You have an idea. Something’s been on your mind that you’ve been wanting to express. It’s chased its tail around in your brainpan. It’s yapping and frothing at the mouth. You know what you need to do, but it’s just so cute sometimes to see the idea act this way, especially since you’ve been with it from the beginning.
You need to pull the trigger, friend.
It could be a darling you know is in need of murder. It could be the starting gun for that new project you’ve had percolating for years. Maybe it’s not even related to writing directly, but getting something off of your chest and out of your mind can help clear the decks for getting that project underway or improving.
You believe in your work. Well, you should, at least. It’s yours, after all, and yours alone. The thing about believing in one’s own creative work, however, and seeking a way to get it out where others can see and enjoy it is that sooner or later, you’re going to have to fight for it. You may have to struggle with your own self-esteem, or push through the frustrations of revisions & rejections, or scream to be heard over the thousand other chirping wanna-bes who are trying to get that same bit of cake you’re straining to reach.
In all of the above cases, the only way to do it is to do it. Strap on that steel-toed cleat. Heft that hardwood bat. Pull the trigger.
There used to be a time when I let things slide. Mediocrity would slip right by me and I wouldn’t even notice. Or maybe I’d wave at it. My point is, I didn’t have standards. What I did was good, regardless of how good it actually was.
Looking back, I shouldn’t have been surprised that my first attempt at a novel got so many rejections. For one, I now know that rejections are good. They show you’re doing something. But more importantly, it was crap. It was predictable. It wasn’t written all that well and I didn’t go to the pains I go to now to revise and edit things. I had help in the second go-round, sure, but it still wasn’t all that great.
I know, now, that the problem might be that I spend too much time revising. Trying to get my work to be perfect could consume all of my time. It’s not going to be perfect. It’ll never be perfect. The idea will be to get it to a point of “good enough to not suck.”
I approach role-playing in games the same way. I used to let myself get away with things like “my character is the son of a god” or “ye olde powerful dragons blessed me with immortality.” I realize now how silly, unnecessary and downright juvenile those ideas are, and I’ve ranted about it at length.
Like my manuscripts, I’m worried about my characters being good enough to not suck. This pertains to both their backstories and how I play the game. It’s a lot easier to avoid cognitive dissonance when the tank of the party messes up a pull and wipes the group, when their character’s description has them being a beautiful, all-powerful, liked by everyone and lust object of all NPCs Mary Sue. “So you’ve seduced the Queen of the Dragons and kicked the Lich King’s ass in single combat, but can’t keep the aggro in the first pull of this dungeon. Right.”
Maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe this is coming off as me being a bit of a dick. I know this is stuff some people don’t want to hear. They don’t like the notion of somebody disliking their special little snowflake of an on-line avatar. And I might get told that not sharing my knowledge with others who don’t have as much experience as I do with this sort of thing is rude, even mean.
But sitting down across from a struggling writer and helping them get a better idea of how to frame their narrative, breathe life into their characters and have the plot make sense is one thing. Dealing with strangers who can’t be bothered to use proper fucking punctuation is another.
Maybe it’s pretentious to have standards. Maybe I’m a mean-spirited puppy-kicking old man for not wanting to waste my time being forced to role-play with people who fail at it. Maybe I’m going to while away the rest of my life mumbling to myself as I pore over the 137th draft of my manuscript because I don’t feel it’s good enough, yet, and I assume everything I do sucks.
I think e-readers are cool. I like the idea of not having to cart a bunch of books, even paperback ones, onto a plane where weight is always a factor in how much you can carry and how much of a pain in the ass you’ll be to the people behind you. But it’ll be a while before I pick one up, and not just because of budgetary constraints.
For me, a thin plastic device will never have the same feel in my hands as that of a few slain trees and copious amounts of ink.
It’s the same reason I go about revising the way I do. Once the first draft is done, I take advantage of a printer and actually put the words down on paper. Then into a binder or series of folders it goes, to be picked apart with a pen. Words are crossed out, moved, scribbled in the margins. Were I more ambitious/creative person, I might even take scissors to it, revising the work in decoupage form. “Hey, check it out! I turned Chapter Six into this coffee mug!”
Okay, maybe not.
But it’s physical. It’s a real thing. It’s every bit as necessary, to me, as a rejection letter. It’s evidence that I’ve created something. Granted, in first draft and even second draft form, it’s unlikely to be something of stratospheric merit. But it’s still something that sprang out of my imagination, ran right down my arms, flowed into the page and took on a form & function all its own.
My point is that, in order to get the thing organized in a way that it makes a lick of sense to other people, I need to work with it physically. Doing so in a word processor or electronic medium will never quite do it. I might put the revision right back into a word processor, but this middle part of the work, that first transition from raw creation to refined marketable product, happens in the real world, as something tangible, a sacrifice made by the aforementioned pulp and pigments.
