Yes, It Is All My Fault!

We’ve talked several times on this blog about creative “blocks”, and some ways to cope with and get around such things. One of the things I’ve slowly come to realize over the past several months, however, is that often something that looks like a “writer’s block”, might not be quite that. A friend pointed out a similar struggle in her own creativity recently, thus the topic (and title) of this post.

What do you do when what feels like writer’s block is something else? To clarify definitions for purposes of this discussion (though you can argue my parameters in the comments if you’d like), “standard writer’s block” often arises through struggles with regular writing routines, or insecurities or doubts about the worth or quality of one’s own work. What’s the point of all of this? or why am I trying something I’ll never succeed in? or I’m not that good a writer anyway are common refrains from the internal judges and censors in many of the blocks you might encounter. And we’ve talked before, and likely will again, about different ways to hack around those sorts of bumps.

There are several other life reasons you might need a break — or at least a slowing down — of your regular creative process. Because we’re used to the blocks we know, often these other reasons will feel like standard creative blocks, to our internal emotional perceptions, because those are the well-traveled neural pathways. For example, Elizabeth Bear refers to a state after she finishes a major project she calls “post-novel ennui”. She describes it feeling as if her brain’s insides are scraped clean, or the creative pool has been emptied and needs refilling. It’s taken her several novels to better understand her own patterns, but she’s found that if she gives herself the few days or weeks she needs to recharge — read books, do physical activity things, learn something new, watch TV shows, and just the minimum maintenance needed on her writing obligations — she can get to functional creativity on the next project much more quickly than if she just tries to push ahead immediately after finishing the previous project.

What if your need for hiatus is different than arriving at a project’s end? Major life changes can be stressful whether positive or negative, and if there is enough upheaval present, it can quite legitimately disrupt the energy available for other things (at least for a while), including your creative projects. Sure, you’ve spent time and sweat making sure you will keep writing anyway, even when life gets tricky, but what about when it gets extreme enough that taking a break would actually be more advantageous to your later creativity? A promotion, household relocation, or new addition to the family are all situations where it’s possible to keep creative flow going…but depending on the specific circumstances, it’s also possible a break would be better for long-term creative health.

Or what if your need for a pause is darker than that? Major life trauma will, if not bring your creative progress to a halt, at the very least cause extreme disruptions in your routine. It could affect which projects you continue working on, or even want to work on. Loss of a job, loss of family members or children, major physically debilitating or activity-changing illness, all these and more can make you question the very reasons you create at all, not to mention whether your current work is worth the work you’ve put into it. Depending on your emotional state, you may not be able to access the same creative energies that you could before. A project that was conceived and begun when you were in love and on top of the world is rather difficult to connect to, if you’re currently in a bleak and despairing place emotionally.

So what do you do when this sort of thing is on your plate?

First, you have to find the space to give yourself to take the needed break. In order to do that successfully, you’ll have to avoid the common habit of punishing yourself for the break-taking. For those of you inclined toward this behavior, a guilt-free break is harder than it looks.

(quoted from http://temujin9.livejournal.com/129914.html, quoting someone quoting someone else clever)
“flamingnerd writes:
I asked her, “do you have any negative self talk?” She burst into laughter and said, “Do I ever fart?!” And I got it. EVERYONE has negative self talk. And some people are more flatulent in that
regard than others. And it’s ok. It’s normal, not some great tragedy.

She went on to tell me of a talk given by a young Buddhist priest. “When you beat yourself with a stick just beat yourself with a stick and don’t beat yourself for beating yourself.”

Thanks to nationelectric for sharing the good reminder.”

For me, in my own recent-past traumatic experiences, I found that giving myself the space for a creative pause and recharge to happen wasn’t an adjustment I made overnight. It was a few months of struggle between what I felt I “should” be doing at a particular point in time, and what I knew internally needed to be happening if I was ever going to create regularly again. It was slow progress, a bunch of baby steps and “two steps forward, one step back” frustrations. It also required a lot of practice in trusting myself, in my ability to assess internally what I “knew” I needed to heal, and to ignore the conflicting inputs externally from people or sources less informed about my situation. Plus enough stubbornness to keep going on all of that when I didn’t “do it right” the first time or three.

