U Is For Unfinished Manuscripts

For the Blogging From A to Z Challenge I’m doing you all a huge favor and filling you in on the 26 Things To Hate About Writing.** I’m hoping by the end of April, I will have convinced all of you not to indulge in the wild insanity of becoming a writer. If I can save even one person from offering themselves up in sacrifice to the mad and fickle word gods, I will have done some good in this world.

Check out each letter’s post here.
[image error]UNFINISHED MANUSCRIPTS

Perhaps when you started this whole writing thing, you thought you were going to come up with tons of great ideas, write every day, and create millions of glowing, finished, utterly perfect stories ready for the world to consume. Now, there you sit, with mountains of unfinished work around you, a monument to your poor choices. Some fizzled out, some never really got off the ground, some ran straight into a brick wall like a hyperactive, unsupervised child. And like some kind of fool, you keep writing more stuff, because if writers are anything, it’s persistent and crazy.

One of the worst things about writing is all the stuff you don’t finish. It haunts and taunts you, like the ghost of that bad burrito you ate, filling you with pain and shame. It builds up in your metaphorical mind closet like last season’s tacky shoes. The pain of unfinished work includes:

– Stuff you were really excited about at the time, but then it kinda fell flat. Like that toy you wanted so bad when you were a kid, until you got it, and then you realized it was dumb. (I have really bad Cabbage Patch Doll regret. Ugh, it was so ugly.)

– The story you wrote right into a corner and it couldn’t escape, like a defective Roomba.

– The story you didn’t think through enough so it crashed and burned, like that kite you got and the first time you flew it you destroyed it in a tree ten minutes later. And then your brother was like “I told you to stay away from the tree!” And then you cried because he’s stupid and kites are stupid and EVERYTHING IS STUPID.

Unfinished work sucks. Sure, it’s part of the learning process, it gives you practice, and it helps you build skills for the stuff that works out and gets finished. Being a writer is full of starts and failures, and that’s part of the game. Like that Hungry, Hungry Hippos game that seems so fun and exciting on TV, but it’s really kind of stupid and the marbles all get lost and the hippos’ heads break off and everyone starts fighting and why did I want this for Christmas??? That’s exactly what writing is like—lost marbles, lost heads, and screaming.

**Disclaimer: If you haven’t figured it out, these posts are pure satire and simply a humorous way to vent my writing frustrations. No offense is intended to anyone. Please, become or continue being a writer. It’s awesome, I swear. It’s super…duper, awesome…heh heh.

Filed under: A to Z Challenge, A to Z Challenge 2017 Tagged: blog hop, funny, writing