easy come....best to stay?

Where shall I start?

Our house is relatively small, and whenever I write, be it a blogpost, a chatline in facebook, an article for an agricultural monthly, or any work in progress, the very action of writing is obvious to anyone in the house. It just can not go unseen.

I have gotten used to it, and it kind of inspires me, too.

The kids don't seem to care, but my husband sometimes notes that I write so fast and am so immersed in writing as if my life depended upon finishing it, while at other times I type, do something and type again and so forth.

He claims that there is a correlation between the speed I write with and the quality of the outcome. He thinks the pieces I write with much enthusiam are better.

I am not so sure... :) 

But there might be a tendency.

When the scene is right in front of me, the feelings I want to convey are clear, (I type faster), the story is more vivid for me, at least. But for the reader?

My DH is just one of the readers :) :) 

What's your experience?

the gastro story

There is this short story, totalling to about 4000 words, that I have been writing since late August.

It's been a long time, but as per usual, I have my good reasons for not finishing ever since.

(I had to finish articles for the monthly magazines I work for, I even had a translation job in between)

And then there are the usual bad reasons...

Waiting for inspiration, waiting for something else.

At times I didn't even bother to open the file for days or at times, for a week or two.

Sometimes I came accross ideas, facts, interesting aspects, and I slap my forehead and thank myself for having waited for such a wonderful component of the story. I even praise myself saying 'how good it was to NOT write the story... see? This one piece of idea/fact/aspect was just what you needed'

But I think it is the other way around.

Since I have the urge to finish the story (do I, really?) anything that rings that particular bell reminds me of the story.

Do I classify as a procastrinator?

And also, if a story is not coming out by itself, is it worth writing?

Owe me, owe you

Yesterday I finished a short story, where the ending is based partly on my memories. This is a haunting, a nightmare~ish memory, the one you keep repressing, yet eventually, it has to see the sunlight.

I worked along the story to have this memory well grounded, and when I was writing, memories of the past have, for some minutes, become things of the present, and I underwent the same pressure again.

As with all therapeutic writing, it took much of the stress away from me and I felt liberated.

But here comes the uneasy part:

This writing was not intended to entertain/educate only me, this writing will be read at a reading evening of our writers' group this Friday.

(I have already contacted someone to read it aloud for me...so I am not worrying about my massive stage fright)

The question rather is that am I able to make the experience as important for the reader as it was for me?

I owed myself this story, but I also owe the reader (or the listener) to be able to grasp it.

This is the trouble of writing from one's own experience: the writer has bits of information he knows so well and feels so minute and/or evident that he leaves them out of the story. Yet these are needed for the experience to be complete.

On a second thought....

I know that no reader/listener will feel the exact same thing what I felt. No problem with that.

But he has to feel something not unlike to what I felt.

How do you overcome the problem of writing things out, writing about haunting memories? How do you make the feeling as memorable for the reader as it is/was to you?