Here to Create

Priorities are an odd thing. When I was a kid, I was frequently told to remember my priorities. Thing was, they weren’t my priorities. They were things that I had to do, like homework. But I did listen to that advice, just not in the way my parents wanted me to. My top priority when I was a kid was reading. So that’s what I did all the time.

Now that I’m an adult, I have to bow a bit to my parents’ ideas of priorities. No one else is going to make me get to work on time or buy groceries so I don’t starve. When I graduated from college, all these adult responsibilities descended on me like some flying nightmare. And I’ve been struggling to identify my true priorities ever since.

I suppose it has something to do with self-actualization and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (which has always made sense to me, though I’m aware that it has been criticized). As little as I like to admit it, the basic necessities (food, shelter, sleep) do have to come first. And next, according to Maslow, is security, like employment. And then love and self-esteem. And only when someone has achieved all these things is there room in life for creativity. Practically, I recognize that this is true. If I spent all my time worrying about being unemployed or unable to keep my little family going, I’d have no energy for creativity. But if I were making my own hierarchy, I think I’d put creativity right after food. Because if I don’t have the opportunity to create, I’m still hungry no matter how full my belly is.

All this is very poetic, but like everything else, it comes down to day to day, moment to moment decisions. What should I do with myself today? What am I going to do in this very next moment? Can I write for another fifteen minutes and risk being late to work? Can I read for another hour or two at bedtime and be completely exhausted tomorrow? What are my real priorities? Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer for that. Not yet.

I’m in a bit of a rut. Or maybe it’s a plateau. Whatever it is, I’m stuck in place, spinning my wheels and not producing much of anything.

I’m stuck on some aspect of four different stories. I’m overwhelmed by the revising I need to do on Sword and Knife so I thought, ok, I’ll work on something else for a while. And that worked for revising and submitting a draft of Devil, a short story. But now I’m stuck again. I went back to Nyx with the hope that being away from it for six months or so would help me figure out what’s wrong with it. And maybe I have, but I still don’t know how to fix it. So I skipped to another short story, about vampires. And remembered it has no plot, as well as a host of other problems. I gave it a plot, but now I’m overwhelmed with worldbuilding. So I turned to a newer idea I had a couple of months ago, nicknamed Nightwalker. And I’m thrashing around with that too.

It hasn’t been that long since I wrote something from scratch. Just November, in fact. But it’s like I’ve forgotten how to build a story from the bottom up. And it’s driving me crazy.

This is one of those times I have to remind myself that I’m writing because I like it, not because I expect it to bring me fame and fortune. I don’t even want fame, though I wouldn’t mind the fortune. But sometimes I’m disappointed when it seems like I haven’t gained any ground, like this newest story is just as hard to write as the last.

I have to slow down, take a deep breath, and remind myself that I’m learning, and it’s ok if I don’t learn each new skill at the same rate. All stories are different and they all take different skills to write. So I’m in a phase right now where I’m learning a lot. It’s not that I’m stagnating, it’s that I’m working away at the problems in the back of my head and thrashing them out on a computer screen.

Instead of expecting perfection or even readability with each new project, I need to slow down, breathe, and just write.

I know this, and yet I resent that I have to chant those words like a mantra every time I hit a new plateau.

Breathe. Write. Breathe.

So I took a two-week vacation from writing. I didn’t really do it on purpose, though I should have. I should know by now that when I push myself too hard to establish a routine, I start feeling like I have to write whether I like it or not, and that’s just death to desire. I’m sure it’s some innate mixture of stubbornness and laziness, but I’ve found through experience that when I push myself too hard — not creatively, but just trying to maintain a steady, hammering pace — I quit. Just quit like a car run out of gas. Slowly, I’m beginning to realize that this is me protecting me from myself.

I want to keep loving writing. That’s more important to me than being published. I want to keep writing no matter what, because my brain gets itchy when I’m not writing. If I go too long without writing, I’m miserable. But I needed a couple of weeks to let the brain fog clear and to relax into writing again without the pressure of a word count goal hanging over my head. So for the past two weeks, even though I didn’t make myself write, I found my mind drifting again and again to my stories and what I’d do with them when I picked them up again. Because there was never a question that I would go back to writing.

Both John Scalzi and Justine Larbalestier blogged recently about what it means to be a writer. John was asked if he would ever quit writing and he basically said no, because it’s a part of who he is. Justine talked about the difference between writer as identity and writer as a career. Careers come and go, but writers write, and that’s really all there is to it. What I need to do is stop trying to write by rules that work for other people but not for me.

So I’m giving up on the daily goal of 500 or 1000 words. It’s the kind of thing that works well for a lot of people, but I don’t seem to be one of them. This doesn’t mean I won’t be writing, even writing every day. It just means that I’m not going to stress myself out about an arbitrary goal when all I should be thinking about are the stories themselves.

Soooooo almost exactly a month ago I said I was committing to writing 1000 words a day. I had been writing that much pretty regularly and didn’t think it would be hard to keep going.  But it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. When I’m really moving on a piece, I can write 1000 words in half an hour or less. But I’ve discovered that when I’m editing one story and revising another and don’t know what to work on next, my free-writing tends to peter out around 600 words.  Hmm.  So instead of giving up and calling myself a failure, I’m just scaling back a little.  I can do 500 words a day.  Really.  And if my word count keeps dropping, surely I can do 250 words a day.  But I hope it doesn’t come to that.

Though I write fantasy, I have several stories that take place in the contemporary world.  My characters have jobs, enjoy their weekends off, and observe U.S. holidays.  But it can be hard to keep track of the date and the day of the week when my characters are running from one crisis to the next.

One of the features I liked best about Liquid Story Binder XE was the Journal, which allowed me to enter a brief summary of a character’s activities on each day of a calendar.  This kept me from having characters take days off from work with no explanation or merrily skipping Thanksgiving with no comment.

Since I’ve now moved on to SuperNotecard, which has a less useful timeline function, I started using Google Calendar to keep track of my characters’ lives.  While I prefer to use as few separate programs as possible, one of the advantages of Google Calendar is that it’s available anytime I have wifi and a browser open.  Calendars can be printed, if you’re the type who needs to look at a hard copy.  And by using a separate calendar from my personal one, I can keep it from cluttering things up.  I can even use multiple color-coded calendars for characters with different timelines.  Also, for stories that require a more detailed level of knowledge, the agenda view makes it easy to look at the character’s actions hour by hour.

I’m all about using free, easily available tools when they get the job done. I’m using Google Calendar because I already had a Google account, but I’m sure there are several other online calendars that would work the same way.

What free tools do you use to make your writing easier?