Do You Have a Slush Pile?
That one pile filled with incomplete pieces of text, stories that couldn’t find their endings, articles rejected by clients or companies?
When I was new to writing, my slush pile represented my failure. It had all the pieces of my heart that couldn’t reach their destination.
There was a story I was writing. I started it on impulse, without much research or planning, only to be stuck in the middle because I had no idea how to reach the ending I’d imagined.
After the first few scenes, the story seemed to have developed a life of its own, going in a very different direction from the one I’d desired.
The characters developed their own thinking, and I felt they wouldn’t be satisfied with the ending I’d thought for them.
There were other problems too. The story was set in a place I was completely unaware of, and fleshing out minute details was becoming hard each passing day.
And so I got detached from it, took a break. One day turned into two. Like that, months went by. I was releasing it as a serial fiction, but its only readers were my friend and sister.
I never imagined they were interested in the story. They were probably doing me a favor by reading it. They never appreciated it, and I never asked them for a feedback,
Was I scared they’d criticize it? Perhaps.
So after spending a lot of time racking my brains to reach an ending, I decided to give up. It wasn’t a decision I took consciously. The story just faded to the back of my mind and laptop, with me moving on to more realistic pursuits in life (like searching for freelance projects as I was short on cash).
A few months later, when the story came up in a conversation with my sister, she asked why I’d stopped writing it. I was silent for a minute. What could I say?
At that time, I still felt like a loser who couldn’t finish a story. I never tried to inspect why it had happened.
In my silence, she said, “I don’t know why you stopped, but I was waiting for the next chapter. For a month, I refreshed your blog every day to see if you’d uploaded something.”
By then, I was gaping at her. I was a loser, a quitter, not a good writer. But here was the one person I’d wanted to impress the most, saying she WAITED for my story.
That was all the push I needed because I’ve never looked back since.