When you’re in brownout mode, the pause is likely to be longer than you want it to be. Yes, that means your patience gets practice along with everything else. Fun times, eh? You are worth it, even the waiting. One day, finally, you might find yourself with a little more energy than you’ve had. The next day, more. One of the trickiest parts, at this stage, is not overloading yourself the first time you have energy to do more than just get by. That’s asking for a relapse, and that won’t help you get more functional. Add some small creative act into your daily routine, and stay with that for a bit, give your artistic muscles time to stretch after some disuse.

Soon enough you’ll notice that you’re a bit bored or frustrated with doing just one thing. This is probably a good sign that you’re ready to do more, but keep the lessons you’ve learned throughout this time in your mind, as you progress back towards more fullness of functioning. Push your limits, but in the spirit of a good workout, not burning yourself on as much as you can do. Let your momentum creep back in a healthy bit at a time, and use those healthy bits to springboard even more positive change.

Trusting ourselves is part of how we better learn to love ourselves. Your baby-steps will make progress. Heck, even 2 steps forward, 1 back will get you there eventually. When you start making visible progress and changes to your routine toward your goals? Don’t forget to notice it, and congratulate yourself. Ideally you have a couple of close friends to whom you can brag about your progress, however incremental, and have them support and cheer you on as well. But at the very least, make sure you give those kudos to yourself. Noticing all the work you’re doing for yourself is one of the best ways to get more such work out of you!

Throughout all of this process, spend time figuring out what really matters to you in this incarnation, regardless of which past goals or projects were important before. Allow your goals to change as you change, throughout your life. It is not a failure to survive and keep creating, even if your process is different than before — even if your work is different than before.

The question of how far down the rabbit hole to fall, when working on a creative project, is rather an interesting one. The possibilities are legion for hacking, warping, and weirding the mental processes to create art. However, an artist of whatever stripe often runs up against their own self-boundaries, in such explorations. Sometimes they’re self-imposed limits that should probably be pushed against; other times they might be coping mechanisms for biochemicals that really need to remain at certain levels, thankyouverymuch. Finding the line between what to give to yourself and what to give to that art can be difficult; even for how many artists have gone before, there just aren’t universal roadmaps for making good, deep, provocative art and staying “sane”.

So where do the compromises come in? There’s a wide range of individual choices. We’ve all heard stories of the people who ultimately lost themselves — either the qualities that made their work stand out or their life itself — to the imbalance between care of self and creation of art. And if you aren’t willing to take at least some risks with your own psyche, you’re likely to have a shallow or surface-level artistic end-result.

For me, it’s usually about finding the balance point that allows me to push forward. If I’m going to be doing some crazy internal meanderings, delving into the Shadow self, finding the locked-box memories that are still raw with emotion and creative potential and dragging them out for a look…then if at all possible, other areas in my life should be as stable and least-disruptive as can be. If everything else in my life is chaos, or my own internal landscape is unstable, and I’ve already considered and rejected taking a creative break for whatever reason, then it might be better to steer toward the more “brain candy” level projects. I can keep creating but not get so locked up into my work that I lose myself in the rest of the instabilities. It’s why I don’t believe in the myth that every work must be a Masterpiece For the Ages. Heck, even the master painters of the Renaissance and other eras still took portrait commissions to pay the bills, it wasn’t all frescos and finery.

Sure, they were Really Good portraits, and taking a brain candy creation path during stressful times isn’t license to avoid doing the best work you can, either. But hey, if all you get written during a rough time is a silly zombie story (to pick an Entirely Random Example), you still maintained the creative drive so that it’s available for “more serious” work later. That is definitely good work done.

And when you do give yourself the opportunities and stability to peer into the abyss…how far will you look? How deep can you go and still come back to yourself, or at least a version of you that creates and with whom you can live?

Or, Murphy REALLY loves me.

But we knew that.  At times his is a particularly sick and twisted love, as in this week.  Yeah, that nice 6 pages I wrote?  The next afternoon, Steve’s dog’s tail knocked over a coffee cup that Nathan had accidentally set too near to my netbook…

That’s right, computer number 2 is down for the count.   So after two days of bargain shopping around town as we don’t really have the pennies to spare right now, I am now on my third work computer for the week.  As cousin Charlie would say, good grief.

