Sunday, June 18, 2006

Darn.

When I made the switch to screenplay writing a couple of months ago, my main concern was trying to adjust to the completely different way screenplay writing worked, as opposed to fiction writing. The different focuses, the different format, different structure, different goals. I set out to conquer this uncharted literary territory and make it mine, to see if I liked it and could make a career out of it.

Today I sat outside a little pub in a little English town and wrote for hours.

Literally. I don't know how long I was there. But I got an incredible amount of writing done, and for the most part it was easy. My last few months at university I was in a creative drought. It was awful. Here I write all the time. Journal entries, long emails, working on my screenplay ideas. It's a great switch, and I'm rediscovering some of the joy I had in writing that I lost somewhere along the way in my panic to be brilliant. However, today I realized something that made me a little trepidatious.

I'm not sure I can write two genres at once. It was hard enough to try to write fantasy and literary fiction at the same time. But today I was looking back at some of the places where I've worked as an editor, and I thought about my fiction contributions or pieces that are waiting to be submitted, and I found myself wondering if I could actually sit down one night and write ten pages for a screenplay and then sit down the next night and outline a short story. I can't do them both on the same day. Today I can't even think about touching any of my story ideas, while if I had more paper, I'm sure I could continue with my screenplay. And it's not like I don't have any fiction ideas, because I do. I just don't think I can focus on more than one genre at a time. It's exhausting. It's daunting, just thinking about it. And that worries me a bit, because - even though I know I will probably never have to - I don't want to choose which one will be my focus. I want them both.

Sometimes I think maybe I want the world a little too much.

No comments: