You Can't Keep It All

This past evening, my co-author and I discussed his IP decisions and their effects on my long-term plans. As we talked, I re-visited in my mind why I was troubled by having "wasted my time."

Certainly no creative effort is a true waste, is it? Can't it be asserted that each time you create something, you add to yourself?

My grief over having to scrap my plans had to do with my goal. My goal had been to present what I had created to a wide audience, and now, that was off the table. So, from my point of view, his decision was a setback.

The new clarity about my work's IP issues showed me that I had not advanced toward the goal of any publishing/sale/distribution, and that was disappointing. But had I not advanced in any other way?

One reason I particularly disliked this turn of events is that some of the work I've done is unsalvageable. [For clarity: half of the situation I'm in now amounts to misunderstanding / poor communication between my friend and I, and the other half comes from my (poor) choice of source material. The bit of work I've done that is unsalvageable is directly related to the latter half.] As we assessed the situation, I realized that my displeasure revealed immaturity on my part.

Expecting to be able to use everything you make is immature. Fighting to protect ill-conceived work is equally so. If you checked out the link in my first post, then it's easy to see a major difference between me and a practiced author: she is mature enough to know when she's created something atrocious, and she throws it away. I am new at this pursuit, and I haven't learned to let go. The flat-out truth is, you can't keep it all, and you shouldn't want to.

I knew or suspected when I laid my plans and began work that I had made a less-than-ideal choice of source material. One method of preventing this kind of grief might be a "confidence check": if you feel confident about your plans (and you've attempted to head off any problems you can anticipate), it's probably okay to go ahead and start work. If you have doubts about what you've planned, then you're not ready to invest a lot of effort into creating - you need to re-visit the planning stage. Invest up front to save a headache later.

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.

Second Guesses

One huge disadvantage to making art instead of doing something more meaningfully productive, like assembling widgets, is that it the results are incredibly subjective. If you're tasked with putting together a widget, the test of whether or not you succeeded is a known-known - the widget works as intended, or it doesn't. In art, there a lot of evaluative known-unknowns (and maybe even some unknown-unknowns). There are many genres of literature, many reader audiences with many preferences, and many authors with varied skillsets and chosen subject matter. What does the New York Times Bestseller list really mean? The distinction of that honor certainly does not guarantee that I will enjoy reading a particular book, especially not if the book is about something I'm not interested in.

My parents are good critique readers for me: they know me personally, they're honest about their reactions, and they're reliable helpers. But, what if I'm working on something they don't care about? What mainly happens is that they'll still read it, but they won't enjoy it very much.

Because the work I'm doing is so subjective, I rarely feel very confident about what I've done. I've most recently been writing fantasy fiction with heroes and monsters, but my mother doesn't care for it. How do I tell the difference between a critique that is influenced by disinterest in the genre and a critique which transcends that preference? How can I know ahead of time if a fantasy enthusiast audience will treat my artistic and structural choices as acceptable staples of the genre, or if I'm really just bad at making fiction?

Really, I know that some of this wondering is ego-protection to compensate for a lack of skill. I'm aware that I'm not exactly composing great literature here.

But, the subjectivity of making art has helped me unearth a more poignant problem: a tendency to second-guess myself.

This is not a problem that is confined to my craft or my chosen profession. My spouse is forever complaining of doubting herself in her own work, and I suspect that many people encounter this in many areas of life.

My latest project contains examples of how this plays out for me personally: as I attempt to narrate story events, I'm forced to make choices. Do my characters travel and encounter their antagonists on the road? Or, do they stand guard and wait for their enemies? Do I follow the story hook as it was originally conceived, or should I change the plot and allow the heroes to fail?

Text is a strange medium to work in because it is serial: you can only transmit one piece of data to your reader at a time. (This makes things especially difficult if a scene contains a lot of simultaneous motion.) Even as the author writing the text, this linear transmission of data can be problematic. Once I've made a choice, such as to move my characters to the wilderness, I find myself "locked in" to that choice. If I later realize that I hate the choice, it's often too late.

Suddenly, I find myself filled with loathing, anxiety, and uncertainty. What if I made the wrong choice? I feel like I want to throw away what I've done, but I'm yoked to the effort I put in. What if the other choice was better? I begin to dread that I've wasted my time.

This self-doubt and second-guessing can be crippling. For me, it can induce writer's block. Instead of drafting, which gives me the fundamentally-required raw material I need to work with when I go back to polish and revise, I hit a wall, I dead-stop, and I feel stuck. 'I've written myself into a corner!' I think to myself.

It can be important in situations of this kind to realize that the doubt itself may be the actual impediment, not the subject of the doubt. Especially in drafting, but also in other areas of life, halting action in response to doubt is the least-desirable response, rather than the most-productive and satisfying response. (In other situations, obviously, doubt and uncertainty serve as guards against harm or loss resulting from poor courses of action. Measuring the difference between the two takes self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-knowledge.)

Starting Out

An author's life is solitary. Sometimes, days will go by and I won't leave my apartment or look outside. My spouse will come and go. We'll fall asleep at different times and wake at different times.

This is important because I am an incredibly confident, outgoing, social person. Like all of my fellow extraverts, I thrive on human contact. This means that from 20,000 feet, writing fiction is a really bad fit for me.

So, the question is: is this right for me? I wonder, sometimes.

Since moving away from my hometown, most of my personal contact now is totally electronic, sometimes totally text-only. I recently caught up with an old friend from my university using Instant Messaging, and she said:

"There was a page I read the other day, and thought 'hmm, wonder how far [dreamdecree's] gotten with the book' http://m-stiefvater.livejournal.com/98551.html"

I've never heard of that author and I've never read her books, but her description of writing them resonated with me. I recognized the writer highs and writer lows she talked about, empathized with the second-guessing and self-deprecating, and above all felt elated that it was all normal.

It's not any proof that working on these books is what I should do, but it's something.