"InfraGreen;14912360" wrote:
And now my turn to vent!
Yay! Does anyone else love listening to good, honest, authentic venting? I love it. It's one of my favorite things to do! I especially love that moment when the air is clear *right* after the venting session!
"InfraGreen;14912360" wrote:
1. So last month, I graduated university. And at the moment, I'm living with my parents, hunting for jobs, and having few other duties. I thought that this would be a rare period of productivity for me, as I haven't had a free summer in years and used to have to balance my hobbies with classes and/or work. Instead, it's been the opposite. I started off my period of freedom by bringing Eight Cicadas out from hiatus and starting The Chains of Lyra. Making new material for them has been slow, full of re-doing, and I honestly almost never feel the urge to write with what I have!
I can at least pinpoint why this is happening: I used to have a highly-structured life and now I don't, which doesn't help me with concentrating. I get side-tracked. But I spend a lot of time playing Audiosurf, accumulating custom content, and chatting with friends, and those can s.uck me in just fine!
Who else gets sidetracked easily/can't concentrate? And what do you do to help?
I feel you've pinpointed it so accurately: the shift in structure of one's life can really affect productivity. I used to teach full-time, and I'd have every summer off. I had such glorious plans for summers! I would write! I'd write entire novels! I'd paint! I'd paint dozens of canvases! I'd garden and bake and... I'd watch movies!
What would I end up doing? Watching movies, baking, and gardening. Goofing off. Lots and lots and lots of goofing off. I'd hardly write and hardly paint. I needed the entire summer to be downtime, for I'd have worked so hard during the school year. Finally, I discovered that I was able to do a lot more with my writing and other creative hobbies while working than during off-time. Now, I work year-round, but I only work 30 hours a week at the main job, and the second job is just around 5-10 hours per week that I can do from home. This structure allows me to create more steadily all the time.
Also, it's significant that you've just made a big life change. You've completed a major accomplishment, and you're in a border state--that in-between place after one phase has ended and the next has not yet begun.
I've never been able to do much creative work when my life has been in transition. When I'm moving or switching jobs or anything major life-wise, it seems that most of my creative energy goes to my life, and I don't have the safe structure to do writing, painting, or other creative work. (Somehow, I'm always able to play musical instruments, regardless of life shifts--maybe because music, too, is transient...)
So, I say a little down-time might be just the thing! You deserve all the goofing off that you want! You deserve a vacation and a rest and huge congratulations on having completed your degree! :)
"InfraGreen;14912360" wrote:
2. Sometimes I really hate writing a super-plot-driven story. Especially one with a framing device that should require me to have planned and codified certain events and elements.
So here's the problem:
For non-readers, Eight Cicadas is mostly a linear story, but it's contained within a framing device. It seems pretty simple on paper: you're reading the story with its own in-universe author, who has experienced and written down everything already. And she has a few of her own "present day" adventures that the story cuts to. Thankfully her current adventures aren't causing me much trouble. I can roll with the punches on those.
But the problem is that I really didn't plan Cicadas enough, but I inserted a lot of foreshadowing in those "present" chapters that...really doesn't apply anymore. Sometimes it got really egregious (like dropping that they're demons, then deciding that they're demonic aliens. Or referring to a character as the narrator's grandfather and then deciding that he'll be her legal father instead). Sometimes it was just not knowing exactly what kind of character the narrator really is, especially when she's in the grungy Cicadas world rather than adventures on her own terms.
And it's really easy to edit these things, even retroactively. But I've done a lot of that since starting Cicadas, and I think my readers as a little tired of me not being able to leave things alone. It stinks, because I really want to change these things! Those chapters are trainwrecks!
Thoughts?
As one of your biggest fans, I love being in on the process of how you create. I love revisions! I love when you make changes. I love when there are inconsistencies! I love living works of art--I think that's what I adore most about blogs.
I don't care if the "reality" that was in place in the beginning shifts, and now it's a different construct. I think that's fun! I don't care if it all turns out to be Jo's imagination or hallucination or past-life! Or even if Jo gets tired of telling the story and Sagebear tells it. I also don't care if you go back and endlessly rework what's come before.
What I love is watching your process, getting in on that, reading what you create and how your mind thinks and how things and ideas change. I guess one of the things I love most about blogs are that we can publish and then revise. We're not stuck with fixed works, like traditional printing demands (of course, even Whitman endlessly revised Leaves of Grass!).
Also, as you explore where your creative energy is now, in this phase of your life, you might find that revision is something that does fit in with your life and creative energy! Or maybe, having a few game-driven generations fits in! Who knows? As a reader, I'm not tied to having it linear. I don't care if we skip Franco's generation for now and spend more time with Jo or with intervening or even future generations--or even if we spend time with those alien demons! I love shifting and fluidity and change.
I would be excited, too, if you did go back and make the changes and edits that you wanted to make! You could just do a post that summarized all the changes, with links to the revised chapters, and then if regular readers wanted to read them they could. It would be really neat insight into the creative process to be able to witness that.
When I was in grad school, studying to be a teacher of writing, one of my mentors used to lament that we never got to see how writing was produced: We'd see the final, published work. But, because writing was often solitary, we never saw the revisions or the steps and changes that went on to create the work. This was in 1992, before blogs. For writers and students of the writing process, blogs are fantastic, especially if someone does what you're talking about--making those kinds of changes that writers need to make as their work takes shape. How fascinating for those of us following this process! How much we can learn about the putting together of a complete complex novel by being able to watch your process! I love it and I find that at least as fascinating as the actual work itself!
