Writing Cerebral Fiction is Like Gutting Chickens on an Assembly Line

Often I find writing to be a thoroughly unenjoyable task. It’s no wonder I haven’t published anything when I can’t finish writing anything. Even when I employ the Mashed Potato Method of fiction writing, I get stuck where I just start thinking too much. Right about step three when the writing starts getting more detail-oriented. Then the mental debates begin—about word choice, sentence order and structure, sorting through underlying meanings and symbolism that begin to surface and whether I should develop them. Completing the short story starts feeling like I am working on an assembly line gutting chickens with arthritic hands that are seizing up into in some malformed claws. Except in the case of writing it is my brain that gets knotted up.

I’ve always experienced the world like a big brain mounted on a pair of puny legs. Thinking, analyzing. Not a lot of doing. (Even when I do something, such as this web site, then it is about not doing something. The site after all, is unpublished guy, not published guy.) It is only natural that his should carry over to the my writing. What do I mean by cerebral fiction, anyway? I touched on this in an earlier post about HAL 9000 and Robert Goorlick. In my case, I mean writing that is less plot-driven, inward-looking to the point of being turned inside out in some deconstructed contortion, and as inert as Xenon. Just what I enjoy reading. Wish I enjoyed writing it more. When I try to break out of that cerebral mold it just gets that much worse. I start to feel like I am in the tenth hour of my chicken-gutting shift. Both my hands have ceased working altogether, and I have to resort to pounding the guts out of the chicken with the sides of my hands, which have frozen into caricatures of the White Tiger kung fu fighting style.

How ever will I defeat the big brain?

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