Progress Report December 2013

It’s been a while since I posted here. One positive reason is that September, October, and November were all heavy months for me, workwise (good for paying tuition!). There wasn’t much to report in terms of my creative writing. And there always seemed to be other projects demanding what time I could spare (like, say, cooking food for my family). But work has slowed down a little, and a lot of the things I could be working on are more or less “on pause” for now. And I want to spend some time documenting the shifts in my thinking about my creative writing during the last few months.

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First, a quick recap on how I got to where I am. About 12 years ago, around the time I turned 40, I had a sudden sense that it was time to work on creative writing. This took me by surprise, as I had assumed this was one of those paths permanently not taken.

So I worked on several story ideas, including one idea for a large story (or set of stories) told against the canvas of a particular fantasy world. I did some worldbuilding and wrote a few chapters. It didn’t seem to be working, though.

I tried various things. I wrote a novella set in the same universe (and then was frustrated when everyone told me it was the first part of a novel, and when was I planning to write the rest?). I drew maps. I tried thinking about other stories set in other universes. Nothing seemed to work. And my pace of work was glacially slow.

Flip back to Christmas 2007 or so. By this point, I had more or less given up on my fantasy stories, so I decided there was no reason not to think about a modern non-fantasy Mormon short story idea that had occurred to me several years prior. To my surprise, I found the idea putting out new roots and shoots. It became No Going Back, my first (and so far only) published novel, about a gay Mormon teenager — hardly anything I had ever expected to write.

No Going Back came out in 2009. I spent much of the next year (to the extent that I had time to devote to creative endeavors) trying to promote it, while slowly thinking over what I might work on next. Eventually, I decided to try my hand again at sf&f.

And that’s where I’ve been for the last three years.

First, I tried working on a book about a teenage empath, set in a modern high school — on the theory that I might as well use what I had learned about writing contemporary teenagers. I had a lot of fun doing research for that one, and wrote over 100 pages. But my readers informed me that it was boring, and after taking a step backward, I could only agree.

Common advice to writers is to simply get it out on paper, no matter how ugly it is, and then clean it up later. But one of the things I had learned from my earlier writing efforts was that when I push myself to write something before it feels ready, I wind up regretting it. The trick is to keep working consistently on something. If one scene won’t work, switch to another scene. If you’re not sure about your story direction, do some worldbuilding. And keep coming back to it every day and putting in a little bit of time.

I should add that while this seems to be the way I most productively work over the long term, I find it difficult to sustain, because (a) it doesn’t feel like you’re making a lot of progress, (b) it’s frustrating, and (c) you keep starting and stopping. Really, it’s a lot like I clean (as my wife will tell you, to her frustration): I drift through the room and pick up one thing, go back and work on something else, go back and pick up something else, fill the dishwasher while talking with someone on the phone, wander into another room and do something there — all without setting any explicit goals or timetables, and (ideally) without anyone actually mentioning that I’m doing cleanup until it’s all over, least of all me. Because, you know, to think about it too much would jinx it, and we’re all just little black rain clouds with no intention of robbing the bees’ honey at all. Ambition, in short, is my enemy.

(Note that I’m not saying this is or should be true of other writers. In fact, I think it’s a pretty perverse way to be as a writer, and I’m not sure it’s possible to have a successful writing career this way. But I a pretty certain it’s where I am right now.)

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I spent several months trying to fix my teenage empath story, but couldn’t come up with anything that fit organically with what I was trying to tell and that also had the promise to add the requisite conflict and excitement. So I abandoned that story and moved on to another one, this time about a teenager from our world who makes his way into another one.

Something Dave Wolverton said a long time ago has taken on more meaning to me in my recent writing efforts: that any story you write should suceed on as many levels as possible for wide range of readers. Your characterization should work. Your action/adventure should work. Your plot should work. Your worldbuilding should work. Your writing style should work. Et cetera, et cetera. At some point in the process, you need to look at each element separately to see how each can be improved.

I used to think that was overly ambitious. I still think no single story can be good at everything, and readers tend to be attracted to writing that’s strong in the specific area(s) they care about. But practically speaking, I think Dave is right — and I think he’s especially right for me. I’m not the kind of writer who can simply follow my muse and let the story blossom on the other end of my pen/keyboard. Instead, the only way I seem to know how to write a story is by doing multiple things at once.

On a related note, I’m not sure I’m capable of writing a story that follows a single story line. Part of the success of No Going Back — speaking of success in terms of my success in completing it, apart from whether or not it was successful for my readers — was precisely because it was my kitchen-sink Mormon novel. Each main character had his/her own story arc; there was the personal, the political, attempts to depict what it means to be gay, attempts to depict what it means to be Mormon, a testimony story, a coming-out story — together with bits and pieces of other things (some of which wound up on the cutting-room floor). For me, a big part of the dynamic of writing came from trying to maintain the tension between and among all those elements and keep them moving forward.

Which may not sound terribly organic, but it felt alive. Maybe that’s partly because I tend to view life as many different stories constantly interweaving.

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My attempts at working on my new fantasy story (known as the “Ellsworth” story for reasons too obscure and irrelevant to be worth recounting) were going fairly well, if slowly. I was trying to build a world, create characters, generate a magic system, and develop a plot — all slow work. But using my “tinker a little here, tinker a little there” philosophy, it was at least going forward.

Then October hit. I was swamped with work. A work deadline meant I had to bow out of my monthly YA writing group. I was up to share something in November, but still felt like I was in the putting-pieces-together phase.

And I found myself wondering, again, whether this kind of writing was something I should even be spending my time on — in light of the evident fact that spending 3-4 hours a day on my writing (the minimum I think would be needed to make a successful career) doesn’t seem possible for me to do productively.

There are a lot of other things I could do with my writing. I’m a good nonfiction/informational writer — probably better than I may ever be at fiction. I’d like to help people with personal and family histories: something I think is more important than fiction in many ways. I’m constantly finding out about worthwhile writing and editing projects that could use my help — if I’m looking to do something that’s never likely to bring in money.

Balance against this the fact that I now find I miss creative writing when I go without it for very long. There’s part of me that wants to tell stories, if I can manage to do it without triggering all the issues I’ve been talking about here.

So I took a step backward. I quit my YA writing group (which I was mostly feeling guilty about). I re-evaluated, and told myself it was okay if I wound up walking away from my creative writing — that I wouldn’t insist on holding to a goal of becoming a creative writer. I called a hiatus.

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I’m tentatively back to my creative writing again: an hour or two a day (and often not that, but it’s my goal), working on whatever seems to make sense at the time. I’ve gone back to my original “big” fantasy story, on the grounds that I think I may be ready to try again and possibly do it right this time, and that if I’m not trying to plan a career trajectory I might as well work on the story I think is best and most important to me, which is this one. I’m no longer making predictions about where this will go, but hope I will manage to stick with it until the story’s done or I find something else I’d rather do with my time.

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Jonathan’s personal rules of writing, current version:

Don’t plan a writing career, but focus on writing.
Work on the story that’s most important to me, that I know how to write.
Chip away at it. Work a little every day.
Don’t get ambitious. Don’t push it.
Work on the part that comes naturally on a given day.
Realize that small efforts can add up.
Give my story the time and space it needs to prepare for writing it — even if the prep work sometimes seems like dumping gravel into a bottomless pit of quicksand.
Try to write a story that’s good in as many ways as I can make it.