When I was a senior in high school, I had a little problem. Everyone said I was good at writing, but aside from a few poems here and there (something I'd pushed myself to do), I never wrote on my own. The first time I'd thought I really wanted anyone's job, the person was C.S. Lewis, and I wanted to write fantasy novels that transported people to worlds that felt alive and sentient. Like his readers, mine would stop seeing words, forget they were reading, and become real travelers. What a peerless skill! I figured I was much too dumb for that, but maybe I could learn to write pretty well. Maybe I could write good short stories—not novels, just short stories. For my next reading assignment, a chapter log as I reread a book in The Chronicles of Narnia (I read those five times in elementary school and haven't since), I started at the beginning, writing out the first page word for word.
I thought the teacher would understand that I was trying to learn from a master. She didn't. At all. She walked by, saw what I was doing, got tense and then angry, and told me I must never do that, it wasn't allowed, that's plagiarism, etc. And while I felt bad, mostly I felt she simply hadn't understood. Yes, I also wasn't sure what to say about this chapter in a reading log, but I thought copying it out by hand was a neat idea, a good start, a way to figure out what to say in the future. By no means would I claim the words were mine. They obviously weren't and couldn't be. She misunderstood my intent, and I was too shy to make much of it. I was in trouble and kept quiet, stifling my upset. Anyway, I didn't try that again. But it turns out many writers have written out whole novels they admired that way. Some say it works. It wasn't a bad impulse.
That was 3rd grade. In 2nd grade I hadn't the faintest idea what I wanted to be, so when I was supposed to say something that would go on a class poster, I randomly picked "firefighter," feeling vaguely guilty that I didn't know what I was talking about.
Fast-forward and I'm a senior in high school, in my first creative writing class, and people seem to like my poems, stories, descriptions, reflections. The teacher usually seems impressed.
She probably ruined me for life by validating my philosophical reflections (even more than my philosophy teacher had). We'd go to a park once a week, sit in our secret, chosen spots out of sight from every living human soul (perhaps not the dead ones), and just write what came to mind. Before that, I didn't see what came to mind as particularly worth noting. She spoiled me.
This is about the time I came up with a strategy. My whole life, since 3rd grade that is, I'd been meaning to write more. When I got into a short story, I felt like I could go on and on and I didn't want it to end. Soon enough, I'd have to brutally kill it (brutal in the sense of abrupt, not violent) with some sort of ending and turn in the corpse. But a phase transition would happen, and then writing one felt as good as reading one. And when I got to that emotional space, I knew I could always get back there. But somehow, I hadn't. Only the occasional creative writing assignment would lure and scare me back in. Why couldn't I write on my own? I very much intended to. But I didn't.
My whole existence was like that. Maybe I was destined to be a failure at everything. Everyone told me I didn't try, never made an effort at anything, but I felt like I was constantly trying to make more efforts and failing at that, and when I did make an effort, it would fail, and it would hurt, and no one would even notice I'd made an effort. So I'd try, fail, hurt, and immediately get accused of not trying, while I was still hurting. That was reliably upsetting.
So maybe in a way I was shielding myself from the same experience with writing stories, a thing I actually meant to get good at. Worryingly, I was never going to get good at something I didn't do. And I was miserable at deadlines, so I wasn't going to hook myself into the normal social patterns and rely on those for structure. I knew it wouldn't quite work. Besides, all the writers and game designers I admired said pretty much the same thing, whenever asked in an interview: they wrote for themselves. They knew it was worthwhile because they liked it. They told the story they wanted but didn't see anywhere. That was their metric. They loved their fans, but when they created, they had an audience of one: themselves.
The way I always wrote, I'd go slowly and fix errors as I went. By the time I got to the end, I didn't really have any revisions. Well, sometimes I'd print the thing out and mark up the page. That helped. But my writing needed very little in the way of editing. If people said it was good, it seemed to come out good as I wrote. But I wrote too little, too slowly. Maybe that's why I was averse to doing this on my own. If I couldn't persuade myself to strike out and get independent, it didn't matter how much talent I might have. I'd never amount to anything.
