It seems to me that time is running forward with such speed, and yet each moment stretches out like an eternity. Perhaps this is just the result of an overly-stressed mind, but I can’t help but feel like I’m caught in some sort of time vortex. My writing has seemed that way, too: I’ve been writing more frequently these days, and yet it seems that the end of my story is moving further and further away. I have found this to often be the case when it comes to my writing and yet I still get frustrated with what is clearly my own process.
One of my least-favorite and most intriguing stories when I was a child was Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. I think it safe to say that the imagery from this story has been used to the point of its becoming trite, but as a child watching the BBC version of the story for the first time, I was at once fascinated and disturbed. Of course it was the white rabbit that drew me into the story – I loved rabbits as a child and would try to catch them in my backyard – but there are many aspects of Carroll’s tale that spoke to me even then on such a profound level that I still have difficulty confronting. I have always been a person to whom control is very important. On the flip side, I have immense creativity and a need to express it in nearly every facet of my life. Thus my extensive list of hobbies over the years: writing, drawing, set design, knitting, crochet, spinning, web design, cooking, sewing, doll collecting…the list goes on. All of these activities have provided me with outlets to express what is at the core of my being. If I am not “doing” something on a regular basis, my life starts unraveling out of control. Like Wonderland, my creative psyche sometimes bleeds into reality when I’m not being diligent, interrupting my sleep, causing unjustified paranoia, etc. I have to be creative as a rule, or else I fear I’ll drive myself crazy.
At the same time, I am a very analytical, controlling and rational person. Where my writing is concerned, I have found that these two traits – intense creativity and rationality – are not mutually exclusive. In fact, my more rational mind does a pretty good job of reigning in my creativity so that the stories I do write are not entirely absurd and flow well. But it’s this balance that I fight with daily: when do I reign it in and when should I just let go? I once asked someone whether or not they would rather fall down Alice’s rabbit hole or walk down Dorothy’s yellow-brick road. Ultimately my answer would be the rabbit hole, but I always hold myself back from falling in. And I’m not sure that one can limit themselves to one side or the other all the time anyway. Sometimes we need a path laid out before us and sometimes we need to take a leap of faith.
At the present moment, I need to take a leap of faith when it comes to EoG. I know where the story will end and I have a general sketch of how the main plot will progress, but the past few weeks have felt as if I’m writing in a void. Every scene is shrouded in pitch blackness, each word laid down by sheer faith that it lands on something solid. My muse tells me to relax and trust that he knows where he’s going, but this process has become increasingly stressful. I think I had become used to knowing a scene perfectly before I wrote it out and being pleasantly surprised and the slight variances that occurred during the transition from thought to paper. I liked things that way – it was controlled creativity and the reigns were pulled just right. Now I’m being told to let go of the reigns entirely, and I’m terrified of what might happen. What if my story gets thrown so far off track it can’t be salvaged and must be abandoned like so many other ideas? I’ve grown so attached to EoG and maybe that’s the overall problem. I really love this story, and want more than anything to find out what happens. What I’m going through might be interpreted as a “dry spell”, and the advice I’ve always received for such periods is to keep writing, ‘cause you can always rip it out later. In knitting it’s called “frogging” because the sound of pulling out rows of stitches is reminiscent of croaking. I hate frogging, and I hate revising. When I knit, I check each row before moving on to make sure I haven’t made any mistakes. Most of my projects that required frogging ended up being completely unraveled and recycled into a new project. For writing, even though I think that I have always had a knack for it, when it comes to revising and rewriting, I woefully lack skills. To me, if what came before is not solid then the next block that is laid is weak, and the block after that, and the block after that. When it goes on for enough time, the whole project is useless. Perhaps that’s just giving up. I guess it is, but that’s how things have always been.
It seems for many reasons that 2011 is a year of turbulence and change in my life on various levels. Why not change my approach to my creative process along with everything else? If I’m yearning to fall down the rabbit hole, why not? There’s a good possibility that whatever waits for me down there will be worth my while. For now I should be focusing on the journey, not the goal. This is something I have to remind myself of from time to time. It hasn’t stuck yet, but it’s all part of the process.
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
