Notes on Ruins

Kafka once wrote in his diary “anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate . . . but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins.” I wish I could do that.

I just burst into tears because my short stories won’t work.

The response when I took ‘Angela’s Dress’ to my writing workshop was a long silence. My punctuation was complimented. I realised that it needs a lot more work, to put in backstory, relationship details and rounded characters. Not able to face attempting it today, I’ve been redrafting ‘Snow Scene’, the meditation of a man whose life has shattered as he considers suicide in an icy lake. I worry that I don’t understand the male mind, he seems emotional and changeable, his problems are trivial and his interior monologue clichéd.

I want to be good at this. I don’t know how. The notes are the ruins.