In which she has a minor epiphany over dinner

[zeborah]

Yesterday afternoon I met up with someone I know from the online librarian world who was in town for the day on the way to a conference. We had this fantastic six-hour conversation which consisted of these amazing nested tangents about work, travel, politics (USan, Australian, NZan), sf (books, TV), family, home repairs, home invasions, and so forth. Every now and then one of us would say, "Oh yes, I was [half an hour ago] going to tell you about X," and then within about half a minute we'd be off on exciting new tangents.

So for example there must have been about an hour between the time I introduced the topic of my fanfic-in-progress and the time I actually started talking about it. But then I also talked about where I'm at with writing in general and it brought together some threads of things I've been thinking about why I'm in a bit of a lull at the moment, which are:

• Partly it's that it's taking me a while to adjust to working full-time and being a houseowner and having to do all my own cooking and housework. (I think I'm never going to manage the "cooking every night" thing. I'm slowly resigning myself to the fact that it's not a crime to go for a walk from time to time and buy some ready-made food from one of the healthy takeaway places around here.)
   
• Partly it's that the last novel I completed was horridly demoralising in the swimming-upstream way it took to write -- and that I'm not really happy with the result: there's a lot of parts of it I like, but as a whole, I'm not sure it's really a coherent story.
   
• Partly it's that this year at work has been a year of ridiculuncous stress what with merging and construction and restructuring and farewelling people and more construction. The earthquake on top of this Did Not Help -- I couldn't write for a month or two after -- but that really was the icing on the cake; even without it I was really struggling.
   
• And the other thing, which I've had to face more as I recover from the earthquake and which clicked a bit better in my head as I mentioned it last night, is that over the last couple/few(?) years, through all the "Fail" conversations and from trying to educate myself about various related issues, I've learned a lot. And it's made me increasingly aware that a lot of things I've written, and a lot of things I've wanted to write, are to various degrees problematic.

This is not a whine that it's all just too hard. (Though it is hard enough that I have at moments felt/understood the temptation to do that.) Of course it's hard; it's learning. When you learn more about characterisation or plot or anything else then you likewise begin to recognise your own failings at it, sometimes before you have any idea how to actually improve.

But and also it's that I'm trying to change what I want to write. (Because I want to write fun things, and I want to write non-problematic things, so I want problematic things to feel less fun and non-problematic things to feel more fun.) And changing what you want or believe or anything like that is doable if you know enough about how you think, which I think I do, but hard work nonetheless. (I'm suddenly thinking of Cyteen.)

So I think for most of this year, if not more, I've been on a "Argh, my stories are problematic and my writing sucks" plateau and going around in circles. And last night as I was talking I just magically recontextualised this as, "I've learned enough to recognise those problematic things; now I can learn how to fix them through the obscure methodology of: practice, practice, practice." (I ought to have known this beforehand. If anyone else had been struggling with the same thing this is what I'd have told them. But I just didn't really internalise it until last night.) I don't think the plateau was wasted time, because it was also time I was continuing to learn and process. And I'm not likely to suddenly burst into perfect productivity as of today either, so this learning and processing will continue. But I have some more confidence now that I can get myself back into the actual writing thing and will be capable of improving what I write.

I still need to learn how to plot actual stories, though.

Comments

[green_knight]

Sometimes knowledge just needs to gel and reform in our backbrains. I understand the impetus to not write problematic books - I very much feel like that myself - but I also think that if you're determined to pay attention to those things, you're unlikely to fail, not in the least because you'll be paying attention to the premise from the beginning.

[zeborah]

The problem comes with stories that I've already imagined (or written) enough of that the problematicness is kind of baked in.... But I don't think my current short-story-in-progress is terrible, though there are certainly things I need to pay attention to and be careful about. It's mostly a matter of stomping on my Internal Editor sufficiently that I can make actual forward progress.

(And there are some things that are just inherently... just no. I don't know about fiction necessarily, though there are certainly stories I'd be very hesitant about writing. But for example I had been planning to write a bibliography of Māori science-fiction, but a very short amount of research made it very clear that a) Māori research has to be done according to Māori methodology and I have no expertise in that at all, and b) it's just not appropriate for a non-Māori to be doing it anyway - there was one awesome bibliography I was reading and she was talking about how, though she was Māori by birth, by culture her family were quite estranged (though trying to reconnect) and even this caused significant difficulties.)