Here is a word cloud of the first paragraph of a short story I’m working on:
This is the first fiction I’ve written since grad school. I’ve written here before that I don’t feel the compulsion to write. And now I have to confess that here I sit, feeling that generative energy after all, and kind of resenting it. It’s hard to build something from the ground up when it doesn’t come in a structured way. I like imposing some order on the chaos, or finding the order in what looks like someone else’s madness. I even like just watching the chaos churn. What I don’t like is getting these random zings out of the blue and having no idea what to do with them.
But this is a real story, something worth excavating despite my often vocal misgivings. Pieces of it come at me in different forms, usually when I’m doing something else. I throw it all into a Google doc, watching for signs of life without knowing what those signs might look like. I seem to have a nucleus but not the atoms, and a fully-formed elbow, and a small cluster of stars. And I don’t know whether I’m building a boat or a jigsaw puzzle or a planet-destroying death ray.
