One of my childhood dreams was to learn to write the books containing the stories in my head.
The thing is, I kind of approach stories like I approach my artwork (which I rarely show to people unless I have to). A lot of feel and mood I can’t express neatly, so I spread the paint around and make a general mess of things until what I’m looking at starts to resemble the vague mass of feelings and ideas and themes in my head.
What that means is that without a defined structure, my creative process is a trainwreck. With a structure, it still is, but there’s a sense of direction that keeps things moving at least.
That means I plan out which books I’m supposed to be writing at a given time. Many are stories that have been lying dormant in my mind in all the years I wasn’t writing complete books. Stories that have been building up along with my frustration, stewing in the background.
Enter this year.
We don’t have to talk about it too much. Only that it threw a glorious wrench into things, a wrench I’m pretty sure also smacked me in the head, because I somehow decided I was going to squeeze this one book right into everything: into the stress of a pandemic and social isolation and my husband getting laid off from work and deciding to go full-time on his business. I know there’s been a lot of discussion about stress and productivity, and how we shouldn’t expect the former to drive the latter, but I also seriously can’t help that my brain is wired this way. I produce in a panic. It’s a survival mechanism I share with my husband.
So I jumped into this story without planning. All I had was a distinct idea from last year, which I then combined with another distinct idea I had for a story a couple of years earlier. So yes–I wrote a story using the outline for another story and hoping the resulting experiment would yield…something. Not a story that exists for the sake of existing, but a story that flies by itself, that makes me feel all sorts of things for the characters and the nature of the world–both theirs and ours.
Staring at the end result, I feel like I’m pushing towards that childhood dream with every new novel I write, and I can’t wait to do more of this kind of thing. Building the kind of stories I want to tell isn’t simple, but I’m starting to learn to trust the process and myself. I may not know what I’m doing but I will get there. And the last few months may have been a deep, dark hole, but at least I got a story out of it.
I should put all that on a t-shirt.
