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.

Organize Your Brain

Even though I find drafting to be a stymieing task, I recognize its enormous importance - the revision process, which far exceeds drafting in clarity, cannot take place at all without the groundwork laid out by drafting.

One of the many ways that I get writer's block when I'm drafting is when I'm not really sure about what I'm trying to do. I'll intuitively stop mid-paragraph when part of my brain has realized that I "just don't know where I'm going with this," and then I'll be stuck. The word-spicket valve closes, and I can't move forward. There's only one way out of this situation for me: I have to think.

To get past this kind of writer's block, I have to get up, get away from my computer, and devote concentration and effort to power my imagination. I'm a particularly visual person and a visual writer. My brain, in the words of an artist friend of mine whose brain works the same way, plays "movies" in my head when I imagine things. (His sister's brain, he says, is different: it thinks in words, like reading a book, which is nothing like my experience.) These "movies" in my head are the only way I'm able to figure out the details of what I'm trying to narrate in my story. When I have this conceptual or imagination-starved writer's block, knowing what I'm trying to narrate is the only way to fix it.

My spouse is training to run a 10K foot race in a few weeks, and I've been joining her on a bicycle. Going out on the roads with her this past week has been good for my process because it forces me into a situation I both can't escape and in which my brain is freed up from writing so that I can finally get some imagination/conceptual work done. In other words, getting out of my apartment gives me a chance to think about what I'm trying to do. The other day I was just chattering to her while she ran about the last writer's block I had and what the problem was, and suddenly it hit me in a eureka-style flash how I could solve my characters' fast-approaching logistical problem.

Prior to that moment, I had been unable to figure out how I could get my protagonists from point A to point B without re-writing everything I'd already done. This was a problem that was impossible to solve when I was at my computer, staring at my text, trying to draft and think at the same time. I devised a solution very quickly when I was able to devote 100% of my concentration to it.

Beyond the brain benefits of getting out of the house, I also recommend exercise to everyone I meet (not just creative recluses!) because of the incredible quality-of-life benefits. Exercise encourages your body not only to regenerate and maintain your physical health, but also to release endorphins, which truly make a difference in how you feel. A sedentary lifestyle will degrade your ability to create, because your quality of mind depends on your quality of body. Paradoxically, expending energy on physical exercise gives you more energy to use (by prompting your body to expand your reserves).

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.