On the plus side, thanks to my trusty half-terabyte, which thankfully did NOT get bathed in coffee, my paltry 15 pages so far this week are still existent.  I’m back on the internet (again-again), and tomorrow we’ll try again with your regularly-scheduled post and some written pages to report.  In the meantime, the word of the day from the Chicago Manual of Style is “integument”.

Also, in case you’re not keeping up with industry recent events, Ms. Figart’s blog has a nice perspective on the recent Harlequin faceplant.  RWA, MWA, and SFWA have all issued censures in various forms against Harlequin as a result of their recent decision.  Remember this mantra, dear writers:  Writers sign checks on the back.  Be highly suspect of any situation, no matter how vanity-pretty, that looks to make you sign on the front for your work; it’s likely otherwise known as a “scam”.

Yesterday was nicely summed up by the following:  “It’s a good thing that I’m not so weak-minded as to be driven in my behavior by omens and portents.  Otherwise the universe would definitely be telling me to quit writing.”  After my first really good day back on the project, I received a major piece of upsetting family news, and my laptop broke.

I continued in the back of my mind to keep writing as a goal throughout the day, and it was not entirely the tragedy it might have been.  Last night, right before powering down the laptop and bed, I made sure to copy my first 9 pages of the current chapter to my external hard drive.  Hurray for being a Smart Writer!  I already have my music and the rest of my writing on the drive, so except for some links and maybe a randomly missed file or two I’ve lost no important data even if I can’t recover this laptop.  Moral for this part of the story: save your work, often, multiple places.  Email your chapters to yourself if you have no other option; there’s not a single writer woe I can think of that is more likely to make you stop writing than losing days or months of hard-earned words in one stupid digital or electronic storm.

The second part was actually harder to deal with.  There’s an artist myth I’ve always been skeptical of, the tortured artist who must suffer for their art in order to create.  I’m leery of it in general, since I suspect it’s one of those sneaky ways humans devise to keep themselves miserable, but in specific I know for sure it’s inhibitory rather than inspiring.  On days that I have extreme emotional distress, I find it insanely difficult to write.  Perhaps not for everyone, but certainly for me, the energy for dealing with the consequences of strong emotional surges and the energy for writing come from either the same internal pool or closely interconnected ones.

It didn’t create a block on the words themselves; I still know what comes next for several pages.  I’m certainly in a very different emotional place than my characters right now, which makes it harder to empathize with the scene.  In today’s writing, depending on if the difficulty lingers, there are two obvious solutions to attempt.  One is to just skip that scene and go write one where the emotional state I’m currently in IS more conducive to empathizing with my characters.  The other is find some way that my emotional state can be related to something happening in the current scene, even in disguised form.  For example, one character is in a pretty good mood, the other is fairly agitated, maybe even a little aggro in response.  That second emotion isn’t quite where I’m at, but emotional agitation in general can give you more insight into a specific emotional state that’s similar even if not the same.  Hopefully I can turn the internal agitation into a powerfully charged scene.

As you might have guessed, by the end of yesterday I hadn’t written any words, not even a sentence.  I was so drained from processing that it was easier to just get some rest and start fresh tomorrow.  And that’s what I’ll try today!  Got some errands in the first part of the day for work, and a poker game this evening, but there’s time around those for writing and I can always sit out some card hands if I need to write instead.

What is something you’ve struggled with in the past week, relating to creating your art?

That wordcount is staring you in the face. Every time you look over at it you get a little sinking sensation in the pit of your stomach. “I’ll never make 50,000 words,” you think to yourself. “I can’t even think of the next sentence! Why did I imagine I could ever be a writer?”

Riiiight, because Real Writers never get stuck. Or if they do, they know exactly how to get unstuck. And you will get a 6-figure book deal on your first book sale, and Hollywood will both buy your movie rights and give you full creative control over the script. Don’t forget all those literary awards! It’s when they start writing lit-crit analyses of how the theme of peanut butter relates to schadenfreude and your body of work that you know you’ve arrived. And how DID those monkeys feel, flying out of your butt?

Again, back to intent. Are we here to collect a wordcount trophy, or are we here to frikken write? So what to do when you’re feeling discouraged and as if you’ll never make that shiny 50K words at the end of this month, but you do sorta care about your characters now and kinda want to know what happens next for them anyway?

