Essay – Pale and Process

One of the more unique aspects of being where I’m at, in my specific position and time, is that I’m transfixed between two ideas that feel like they get mythologized a bit – or at the very least they’re real things that get used as such wide umbrellas to explain something, that they aren’t very useful.  They don’t feel to me as though they explain where I’m at, anyway.

Some users were saying “Wildbow’s clearly going through a midlife crisis“.

And I’ve run into the term writers block on top of that, in reference to how I went down to one chapter a week.

To me, the first doesn’t apply- I’m similar to Verona in that I don’t put a lot of stock in the usual life path, (no interest in marriage, minimal interest in dating- will date if someone approaches me, no interest in kids), I don’t feel as if my life’s running out.  I want to do the things I enjoy, and a big part of that is writing, or at least creating.

The second conceit has been a bit of an issue, and gets more at the topic of this post.  ‘Writer’s block’.  When my writing slowed down, I went looking for professionals.  Two therapists, one career counselor.  There were some regular hassles- I researched people who might be able to help me, found one that seemed good (dealt with work stress, productivity and burnout, among other things), and rather than assign me to him, their office assigned me to a sex abuse therapist who works in the same clinic.  The second guy had a terrible connection.  With the two where I got any headway, I put forward my situation, and ran aground on the very idea of writers block.  The career counselor said “I don’t know much about writing or writers block” and I couldn’t seem to convey, you know, “Okay, but if this was any work other than writing, and I was having issues with productivity, what would you say?”

That’s where I first started thinking of writers block as something mythologized.  Or something painted as so broad and encompassing of any writing issue that it’s almost dismissive.

My inclination is more that writer’s block is a catch-all term used to describe a varied set of problems – not having inspiration, not having motivation, not having time, being discouraged, losing attachment to a story, having a process that doesn’t take you to the end, getting caught up on a snarl or plot point and not knowing how to get past… I’ve seen people ascribe all of these things to ‘writers block’, in media or writing groups.

So it was frustrating to reach out to professionals who might help me explain and work through the downturn in my writing and run up against this nebulous idea.  Does any other career have something like it?

I know people will say you can’t expect one magic word or idea to fix things, but in the past, that’s very much what’s happened for me.  But let me step back.  Writing this as an essay gives me some freedom to talk more about my creative process.

Back when I was 13, I started writing “City of Woe” and as I described in the APU2 livestream, it was an angsty equivalent to punching a pillow, being mean to my characters, writing the sort of cringe-inducing stuff a hormonal 13 year old writes.  I was inspired by Buffy’s ‘The Pack’ episode, where Xander gets possessed and finds a friend group that automatically accepts him, I liked that, I wrote ghouls.  Also wrote a demonic possession story and a vampire story (though sometimes the vampire one was folded into the ghoul one).

The writing process, turned into a graphic, would’ve looked like this:

Where the color intensity marks the effective writing- in this case favoring the days I’m consuming related media and tapering off.  Writing that way, I got to 40k-80k words multiple times before restarting each time.  It was enough to fill a book, even though none of the stories even made it that far plotwise, past the characters whining and transforming and figuring out powers.  I could do that in the course of a couple weeks.

Cool, great.  Except over my teenage years and early 20s, I stalled.  Before I was 18 I hit the point where I couldn’t get past a few pages:

Or, putting it into words, less intensity in the intense moments, tapering off faster.  Until I settled into something that looked more like this:

One night of writing, where I didn’t make as much forward progress, maybe one struggling attempt to pick a story idea up again, but I’d falter.  I tried to stay productive and in a way, practiced mindfulness by doing postmortems, where I’d do title pages for each with notes on the story, would change up the stories I wrote to write from different perspectives, and tried to see if I could find a working story that way.  I covered a lot of ground and conceptualized a lot of characters I eventually put into Worm or Pact in one form or another, but I ended up with a graveyard of stories that I couldn’t seem to get off the ground.

Very frustrating, to have the will but not have the words come.  If I hadn’t had the early success of writing full novels worth of stuff (of garbage), I would have simply thought that writing was too hard and given up.  The thing was, I knew I could put out more words.

At 26, I was (still) in University, I was taking classes on applied language and discourse.  Not about learning a specific language like French, or linguistics, to get into the nitty gritty of a language, but more broadly looking into the who, what, where, when and why of language.  How do you learn a new language?  How best do you teach it?  How does one pick up the necessary lingo for a profession or a particular role in society?  What goes into writing a professional email?  What about language and power?  What about what isn’t said?  Textual silences.

In the course of taking those classes I stumbled on the idea that helped me pull things together.  In an article talking about how students should best approach an essay for school, the notion of getting to the finish line first came up.

That’s one of those times a single sentence or idea totally unlocked something for me.

Not stated, but easy to pick up on once you grasp that, was the idea that something that was okay but finished is better than something forever unfinished.  That poked at my brain, because I’ve always hated when a work I’m enjoying dies without resolution.  I started writing serials, figuring the schedule would force me to keep working.  And it worked.  I went from being unable to get to 1000 words to writing a couple million.

What ended up happening was that the deadline was a huge factor.  As I wrote closer to the deadline, the writing would ramp up, to the point there was a peak right before I hit the deadline.

Which formed a comfortable routine.  Wake up in the morning, make tea, review past works, get underway a few hours after getting my head sorted, and then start writing…

If I got stumped, I’d take a shower, use shower thoughts to help work through any snarls, or make a meal, return strong, and with the deadline mounting, frantically finish.  I’d be writing 1000+ words an hour in the last few hours, helped by the fact I was tying up threads and drawing things to a conclusion.  Then I’d review feedback, fix typos, and then sleep.

This was pretty workable, and once I settled into it, it was what I maintained for a long time.

