Fairy Revel

Whenever I take those “Which Jane Austen Character are you?” quizzes online, I almost always get Marianne Dashwood as a result. In spite of that, I’ve always identified most with Emma. I’m not sure why; I’m not into matchmaking and I probably mind my own business a bit too much. I do think I see a lot of my own flaws in Emma; I’m not sure it’s a good thing that I like her more because of it.

Whatever the reason, Emma is my favorite Austen character, and when I was recently reading Emma, I smiled when I read this passage:

Emma wished to go to work directly, and therefore produced the portfolio containing her various attempts at portraits, for not one of them had ever been finished, that they might decide together on the best size for Harriet. Her many beginnings were displayed. Miniatures, half-lengths, whole-lengths, pencil, crayon, and water-colours had been all tried in turn. She had always wanted to do every thing, and had made more progress both in drawing and music than many might have done with so little labour as she would ever submit to. She played and sang;—and drew in almost every style; but steadiness had always been wanting; and in nothing had she approached the degree of excellence which she would have been glad to command, and ought not to have failed of. She was not much deceived as to her own skill either as an artist or a musician, but she was not unwilling to have others deceived, or sorry to know her reputation for accomplishment often higher than it deserved.

I’m afraid it sounds just like me. I’ve always had a lot of inspiration but not much patience for practice. In fact, apart from writing, I didn’t even realize that I could practice at art and improve until a few years ago; before then, when my projects didn’t turn out I just gave up. I guess I thought that I had a little talent, but only enough to be frustrated.

On the other hand, like Emma, there has always been the element of distraction keeping me back. I do want to do everything, to try every sort of creative pursuit. It makes progress difficult when you never stick with anything for more than a few months. Writing has held my interest over time, but everything else gets tossed aside and picked up again every so often. It’s not that I stop enjoying what I was doing before… it’s just that I want to do everything.

There’s an excellent essay in Booklife called “Permission to Fail”, and in it, Jeff Vandermeer says,

To be great, we must attempt so much that we not only are in danger of forever failing, but that we do fail, and in the failure create something greater than if we had set our sights lower.

Whenever I’m working on a novel, I get a sinking feeling at some point, sometimes at multiple points. “This is too weird,” I think. “No one will like this character. This setting is too alien to me. This novel is way over my head.” The feeling of biting off way more than I can chew is familiar to me, and I usually end up putting the novel away. It’s a coward’s way out: “I’ll just work on something else for a while.”

Here, Vandermeer is giving me a different perspective on that feeling. Maybe that feeling of being in over my head is a good sign, a sign that my ideas are exactly the right ones to inspire me to write something dearer to my heart, which I believe is the real way to reach for literary greatness: write something that matters to you. He continues with a quote from J.T. Glover on Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell:

‘Both were big, ambitious books, and from a fearful-of-failure standpoint horribly risky. What happens if you spend ten years on a novel, only to find it doesn’t work?’

All I could think of is how much Kostova and Clarke learned while writing those novels — how at times, for whole years, their lives must have revolved around work on their respective novels, and much of everything they did had some relationship to those novels. The risk factor is incredible, and yet even if those two books had never been published, I find it unlikely that either novelist would have said they’d failed. the failure would have come from never attempting what had appeared in their imaginations. The failure would have come from thinking what if I had tried?

Surely if I write something that’s frightening in its peculiarity, but that speaks to me on a deep level, it will speak to someone else, too. Even if it doesn’t, does it matter? By writing from my heart, I will have written the thing I needed to write, the thing that made me get up in the morning and throw myself into the work with abandon, and isn’t that better than writing a sure bestseller? How could I regret something like that?

The downside to this is that there’s every possibility that when you devote that much of yourself to a project, give everything you’ve got to it, there’s no way of knowing you’ll write more than one. When Vandermeer says, “You might be of a more cautious temperament than other writers so it might take you longer,” I feel a twinge of apprehension. On the other hand, is there a cost to planning a ten book series, in that you may rob Book One to pay Book Two, and so on down the line, never really reaching your full potential in any of them? Is perfection really the enemy of the good, or do you have to shoot for perfection to ever hit greatness?

I don’t know. While this advice gives me inspiration for those beloved projects that once seemed too big for me, the part of me that dreams of being a prolific working writer is skeptical. I don’t know what the results will be if I aim for a middle ground; my personal conviction is that everything in life has a cost, and the greatest rewards have the greatest cost.

I’m also reminded of a favorite quote of mine, by Annie Dillard:

One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better.

In Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st Century Writer, Jeff Vandermeer talks about open connections versus closed connections, and how they affect creativity.

A “connection” in this case is any access point with the outside world, especially those opened by social media. A blog, email account, Twitter, Facebook, and so on — each point at which the writer can be accessed is a connection.

Each writer can handle a different number of open connections. I know some writers who seem to have a limitless capacity for interaction with the outside world even as they are working on drafts or brainstorming. But I think most writers have a certain threshold for the number of open connections they can maintain, and that most work (or would work) better with no open connections during their actual writing time.

I’m afraid I’m one of those writers who needs a severely limited number of open connections at any given time, and none whatsoever while I’m writing. The more intense the stage of the creative process I’m at, the further I pull back, hole up, and hide out (that’s how I’ve earned my reputation as a recluse, probably.)