Besides, I couldn’t have looked at a scroll bar in an e-reader the same way I did the first five volumes of Scott Pilgrim and wonder where the hell the time went. Both finishing a book and finishing that step of revision are accomplishments, and they feel more like accomplishments worth enjoying if there’s the physical feel of closing the back cover.
Dichotomies of personality are fascinating to me. Studying Jungian psychological theory and philosophy could eat up a great deal of my time and probably make my reviews of films like Dark City, Inception and even The Dark Knight more interesting. But I tend to be a lazy slacker, while wanting to do things that require intellectual effort. My own dichotomy is one I need to study and discern, because lately it’s kind of been pissing me off.
I’m a dreamer. I look up towards the stars, away from the mundanity and mediocrity of the world, and I see what could be. I envision things that haven’t been created yet. I feel urges within myself to create those things, to bring them to life. I’ve almost always got an idea on my mind, a snippet of fictional conversation or a scene of drama or flashes of action, even as I’m going about mundane tasks. I’d like to think that this little touch of insanity is what’s keeping me sane.
On the other hand, I’m a slacker. After expending energy in a day’s work, especially when it’s at a job I attend just to keep my bills paid, I want to relax, to enjoy not pushing myself, to treat or reward myself for surviving another day. I’ve already burned a lot of lean tissue over the course of the daylight hours, I tell myself. Stress just makes my already dwindling lifespan shorter, and spending more time making myself miserable is wasteful.
Nights like last night make me stop and correct myself, examine my thinking. Both writing and playing games became stressful. Granted, at one point I was trying to do both at the same time because a lot of time had already been lost in the afternoon and evening, which probably didn’t help matters. The point is this. The game ceased to be fun; it felt like a job. The writing was going nowhere; the blinking cursor of the document seemed to mock my creative impotence.
Every day is a series of choices. We choose to get up and go to work, or not. We choose to pursue what’s important to us, or put it off for another day. We choose to push ourselves to excel, or hold back for fear of the critics. We choose to reach for the stars, or just watch those who’ve already achieved orbit because our arms hurt.
I think lately I’ve been making the wrong ones, from how I spend my time to how I view my projects. Last night was bad. Today should be better, but only if I choose wisely.
We get inspiration from a variety of places. It might not even be intentional. We catch sight of something, hear a snippet of conversation or music, and suddenly our mind is off on an unexpected tangent. Inspiration runs away with our concentration, laughs at our attempts to focus and taunts us with ideas and dreams until we finally sit down and bang things into some form of coherent work.
Let me give you an example, and I’ll speak in general terms rather than specifics. Maybe you’ll figure out something in the process, or maybe you’ll just be amused or entertained. It’s the least I can hope for.
Inception is pretty inspirational just in terms of getting an audience thinking, and it’s been on my mind pretty much since I’ve seen it. In particular of late, however, has been this piece of music used in its last trailer: “Mind Heist” by Zack Hemsey.
So why is this music from Inception making me think of this particular character? In thinking about it, there’s one line in the trailer that stuck out. Cobb says to Ariadne, regarding extraction, “Well… it’s not, strictly speaking, legal.”
The things this character does are not, strictly speaking, good.
He has a good goal in mind, like Tyler Durden looking to free the world from the bondage of corporate greed. And he may help someone in need, but only if it suits him. The means at his disposal almost all fall into the realm of dark magics, he consorts with demons, he’s an intellectual snob and shows a lot of signs of being a sociopath. He’ll hear something he’s done or is doing called “evil,” agree, and laugh about it.
But why?
We have to go a layer deeper, like diving into another layer of dreams. We need to uncover what motivates or at least gave rise to this sociopathy, even if it’s of a heroic nature. What might people consider evil, among his actions? Well, evil people tend to destroy things. Going back to the Fight Club example, at times something must be destroyed in order for something better to be created.
In the world in which our subject lives, there are malevolent forces far worse than he. If he wants to continue to enjoy life in general, and his particular lifestyle in particular, the world must be prepared to face and fight back against those forces. I am suddenly reminded a line from The Boondock Saints:
“There are varying degrees of evil. We urge you lesser forms of filth not to push the bounds and cross over, into true corruption; into our domain.”
I think that’s it. His goal, the underlying motivation for all he does, is to cultivate within himself the power to stand against evil forces on equal footing, unhindered by the constraints of societal morality and seeking a form of karmic, cosmic justice. He has seen evil, stared it in the face, and chosen to become, not the antithesis of it, but a rival of it, a rival firmly on the side of his allies but cut from the same diabolical cloth. To this end he must bend his will and all of his intent, playing things off with casual humor, devilish charm and ruthless cunning. Good cannot exist without evil, after all, and if one is necessitated to become evil, one might as well enjoy the experience.
Now that I’ve found the roots of this inspiration, all I need to do is put it in story form.
Have you ever explored inspiration like this? What have your experiences been? What were the results?
