The Stories I Don't Write

In my mind and heart, I'm a writer. But I'm imperfect and confused. I settle for quasi-reporting of personal experiences and social commentary. But I feel that it's distraction from the stories - the stories I don't write.

I'm a storyteller with nothing more than fragments and glimpses of people and worlds I assume don't exist and haven't had told to me before.  I assume my subconscious is not lifting ideas already created, though that is difficult in a late modern age with seven billion people. It's all been done before, I'll tell myself. Maybe it's too much for me clear this clutter from my mind to tell a complete story.  It's exhausting.

I've got a couple of short stories that I've completed and countless others that have been outlined and half baked. For spells of time, I'll obsess over these stories and characters. I've let them consume me as I fantasize their environments and related chains of events.  I'll ride the bus so I can stare out the window for 45 minutes or so a day and let my mind wander and wonder. Most of the time I end up with noteworthy yet incomplete ideas.  Somehow that is comforting.

I've got a story about a missionary who comes back from a mission trip and brings some deity with her. There's another one  with a farmer who experiences a head injury and from that head injury, a mythic world literal pours out around him.  I've got a story about an old man and his subterranean obsessions and a story about the cultural impact a couple of off putting rural singers who are sisters.  It's all pure fantasy and science fiction.  Worse still, it's likely all derivative tripe that is successful in only communicating my immaturity as a story teller and writer.  I tell myself, does the world really need more of this?  

What I do commit to paper is often rambling and too lengthy.  I've really tried to write short stories and keep things brief.  However, I get bogged down somehow.  I'll start writing and then get lost in it.  I'll then start editing things for the sake of brevity.  But as I edit, I lose touch with my ideas and end up waste deep in something without direction.  I struggle finding resolution with some of my stories.  I'm good at formulating ideas, but not stringing together narratives with satisfying endings. A lot of my stories are dreams which is probably part of my problem.  They are environments and characters that I dream up, sans a sequence of sensible events.  Hey listen to me complain about these awesome dreams I have and are able to remember.

But somehow I'm content with all of this. If it's meant to happen, it's meant to happen. I'm happy keeping my worlds and characters to myself. My only challenge is that I want to be able to distill these fragments into stories I can tell my kids.  They believe anything I tell them.