An ode to my problem with middles: Here I am with a splendid idea for a story. I think, sure, here it is, this will allow me to write a good story: waiting in line, scared of a mouse, loud neighbors, pink sweaters, and the latest, floating yogurts. I know the main twist. I’m not worried too much about the characters since the narrator will be me (surprise), and the second character (since I don’t know how to write stories with more than two characters) will be someone I know.

I write the first part. Beginnings are great. I throw out some clever thoughts I’ve had, the characters start coming together. The setting is described lovingly, and then, then I get to where something is supposed to happen. I hadn’t planned for something to happen—my twists rarely involve action—but I know that I can’t tell a story unless something happens. It’s funny how that works, how stories need a conflict to create interest. Somewhere around here, I stop writing for the day. Whatever inspiration or liquid courage allowed me to get that far runs out, and I close the computer and decide to put off the conflict for another day.

Most times when I put off a problem, it doesn’t solve itself. I don’t come back reinvigorated and knowing what is going to happen. Most times, I come back to the same state as I left the story, at a crossroads with no idea of where to take it. Even here, as I write this short essay, I arrive at the moment of answers, and what do I have to share but consternations about how there are no answers, how even if there were, I wouldn’t be able to come up with any because I’m stopped up, filled to the gills with my own bullshit.

It’s not always a problem with conflicts and answers. There are times when the idea is fully developed and I know where I expect it to go, but when I sit down, I don’t want to write it or tell that story. The disillusioned space ship captain (USS Lucille) is an example of that. I had an idea for the story (the captain was disillusioned with the military, like my pediatrician was disillusioned with medicine), and he flies through space with a rookie, and they encounter problems. I started piling on new ideas, such as how the political system had changed, and when I had all of that in mind (including a failed love interest), I didn’t have the energy to write it. Something overtook me, as happens with fully formed but unrealizable works, and refused to let me put the words together, one in front of the next, to tell the story.

Why am I telling you this? I find myself at the former point in my floating yogurt. As I said previously (or I think I said but probably didn’t—I do that, imagine things I thought I had done but didn’t do, or did with someone but not who I was thinking of), Andrea will levitate and turn the narrator’s world view, everything he held dear (I planned to add more support to show him as a rational, logical (i.e., David in college) character) into rotten fruit. Or something like that. And, after I had done that, I planned to either have the whole thing turn out to be a rotten joke, or show how he becomes a devotee—how, if god showed himself (to use an analogy), there would be no disbelievers. How can one not believe what they see? Faith becomes meaningless. People don’t have faith that the sun will rise in the morning. They know it will—and if it doesn’t, something bad, bad must have happened. You can (using my definition) only have faith in something that’s not provable.

So, here I am, instead of continuing my yogurt story, I’m bitching and complaining, and trying to come to terms with why I’m bitching and complaining and not writing. Yeah, I’ll stop now and open the story and see if I can move it in the direction I blabbed about above.

I did just that. I sat down with the story, spent about 20-inspired minutes adding and changing, and then arrived at the final line I wrote last time. Added another paragraph, and then started surfing the web. Notice the dedication. It’ll come . . . eventually.