept getting hung up on details. Would a detective really do that? How does heroin get from Korea to Portland? If a shipping company goes bankrupt, what happens to the sailing crew? Why put a dead man’s hands in a crab trap instead of just tossing them over the side of the boat? How does one find out who owns a chlorinated swimming pool? And then, inevitably, I do research: I look up shipping routes, stats on defunct shipping companies, flesh decomposition rates in sea water, the history of the drug smuggling trade.

I tell myself that the details I get hung up on are due to my lack of worldly experience. I am, at heart, a North American housewife with a middle-class upbringing, an office job and limited understanding of world suffering and political turmoil. I’m a mother who has an acute sense of her children’s strengths and shortcomings but is still caught by surprise when they do things I don’t expect; I’ve learned to doubt my capacity to understand, let alone write about, the motivations of others. I’m an academic who revels in research but balks when asked to say something decisive and original. I’m a professional editor, but ultimately that means I’m good at finding holes in other people’s plots, not creating my own.

But deep down, I wonder if it’s an inherent lack of imagination and follow-through, an inability to conceptualize a task and finish it, that hinders my ability to tell a story from beginning to end.

So I change tactics. I spend another half-hour trying to come up with an original story idea. Anything. A young entrepreneur who sells body parts for medical research in order to put himself through school. A Ukrainian refugee who talks her way into a job as an esthetician. A woman who arrives home from the airport only to realize she’s picked up the wrong suitcase from the luggage carousel.

I write the first paragraphs of half a dozen short stories. They all peter out before I’ve hit 500 words. I know myself well enough to know that I should go to bed. Inevitably I wake up the next day more confident. I’m a morning person; I’m more hopeful in the early morning light.

But not today. I woke up this morning just as bad a writer as I was when I went to bed last night. I’ve lost the plot – or never had one in the first place. I tell myself that some days are like that.

Deep down, I hope my life doesn’t turn out like one of my unfinished books – strong beginning, engaging characters, but no middle, no guts. I’m preparing myself, though. Some books just don’t get written. And some books that get written just aren’t any good.