New Phase

Let's keep this short and to the point, for there's no time to waste.

It's been five years since I touched this record of my thoughts on process. When collaboration failed, I turned to the self. Working a solo project, you're the only one who can let you down.

I did a lot of letting myself down in the intervening years, but that time produced triumph as well. No failed collaboration, I got myself to the end: a whole book, a novel, ready for sale.

I've tried to explain how it can be done - a little at a time, it must become a habit. Without the habit, there is no constancy, no plodding to the end of the race. And if you please, the race is against time, the most precious resource we have.

Don't work in isolation. They say a writer's life is solitary, but does it have to be that way? The first time I met with a whole group of writers, it astonished me the things that they said. The words on their lips were the words I had used, when I told my spouse of my troubles writing. Find others like you, seek encouragement, don't get lost nor despair.

In the end there is the dream and its decree, that we must go forward or die trying. That is the human spirit, and the end that can be served.

Should I Work On My Weakest Area?

The main reason I am only a co-author is that I use my best friend to compensate for my weakest area, the conceptual side of storytelling. I'm a good writer, but I'm not a fantastic storyteller.

I suffer from blank-slate syndrome: when I sit down to write something without a detailed plan, I find myself at a loss. Plot hooks, on the other hand, I can do. If I know what the plot's going to be, I can draft it up no problem.

In contrast, my friend is a visionary and a storyteller. He invents interesting characters and makes their personalities bounce off of one another, he uses vivid images and re-visits themes. In other words, he makes all the pieces fit together.

That is a skill that I have never demonstrated to myself that I have. Even in collegiate studies, when I was faced with writing a story, I resorted to looking at science fiction artwork created by an artist friend and writing stories based on the setting they depicted. The stories I wrote, moreover, I did not consider that their pieces fit well together, regardless of the skill with which I made them.

In the discussion that led up to the early termination of my last solo project (the one with IP difficulties), my co-author suggested, as he has many times, that I strike out on my own. This time, though, he specifically suggested that instead of compensating for my weakness, I should develop it in the hopes of making it not-weak.

This is a difficult question without a clear-cut answer: should I work on my weakest area? There are two basic approaches to this question. 1) Because it is my weakest area, my time is better spent doing what I am naturally good at. This is the approach I have favored. The other approach is this: 2) Skills at which you are weak should be developed. This is a costly approach, but the idea is that, afterward, the weakness will be gone.

This over-simplified description is leaving out non-measurables such as the individual's capacity to learn the weak skill, the start-up cost (money/time) of the learning, and the availibility of compensation aids. The superior answer seems very situational. I don't know what's better for me in my situation, but at this point I feel that my hand has been forced, and my next step must be to select a project and begin work.

Sometimes, Nothing Goes According to Plan

Last night, I had a dispute by telephone with my best friend / co-author about source material.

Our conversation was, for me, a devastating turning point. I tried to deny it, but he could tell from my tone of voice that he had, in his words,"taken the wind out of my sails."

The implication of his decision, from my point of view, was to invalidate nearly a year's worth of my work, which was upsetting. For the purpose of this posting, it's not necessary to dwell on the details. I consider that a bad decision I made a year ago in the conception of these plans I've been following is largely to blame for the situation I'm in now. Still, I am disappointed with the results of his decision. What I'm faced with now is deciding what to do next.

The reality is quite simply that the plans we make don't always work out. Imagine, for example, the gut-punch of dreaming up a story that you think is brilliant, writing it, and then finding out - after you're already finished - that it's been done before and you can't use it. (That's not what happened in this situation, but that has happened to us before.)

I have two reasonable options right now, as I see it: 1) I could devote a whole lot of extra work to try to save what I've done from being wasted effort, or 2) I could cut my losses, chalk up the "practice" value of the effort that went toward fulfilling my now-scrapped plans, and figure out something else to do instead.

A third, unreasonable option, is to mope and feel sorry for myself, to hard-stop now that my plans have been wrecked, and spiral downward into a very dark and unhappy place. Since this is, in my estimation, a demonstrably unreasonable response to this situation, it is off the table.

Unfortunately, even if I choose reasonable option #1 in a bid to not feel as though my work over the past year was wasted, some of what I've done is still completely unusable. This is partly my fault: my source material was poorly-chosen, and I should have better-appreciated the dangers of using it. Back when I started this venture, I believed that I could turn the story idea into something worthwhile; it turns out that I was wrong.

How did this happen? At the most basic level, it happened because I compensated for my weakest creative area - the process of idea-generating - by collaborating with someone else who is strong in that area. My best friend / co-author is a visionary, and I have long leaned on him for a crutch in that department. In a display of his usual prescience, my friend had long tried to convince me to strike out my own, apart from his influence, because his writing is only a hobby, not a primary pursuit like it is for me. During our conversation last night, he characterized my decision to rely on his idea-generating powers as a mistake, because I had opted to avoid my weakest area rather than strengthening it.

I've often lamented that I draft/work/create too slowly for my taste. My spouse is fond of a Chinese(?) proverb that essentially states: it doesn't matter how slowly you move as long as you don't stop. This is helpful encouragement when I'm feeling sluggish, but it also applies to this specific situation: the wrong thing to do would be to get discouraged and give up or quit. What I'm doing instead is to re-evaluate everything and choose my next course of action.

A final word about art collaboration: I don't want to denigrate collaborating with others or discourage anyone reading this posting from doing so themselves. In the case of our primary project, collaboration serves us very well - my friend summarized by saying that he felt that for every area he is weak in, I am able to compensate with my contributions. That said, collaboration can also be restrictive. The stereotype that comes to mind is that of rock musicians who cease working together "because of artistic differences." Striking out on your own instead of working with others definitely offers more creative freedom.