Here was my strategy, then: I lowered my standard and with that my inhibitions. Like my older sister, probably the most imaginative person I knew, whose reams of poems would flutter around the room if the window was open and get stepped on and torn, etc, I decided I would write a lot. Artists did that, didn't they? They just kept creating and let others pick things up off the floor and say, "Hey, this is pretty good! You should show your art in the lobby!" or "You should get this published!" That was a secondary concern best left to others. I'd read that Aphex Twin made music as a way of life, every day, because that's what he did. He always had. Once in a while a label would ask him for music, and he'd rummage around through his stacks of tapes, his informal diary of composing, and find some pieces he liked, and ask if that would do. Generally it would, and he'd have another terrific album out, and meanwhile he'd just be doing what he did, making music out of habit. That could have been a slightly tall tale, but it was memorable. Anyway, with these examples, I wasn't going to be so concerned about what I wrote. If it blew away in the wind, it wouldn't matter, because I had been writing so much and could write so much more, and would. This way, I'd get raw experience.
It was a direct counterattack on what had been holding me back.
It worked. At that time, I deeply disbelieved I could become a habitual writer. It seemed nice, but I despaired of any possibility of actually transforming myself. Today, though, I despair of the swing of the pendulum. Now I write too much, sometimes horribly too much, sometimes to the detriment of everything else in my life, so that everyone's angry with me, and I'm almost crashing my car. In fact, I've gotten in three accidents because I was typing thoughts on my phone. (Finally, I think, maybe, hopefully, I have broken that habit. Thank God. But you see what I mean.) For all this time and energy—and, very stupidly and condemnably, danger—I should have more to show for my efforts.
It seems I succeeded and went too far the other way. Most of what I write is garbage, and more dreadfully than that, repetitive. Of course, there's a certain amount of woodshedding you've got to do to refine an idea. Jimi Hendrix - please forgive me for referring to brilliant people as if I am one, but I think it's good to have heroes who are brilliant, whoever you are - would compose most of his songs either on stage, shaping them from performance to performance through repetition, or in the studio, where he all but lived, doing much the same as the magnetic strips whirled by. The vast majority of his studio material has still been heard by virtually no one, because it's this kind of experimental, formative noodling. More recently, Radiohead's composition process bridges years, even decades, and their initial song demos are so chaotic and unmusical that apparently it's difficult to reconcile the starting point with the consistently world-class endpoint. Allen Ginsberg, to revisit great writers, is said to have written 99% unpublishable trash, but the 1% that he allowed to be published was generally stunning. That's how this stuff works, though. It isn't just them. They were just particularly brilliant, industrious, and successful.
So I try to cut myself a break for slipping into repetition. But I also hate being a broken record, and disgust with it is a healthy feeling. If you aren't repeating a thing because you intend to make it great, knowing right now it isn't, then maybe you should quit repeating it entirely.
For the last year or two, I've been trying to reel in the excess. It had become a breeze to write five thousand, ten thousand, even thirteen thousand words in a day without any goal to write many words or even to write at all. It would just happen. But I was getting more and more disgusted with myself and the words I relied on ("way," "people," "result," "logic," "imagination," etc) and my sentences and my paragraphs and most revoltingly of all my boring topics.
Maybe six months ago, I decided I was going to write a story, and instead of thinking up a new idea or catching one from the air and this causing me to think I should write, I went to one of my digital piles of story ideas and picked one. It was the first time I'd ever done that. I actually went back to a tiny story idea and decided to try it out. Normally I'd either write as much as I could when I had the idea, or jot it down, intending to come back but then never coming back.
It felt liberating. Separating the idea-egg moment from the idea-hatching moment helped. Because I'd written this one down so long ago, I didn't care what happened to it. I could mess it up as much as I liked, or as much as my incompetence would demand. Within a few sentences, I was in that mode I talked about. It felt as if I could write this story forever.
I didn't. I wrote that day for a bit and haven't come back to it, yet. But after I wrote, I checked how much I'd written, and how fast. The calculation showed that I'd been writing at 1/3 my normal rate. Yet I was so much happier with the result, and I'd enjoyed the process so much more. It wasn't habitual word-stringing and idea-slinging. It felt... it felt like dreaming.
