Some Comments on a Week of Writing Fiction
.I’ve written more fiction in the last eight days than I have in years, with seven finished stories (some of them even too long to count as microfiction). I’ve also been working on the second draft of my science fiction novel, and on a short story that’s been in my head for more than a decade.
On Saturday, after I’d written ‘Wishes’ and ‘Distant Sun’, I read Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, which is about overcoming resistance to (among other things) creative projects. I think I read it at exactly the right time, because it had a powerful impact on me. After reading it, I started working on the second draft again, after a long hiatus, and I was also determined to keep writing fiction for my blog, at least for a few more days. I recommend The War of Art quite highly. It’s a quick read, and packs a punch.
Prior to this week, I had already learned the lesson that one should not wait for inspiration to strike, and that one can sometimes induce it. Generally, my writing was better when inspiration did strike, and worse when it didn’t. Inspiration tended to also bring passion, in the moment, passion to drive the writing to completion. I tended to experience this inspiration a specific way, a kind of creative rush that I really felt strongly.
This week, however, was different. I got inspiration and didn’t feel that way at all. I got ideas that completely came out of nowhere, but didn’t announce themselves with emotional fanfare. Rather they simply appeared, and I wrote them. ‘Wishes’ was quite like that. I didn’t feel inspired at all when I started that story, and it began as something completely different. But I got a few lines in, and even then I didn’t know where the story was going, what it was planning to do, but I also didn’t feel caught up in it. It just moved along, revealed itself to me near the end, and that was that.
‘Distant Sun’ wasn’t like that. I started off knowing more or less where I wanted it to go, and while writing it felt more caught up in it, felt “inspired” in terms of crafting the words. I had some very different ideas for its progression when I started it, but the tone and general idea was set and known to me.
‘Desert Walk’ came to me in outline form when I was going down the stairs in my building. More than any of the other stories I worked on, it evolved over the day, as I turned it over in my mind for several hours before starting it. There wasn’t a sense of “inspiration” here, but by the end of the day I felt that the story really wanted to get out, and that I had little choice but to let it. And when I did, some of the decisions took time, but it didn’t feel too difficult to write it.
‘Near the Border’ was much harder. I didn’t know where it was going to go, but unlike ‘Wishes’ there was no easy feeding of it to me from somewhere. It took me a lot of time to work out what should happen in it, just who the characters were, and what was really going on. Some of the dialogue came easily, which was pleasant, but overall it wasn’t a smooth experience—I stopped and went away from it quite a few times.
‘Detox’ was the hardest to write of any of them, by a considerable margin. I struggled with the idea, with the characters, with the plot. I couldn’t figure out what part of the story to tell, or what would work. I tried to force it into a number of configurations and none of them would work. It took longer than any of the rest, at least twice as long as any of the others. I felt no inspiration at all, of any kind, even the weird affectless kind I experienced with ‘Wishes’. At the same time it wasn’t a grind in the sense of just having to grind out the details for a series of events. The decisions about those events were yet to be made, and making them proved difficult indeed. I doubted the core idea for the story throughout all its incarnations.
‘The Case of Curious Eddy’ felt somewhat more like inspiration, not so much in the sense of an emotional rush as in the sense of having a sudden idea and knowing it’s going to go somewhere. I had no idea what I was going to write that night, and then I had the title, and the idea of Rick’s peculiar approach to cases followed swiftly afterwards. I knew it was going to flow, and I knew the style to use, and the rest was just letting it onto the page, which took no more than an hour. I knew that I liked the idea, also, before I had finished it.
‘Chosen’ felt almost like solving a puzzle. I had the first couple of lines very early, well before I started actually writing, and spent the rest of the time on this story working out where it would go from there. Each paragraph was like another piece of the jigsaw. I saw the whole picture a few paragraphs before the end, and just had to work out how to get there.
The other short story I’m working on is one that came to me in a dream, so clearly that’s a form of inspiration. While working on it, I don’t feel that much of a creative rush, more like I’m finally giving it a more finely-detailed shape than it’s had in my head all these years. It doesn’t feel spectacularly difficult to write when I’m working on it, although I might simply have not run into its problem areas yet.
As for the second draft of the novel, that does feel like a grind. I know what’s going to happen, indeed it already happened in the first draft, and I know I just have to tell it more effectively. It feels like a slog, but once I’m actually writing it, it’s not a terrific struggle the way ‘Detox’, and to a lesser extent ‘Near the Border’ were.
The two stories from the early 90s, ‘TTCS’ and ‘Rondo’, weren’t like that. They were written in full-on creative rushes, where I really felt that powerful sense of inspiration and passion combined.
So, eleven different creative projects, almost that many different flavors to the experience of writing them or coming up with the ideas for them. I’m not sure what answers that gives me, except that the most important things might be ‘being there’—that is, being at the desk (or wherever you write)—and the determination to write something. Perhaps that’s not enough, actually, and perhaps I should phrase it as the determination to write and finish something.
That, and the determination to do it again.
09 Jul 2007 at 15:15
I second the recommendation of The War Of Art – it’s short, but very powerful, and useful for anyone trying to get things done, creative projects or otherwise.
11 Jul 2007 at 12:51
Yes, it’s definitely worth reading. For a different approach to some of the same problems, I also recommend The Artist’s Way, which also had a profound impact on me.