#WritingWednesday – On Content Creation
So November and December have blown up in my face. I know. Big surprise, right?
The past six weeks have been a struggle, one more than I had expected and suffice to say, the habits I had hoped to form… did not happen.
I won’t bore you with the details of every little reason (excuse?) that content did not get produced over the past six weeks. That’s unimportant. What is important is that… well content creation is difficult.
Up until a week or so ago, the barely half finished draft of “Huntress” kept staring at me and laughing at my inability to find that hook, that thread, that twist that pulls the whole thing together and makes me want to give a damn about these characters…. to say nothing about whether or not the reader cares. It finally came to me in the most unlikely of places… at a performance of “The Nutcracker”… and no, the twist has nothing to do with ballet. I’m still unsure as to how well it’ll work truth be told. But it’s the strongest thread I’ve come up with for this story so far so I’m going to take it and run with it until the work is either finished… or the project runs out of steam… again.
Other ideas for other projects keep bumping in and out of my mind and you would think that with these ideas coming back and forth the concept of content creation would be easy. But for me, right now, it’s like herding cats and it is damn exhausting.
This is not a ‘woe is me’ or a ‘I have writers block” post. At least that’s not the point. But when it comes to creating content, the ideas are like a huge crowd of people all fighting one another to be through the one unlocked door before the guys next to them. Making matters worse is that some of the old standbys I relied on to clear my head and focus my thoughts…don’t seem as effective as they once were.
But last week, something may have changed. I was flying with Nathan Lowell in EVE Online and we got hit up by a troll. The troll was hardly un-expected and as I chatted with Nathan about it in game, and felt my own frustration start to build he disarmed me with three simple words “He’s creating content.”
And something flipped. If I told you that I knew what it was, I would be lying to you. But in that moment things started making sense. Here was an annoying twerp of a player who was enjoying ramming his ship into ours in the attempts to push them out of range of what we were doing. (No ships don’t take damage when they collide. It’s a conceit of the game). He was being a pain in the ass about it too. But Nathan was correct. He was creating content. He was giving no thought to it… he was just… doing what he wanted to do and content was being created. Granted it was not the written or spoken word mediums in which I operate. But content was being created and in our own story the characters Nate and I played were being presented with a challenge to overcome. (Challenge Accepted!)
I’m not yet fully certain how this translates over to my writing, but it’s got my gears turning as I wonder if I’m working too hard to create content in my written work and that perhaps instead of continually re-focusing my efforts and trying to drill harder and deeper into what that ‘missing piece’ is… my answer is to do the exact opposite. Sit back, relax, work on something else and let the pieces come as they will.
More next week. (Seriously)