Even when I’m not in the thrall of my Muse, I can only handle a very few open connections, much fewer than I think most other writers can manage. I can’t have an instant messager open at almost any time; the temptation to procastinate my life away in chit-chat is just too great. I try (and often fail) to keep Twitter off until I’m done with the day’s writing, and if I look at my email before writing I find it almost impossible to get started, even if it’s junk mail and sales notices. I’m a born rabbit-trail-chaser and don’t dare websurf, so internet memes and the popular YouTube video du jour are totally under my radar for the most part. I never even know what to talk about on Twitter anymore.

I’m at a place where I’m ready to count my open connections, set a limit, and start closing some. Jeff Vandermeer says that even connections that we ignore can drain us, and I’ve found that to be true, with so many accounts open all over the place that I’m sometimes surprised to find that the person who has my username at this or that site is actually me.

The most important thing to me, as Jenny Crusie wrote in her oldie-but-goodie article, Taking Out the Garbage, is to protect the work. Social networking, self-promotion and marketing are a necessary part of the writer’s job these days, but not at the expense of the work. So if I have to let some of my accounts go, consolidate, or otherwise shut down a connection, I will. I’d rather write only for myself than spend my life writing bad stuff — or never finishing anything — because I couldn’t concentrate.

(For what it’s worth, right now I’m definitely planning to keep this blog and my Twitter account. Everything else is a potential candidate for scrapping.)

Once about every three or four months, I go into social hibernation, for a couple weeks at least. I don’t know why I do this, but I’ve learned that it’s necessary for my mental health and creativity to just go with it. It’s not great for my online friendships, not great for “building my writing platform” (whatever that means), but it is great for me personally. But I still haven’t worked out how to keep up with the online things that need keeping up while I’m away.

Anyway, I’m trying to get back to it. I’ve been thinking about how I spend my time and what I want to spend it on. Creatively, I’m a writer, will always be a writer, but when I spend too much time on writing-related etcetera, my whole creative life suffers. I need time to work with my hands, to work with tangible things instead of just ideas, and I need time to just think. I feel like the content of this blog is focused on such a narrow part of my life, and full of too many lengthy book reviews; I never meant for this blog to become a book review blog, but at the same time, I do want it to be about books and writing.

I dunno. Sometimes I think about posting about everything I’m doing, making it more personal. I know that I don’t want Badgerish.Net to be a “writing tips” blog, for a few reasons. One, I have pitifully few finished manuscripts, so I don’t feel confident giving writing advice; two, I have this funny idea that it’s counter-intuitive for a writer of fiction to build an audience of other writers looking for writing help. I want to get to know other readers, because that’s who I’m interested in, honestly.

Which leads me to wonder, what do readers like to read on an author blog? For myself, I know I don’t like to read negative, angry political talk or diatribes. What I do like to read is harder to say, because the truth is, I rarely see authors writing about anything other than writing on their blogs. This is helpful to me as a writer, but I wonder how well they’re serving the readers of their fiction. On my current favorite blog, The World According to Maggie, Maggie Stiefvater talks not only about her books, but posts playlists she listened to while writing, pictures of herself with her bagpipes, photos from her travels, and what’s generally going on in her life. She doesn’t post much “writing advice” only of interest to other writers; she writes about things that her readers want to know.

Enough rambling. I’m back now, and trying to catch up on stuff. I’ve been working on Story A Day May, and even though I haven’t written a short story every single day (not by a long shot), I’ve written a few, which is a few more than I’ve written in the past three or so years. Maybe longer. I still don’t love writing short stories, but I think the element of instant gratification is good for the soul.

I frequently ask myself the question, “Why do I have to write?” I think it’s a crucial question if one wants to survive the ups and downs of the writing life for the long haul. As a visual, tactile person, who sees strange visions of the story and feels the emotion of it before getting “ideas”, someone who is more inclined to create things that can be picked up and touched, why do I feel this burning need to write stories? I’ve always been a storyteller, ever since my days as an overly-imaginative kid running circles in my parent’s living room, telling stories out loud to myself (I never said novelists weren’t crazy). But why?

I hit on the reason awhile ago, but typically for me I’ve struggled to articulate it. It had to do with expressing ideas and beliefs, with drawing people into another world, and by doing so, putting them off their guard, so they might be willing to examine my admittedly odd ideas about the world, what it is and what it should be, with less prejudice. Not that I would necessarily change them, but that they might become willing to open their eyes and see something outside of themselves, at least while reading my work. In a recent email to her list, Holly Lisle said:

“My job as a writer is to create the best work I can, to raise the level of dialogue, to challenge my readers to see the world in new ways and to think new thoughts, to present to them worlds and ideas they have not met before in ways that make them hungry to discover more.”

There it is. She summed up my main reasons for wanting to write. I want to be able to say to other people, “The way you see the world, your fundamental premises, may be wrong. Why do you assume the segregation of children and old people is ‘normal’? Why do you get all your food from cardboard boxes or plastic tubs? Is the big, important job they promised if you went to school really big and important after all, or are you a wage slave?”

Another reason I want to write is because I am endlessly fascinated by other people and the inner workings of their minds. Visual arts can express the internal state of the artist, and possibly of the observer of the art, but it is limited in its ability to reach into the mind of another person, or many persons, and explore their every thought and feeling intimately, to uncover what drives them and what makes them laugh or shout or go quiet with awe.

I feel some tension with the writer’s life. Words are not my first language; feelings and dream-symbols are the language of my mind. But nothing fascinates me more than people and all the many puzzles that make them up.

© KY Craft