Hey, did you know that 50,000 words isn’t even a proper novel-length work in many cases? Sure the technical dictionary definition of novel-length is anything over 40,000 words. However, 40K or even 50K is NOT the current accepted industry standard, and in fact varies somewhat by genre in expectations. A mystery novel might be 60,000-80,000, while a thriller might be 100,000 words or more. If you’re coming in at 50K, it might be better to see what you can trim down enough to sell it as a novella, or add many more words to bring it to the size most people expect to read when they pick up a novel. Also, the story type matters as well: a Steven Brust Vlad Taltos novel is usually 80,000-90,000, while the Khaavren Romances are much, much longer than that.

The most obvious solution is to find some way of redefining success for yourself that allows you to continue working even if you don’t hit an arbitrary and specific wordcount. It’s been two weeks now, you should have enough data to at least make a guess about your average daily wordflow. One way to look at it is that NaNoWriMo was a useful tool for getting you to learn this flow-rate, or at least a starting point to guess from. Set your new standard of daily wordcount success at 4 pages a day, or 500 words a day, or whatever seems to be a more achievable and sustainable wordcount goal for continued writing. If you’re around the 3-page-a-day rate, and you still want community support, and you’re on Livejournal, there’s a community over there called novel_in_90 that has a 3-page-a-day wordcount goal for a finished novel draft in approximately three months. Still fast, but much less weighty than one month. There are likely similar communities to be found elsewhere, or if you know enough local writers create your own!

Maybe your wordcount is too erratic to pin down to a daily average. Some days you’ll write 4000, other days nothing, other days 50, then 1000 the next. Or maybe you don’t really have a problem when you actually sit down to write, but you’re a rather distractable sort who pretty easily loses focus to ooh squirrel!

Uh, right. Focus. So maybe in these instances, your daily measure of success is whether you write at all. One of Steven Brust’s sayings is “any day I write a sentence is a good day.” Or you could use “time spent writing” as your counted number, rather than a specific number of words. And as both Steve and Neil Gaiman (and others) say, writing a page a day will still get you a novel a year. Think about it!

How do you think you might redefine your NaNoWriMo success to keep writing if you can’t make 50,000 words by November 30?

This business models paper is eating my brain. Not in a bad way, it’s just a bit hard to shift gears and work on other things.

I’ve been operating at the nadir of my efficiency and output in many areas for probably about a year now. I think it’s probably burnout, or brown-out; I didn’t get any recovery time after the drawn-out process of business-buying, and not since then, either. I think I’ve also been depressed, possibly clinically, for the past six months, but if I had to guess I doubt that a mental health professional would consider me so. After all, don’t I get out of bed? Stay cognizant of eating, clothing, relatively clean hygiene? Retain some semblance of interacting with people? I’d fail the checklist, which is part of why it’s taken so long for me to figure out myself, but I think that just as the regular depression signs are to a normal mental state, so is my current state compared to how I remember functioning when things internally worked better.

It’s gotten to the point where I’ve considered official anti-depressant medication, which I never expected to have to think about, given my naturally sunny disposition. But if I’m not willing to take hormonal birth control medication due to the crappy side effects (let’s hear it for women’s health!), I’m quite adverse to the idea of the mood chemical-cocktail and all the adjustments most people have to go through, with concurrent side-effect rollercoaster. Plus, as I understand it, one really needs a cooperative and skilled head shrink to facilitate the process, and I just don’t tend to be someone with doctor-luck. In addition, it really irks to rely on chemical solutions when I haven’t explored the non-chemical options (like altering diet, exercise and activity levels, and so on) fully.

So I muddle through, and when you look at it, there really isn’t all that much wrong with my life, and quite a lot very right with it. I just wish I could access how to enjoy (in joy) it all again. This fake-it-til-you-make-it shite doesn’t always work as well as advertised. And I am so not an artist that works well when morose. But I also don’t work well, or at all, in silence, and I’ve been quiet on what’s up with me for a long time now.

I realize that it doesn’t help me in sharing common humanity bonds to confess that my accomplishments of the past year and more have been achieved under sub-optimal (sub-sub-sub-optimal, sometimes) conditions, and yes that does mean that I would have gotten a magnitude-order more done had I been healthy. But not-talking about it doesn’t help, and things are about to get way more intense for my creative career, so the time to fix my head is past due. I refuse to be a “flame big and flame out” rock-star. I much prefer to shine bright and keep glowing.