If anyone’s had that school assignment that felt impossible to get done in time, where they got into the zone and managed a thousand words of passable writing in the last few hours before finishing just before the deadline, that was it.  Twice or thrice a week, for years.  It worked for me, and in the off days, I could attend to community stuff, do chores, shop, clean up, etc.

People would say “Wildbow, take a break, take a vacation”, and while I recognized that maybe it’d help me get wider perspective and give me time to think (see my ‘Beyond the Pale’ post from a week and a half ago), I didn’t feel a pressing need.  I had two mini-vacations a week, or one longer one if I didn’t have an extra material or third chapter, it was a comfortable writing pace, I didn’t feel drained.

Really, the only obstacle was stuff like holidays or family pressures, and I moved away from immediate family pressures in late 2014.  That didn’t mean I wouldn’t have bad weeks, but they were more due to insomnia and other stuff.  In the course of writing Twig, I got okay at writing even during the bad health patches.

Along the way, though, and this is key: there’d occasionally be a period where I’d hit a deadline, have just a few thousand more words I wanted to write to bring a chapter to being ‘done’, and then I’d go past the deadline…

…and that would become the new deadline, in my subconscious.  From midnight on the dot to half past midnight, now.  Try as I might to reel it in, that sense of self-imposed pressure just didn’t recognize what I wanted, I subconsciously knew that if I went a half hour over, I’d be okay.  Which meant, when I went an hour over, as days went on, I could sit down to write, and the writing ‘energy’ wouldn’t happen until an hour later.  I could try writing, but words wouldn’t flow, I’d get stuck.

I sort of made the decision that if a chapter needed an extra hour, I’d give it that, because I’d rather write something I was happy with than force something that I wasn’t happy with.  In that way, over weeks and weeks, the schedule slipped by hours, then a couple days.

Except in summer 2022, everything went to shambles.

Edited to add this: graph courtesy of Coro on the Doof Discord.

I wanted to see family.  I had a new niece I wanted to meet, it meant catching a plane, and I figured family should be a priority.  I told myself that if there was a need, if the plane was a disaster, if there was a dinner or something that would pull me away from the keyboard, okay.

That’ll be fine.  If need be… maybe I take a week off.  People were cool and encouraging about that in the discord and stuff.

I didn’t end up taking a week off.  I did get sick despite a mask and covid precautions, just a cold, but just the fact I’d told myself I could take time off ended up killing that tension entirely.

That ramp-up as I get closer to the deadlines stopped happening entirely, so I wasn’t getting 1000 words in the hours just before/after the deadline.  I was stuck at a couple hundred words an hour at best.  No flow, which meant it took days longer, which meant it was harder to join ideas together, because the time I wrote that one bit in the first quarter of the chapter could’ve been days ago, and the bit in the last chapter was a week ago.

Is this writer’s block?

I think I knew subconsciously that this would happen if I took a break.  Even just for-real entertaining idea of possibly allowing myself some slack on the schedule around family stuff?  Left me nothing but slack.  Pushing slack rope.

In a way, it’s really frustrating, because I’m spending twice as long and twice the effort writing to get as far as I used to.  I have less free time, less energy, and a lot of frustration.  It reminds me of the teenage years, where I know I can write more, but the writing eludes me.

It’s subconscious, too, and in the various things I’ve tried, like tricking myself, giving myself incentives, giving myself punishments, trying to get back into old routines and headspaces, I did find one thing that worked a bit in generating tension.

“Wildbow,” I told myself.  “You can only get a full night’s sleep if you get this done.  1.5 hour naps allowed, maximum.”

You know what’s really unhealthy?  Getting 4 hours of sleep across two nights a week because the only way to generate tension and get some ramp-up/some way of getting ‘into the zone’ was denying myself sleep.  For months on end.  I’m approaching 40 and I do not have it in me to do that in any big way for longer.

So the question becomes, I guess, how do I recreate the tension of the deadline, when people are so nice and I can’t trick my subconscious?

A part of me was hoping I could, in framing things here, sort of settle on an answer.  A big reason I wrote this essay, even: that dim hope that I’d get 75% of the way through, figure something out, and tie that into the conclusion.  No such luck.  I do think I have the problem sorted in my head, but the solution eludes me.

Tried talking to professionals, and ran aground on the very unhelpful preconceptions and mythology around writers block.  I do intend to start looking again once I get myself moved, but there wasn’t a magic word or easy solution that helped things to ‘click’.

I do have ideas, which involve going back to basics.  When I started Worm, I had a backlog, chapters pre-written as a safety net, and I’m thinking that a backlog going into two (shorter than Pale’s) chapters a week might help produce the momentum I’m looking for.  Can I then, moving into writing chapters for the story proper, carry that momentum forward?  That is something I think I connect to and I could see it working.

There’s also trying to change up process more.  What if I stopped ‘gardening’ (writing by the seat of my pants) and wrote with more of an outline?  It could be an experiment to do with a shorter story.  Feels less exciting to me, personally, where I usually enjoy being surprised by what the story churns up.  That said, if the tradeoff is that I know what I’m going to write, it could mean less points where I stall and wonder what I’ll do, a focus of energy into the margins between the stuff that’s outlined (dialogue, etc.), and a change-up that makes my subconscious lack of tension feel more tension, because I’m going against the grain a bit and that’s harder.

And, I should say, maybe I’ll go back to some elements of worldbuilding and character building, and digging into the personal, digging more into what I’ve done in the past, seeing if I can recapture the positive points of energy from prior stories.  What did I do when writing Taylor or writing the Kennet Trio that made the stories flow like they did for me?  Because that did play a part in things.

Which would be the topics for the essays next week and the week after.