Writing fiction

I wish I were a better fiction writer. It isn't that I'm bad at it, I just don't know how to come up with ideas. I don't know how to use small inspiration and turn it into a story with character development and plot and...um...adjectives.

I can write what I know. When I do write fiction, it's always as a facet of me. It's always me in the story doing the taking, or walking along a highway in khakis, or flubbing a moment with a beautiful girl.

I cannot do it easily, though, because it's hard for me to take myself to another world. I can immerse myself in something -- like a smell or a sound or a piece of music -- but to actually go to a totally new world?

I'm jealous of those who can, but worried by/for those who do so to the extent that they forget to live in reality. Maybe that's my problem: I'm too deeply rooted in reality to write fiction often. (Or maybe that's my problem, period! I have issues letting go of, well, the tangible world...and I don't mean tangible in the sense of physical tangibility, but in mental tangibility in that it's real.)

As much as I try to hold on to childhood, I think that's one part of it that died beyond resuscitation. I am no good at make-believe anymore. I once was, however. My childhood best friend, Adam Palmer, and I would constantly pretend to be in other worlds and the whatnot, but now, I even have trouble holding a wiffle ball bat in my hand and pretending I'm about to win the World Series.

To paraphrase Freud: Sometimes a wiffle ball bat is just a wiffle ball bat.

And that's sad.