Three Writers and a Chimera

I went to my local bar Friday night. I drank beer with a number of the regulars who gather there after work. I’d been writing all day and I could not disengage my mind from my writing. After a few beers, while listening to the hum of voices around me, an idea for a short story came to me. I spent the weekend trying to write that story, not making any progress on it, even though its target length is only 500 words.

That’s the way it goes sometimes. The plot, emotion, and detail for a story shine vividly through its images, but the words and the sentences don’t come out right.

Since the beginning of the year, I have read Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, most the new Haruki Murakami novel, Kafka by the Shore, and a many of William Trevor’s short stories. I wonder if I am trying to write a 500 word short story that is stylistically a combination of all three writers? I might be chasing a chimera.

Put it on my tombstone: he chased chimeras.