There are no limits anymore.
We have destroyed all barriers before man.

Haha, just kidding. However, today’s message of creative fulfillment does rather tie in to my occasional contemplation of certain Satanic themes: “Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law”, eh? I’ve used certain variations on this in my stories when examining the potential of unchained will (most notably, the Jensian critics say, in Chapter VII of Papillon). Today, I found myself ruminating on my recent creative frustrations: my last Blankenship & Dawes story went nowhere and was abandoned, and my current story has taken two weeks to hit the 7k mark. Then I recalled reading in East of Eden last night one character saying that she’s written poetry, too, “pages and pages of it all over the table.” This capsuled description of pure generation inspired me in a strange way. Why am I struggling with these stories? Has my mind run fallow? Am I out of ideas at twenty-six? Of course not. These obstacles are nothing!

Then, this morning, I chanced (random clicking) to listen to some Ryan Adams. He’s a musician who, at age 34, has released something like fifteen albums, and has maybe a dozen unreleased. His songwriting is wildly uneven, of course; it takes a genius to be that productive without sliding occasionally or often into mediocrity, and Adams is no genius. But his reckless generative power is impressive.

Taking these random factors into consideration, the problems besetting my current story suddenly seem infinitesimal. I’ll give it a kick in the pants, I’ll take it on a wild left turn, I’ll drive it into the ground. I can do anything!

The more I learn about writing, the plainer it is that sheer production is the singular mean to the end. Things like Nanowrimo understand that. Get words on the page. Who cares if they’re crap? Get the words out on paper, revise them later, just get your brain into the state of logorrhea. Feel the creative impulse. It feels wonderful. All my friends currently gearing up for the next Nano know this. Or, Joel just announced his plans to produce a piece of art every day for a week, which is laudable. You cannot produce quality until you produce something.

The writing habits of certain greats like Anthony Trollope back me up here. Trollope wrote a certain period of time every day, even when on vacation, even when sick. If he finished a novel and his time wasn’t up, he’d start another. Harry Harrison writes hours every day. Flannery O’Connor forced herself to sit at a desk every day, even if she didn’t write a word. Many scorn this approach; the muse keeps no schedule. This shows naivete and ignorace - a lack of understanding and a lack of knowledge of the subject. The muse is a fickle bitch, and the average novelist is lucky to get a pinch of muse every few months. Trollope wrote forty-eight novels, and they’re regarded as “pretty okay” to “really quite good” - but people still read them a hundred and fifty years later. The muse is the privilege of geniuses. Are you a genius? Of course not. You’d have better things to do than read this blog if you were a genius. Now get to work!

Edit: To bring it full circle, Alan Moore describes any sort of creative process as magic - creating something from nothing. Bringing something new into the world. He lays this out in the penultimate book of his Promethea series - would our great (toxic) cities ever have existed if not for the imagination of man? Creativity = magic = Satan. But, creation = generation = God. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 8:29 pm and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.