Here to Create

For some reason I’ve been doing a lot of whining about writing lately, especially on Here to Create.

Sorry about that.

I whine that I’m not revising the project I should be, that all my shorts turn into sagas, and on and on. But the problem is that I’m overthinking instead of writing. I know that the writing isn’t just going to flow all the time and of course I need to think about what does and doesn’t work in my stories so I can fix them instead of just shoving them in a drawer or worse, out into the world as they are.

What I don’t need to do is get wrapped up in meta-writing to the exclusion of real writing. Can I call myself a writer? What does that mean anyway? What if I never get the motivation and this thing whithers and dies and I’ve wasted all this time? What if my writing has some fatal flaw that I can never overcome?

It’s ok, you can say it. I get sick of listening to me too.

Most of my worries are pretty pointless when I write them out, which is the benefit of doing it, as long as I don’t let it go too far.  This weekend I did something novel, for me at least. I ignored my angst about whether or not I can write and just wrote. I revised a short-short story I’ve had sitting around for a couple of weeks and ended up pretty pleased with it. And then I spun those characters around, made them do the hokey-pokey, and ended up with some serious progress on another short story.

It’s true, whining gets you nowhere unless you’re one of my cats.

That's his food bin he's standing on, in case we missed the point of all that noise he's making.

Alison Kent posted at Genreality today about Getting Out of Your Own Way: The Fear of Success.

Why, hello.  *waves at self in the mirror*

Good to know I’m not the only one.  Of course, I may have no need to fear success, since I keep sabotaging myself so that I’ll never have to try it out.  I especially resonated with worrying that anything I accomplish will self-destruct, feeling self-conscious when someone compliments me, and feeling let down or empty rather than celebratory when I’ve finished something.  A lot of the time I’m avoiding working on something not because it’s hard but because I’ll have to show it to someone when it’s done.  Whether that’s fear of success or failure, I don’t know.  Could be both.

Anyone else?  What do you fear more, success or failure?

The problem is, none of the words are related to the revision I’m supposed to be doing.  There’s nothing like something I’m supposed to do to give me a million ideas for other things I want to do.  Until I start the project I supposedly want to do, and it becomes something I have to do and I don’t want to do it either.

I can’t decide if it’s self-destructive or just misguided stubbornness, but once I tell myself I really need to get busy with revisions or homework or laundry or whatever, that’s the signal for my brain to shoot off in a dozen different directions.  As long as I keep procrastinating, I’ll never run out of ideas.  And I don’t really expect the procrastinating to stop.

One thing I do right is seizing those ideas when they appear, no matter how distracting they are.  I carry a little notebook with me everywhere and I’ll whip it out anywhere.  Some of my most productive thinking happens in bed or in the bathroom.  If it weren’t for the wasted water, I’d write in the shower.  I start writing the minute I get that spark in my brain that tells me this isn’t just daydreaming but a character talking to me, because if I don’t pin them down, the words will flit away and I’ll never find them again.  So it’s a good thing to write when I get inspiration, but it’s bad that it only seems to happen when I’m supposed to be doing something else.

I finished a major project for grad school a couple of weeks ago.  I’d been writing a lot in the weeks before that, but it was guilty and reluctant.  The words wouldn’t stop pouring out of my brain, but I knew I was supposed to be doing something else and that made my brain want to disengage.  It made even writing under the influence of inspiration feel like work.  But as soon as the project was done and the weight of it was off my mind, writing became a joy again.

The day after the project was done, I spent all morning in bed freewriting, just writing crap until it all bled away and the good stuff bubbled to the surface.  Even in my freewriting, I usually feel pressure to eventually get around to the good stuff, but this time I picked up a  notebook just because there was stuff in my brain that had to come out.  No expectations.  And it felt good.  I haven’t looked at it to see if there’s anything usable there, but that’s not the point this time.  The point is to move past the “shoulds” into actually doing something.  I didn’t put any pressure on myself, and the words came through.

Now if only I could trick myself into revising the same way.

I know what needs done, I swear.  But it’s not happening on its own.  Sure, I’ve had plenty of good excuses.  I’m finishing up grad school this semester . . . um, there must have been some other good excuses?  Anyway, I finished the rough draft of CODENAME: Werewolves in February.  I let it sit a month like all the advice says.  I read it through without letting myself make all the tiny editing tweaks I wanted to.  I came up with a list of scenes that need fixing, details that need smoothed throughout, characters that need developed.

And then I froze revising the first major scene.

It’s an important scene.  The decisions I make here will cascade throughout, so I should do it before I make all those minor tweaks, since some of them might change again anyway.  But I just can’t force myself into it.

Thinking back on it, I’ve never done much revising.  I’ve done plenty of editing, combing through a scene for awkward wording, adding character-building details, merrily inserting scenes and whole chapters.  But I’ve never sat down with a scene and said: This needs to accomplish this purpose, so I will rewrite it thus.

I didn’t even revise my papers very much in college.  And I was an English major, so I wrote a lot of papers.  And that might be part of my problem.  I learned how to write papers that were “good enough” back when all I cared about was a grade.  But now I don’t want it to just be “good enough,” I want it to be good.  Clearly, I have a lot to learn.

And again, it’s been months since I’ve written here.  Whenever I think about blogging, I start thinking about what my purpose here should be and if what I want to say fits.  My original purpose still sounds nice: I’m interested in developing my creativity, especially in writing, but also in jewelry making, photography, and all the other topics I’ve touched on here.  But not all at once, which makes for an uneven blog.  But I have a hard time steering my brain away from my current obsession and onto another topic, however worthy.  And so, paralyzed with fear, I do nothing.  Story of my creative life.

As with fiction, it comes down to writing what I want or writing what I think will be most successful.

I read a lot of blogs and forums about writing, and it seems half the comments and questions are about writing technique and half are about the publishing business.  It makes sense, because most of us who write want to be read, and that means building an audience. But a balance has to be struck between what I want to write and what the rest of the world wants to read.  I’ve gradually come to accept this idea in fiction writing, concluding that above all, I write what I want to read.  When I find myself complaining that I just want to read the story, that writing it is taking too long, then I know I’ve got something worth working on.  Surely there’s someone out there who shares my taste?

When I began Here to Create, I was trying to make it smooth, professional, informative, because that’s the kind of blog I was reading at the time.  And there’s nothing wrong with that.  But I’ve realized since that the blogs I like best are those that have a distinctive voice.  They’re less formal, more thoughtful or amusing.  A little messy, sometimes off topic.

I’m giving myself permission to relax, be myself a little.  Every word doesn’t have to be gold.  Sometimes the value is in shared human experience.  Another reason I’ve felt uncomfortable writing this blog is that I set myself up in the beginning as having some knowledge worth imparting.  I’m not sure that’s true.  All I have is my experience, my voice.  If someone finds something useful here, that’s wonderful. But I’m not going to let  my insecurities keep from writing here anymore.