The Painful Silence of Writing · 10:26pm July 7th
One problem that seems ineradicably fundamental to writing, or at least to the kind I'm attempting: frustratingly fiddly, and yet it has to be kept a secret.
This is going to be a bit of an effusive confession, I'm afraid. Hopefully, I'll be in a better mood next time, but today...
"Secrecy."
Blog Number 264: "Obviously, That's Why I Zipped My Mouth Closed, Then Locked It With A Key, Then Dug A Hole, Then Buried The Key, Then Built A House On Top Of The Hole Where I Buried The Key, Then Moved Into The House On Top Of The Hole!" Edition
Writing without ruining the experience is like trying to be a spy single-handedly bringing about world domination*. The scope is borderline impossible. The risks of discovery too great to tempt.
* Or world peace, which is arguably harder to achieve.
The first and major problem is when you make a decision on what to write. When your answer to the question is "a lot of things"*, you have to prioritize. For some reason possibly to do with psychological ease, commitment to one idea for long periods (say, longer than a day) is easier than writing said commitment down in full prose for long periods.
* Might not have been clear before, but I'm an ambitious monster in many respects. See Exhibit A.
Imagine, if you will, the psychological effects of enthusiastically obsessing over one idea or set of ideas for months if not years, only to spend one day putting down the first few thousand words and then hitting a massive roadblock for the next few weeks. Sadly, I'm a veteran there.
Why is this such a problem?
"Yes, why is being fabulously creative such a problem?"
"Oh."
The second and also major problem, even once you've narrowed it down to the idea you will definitely do, is feeling that you're doing it justice.
This especially haunts me when it comes to comedy, because I see a blurry line between "a normal fic that has comedic elements" and "a comedic fic that's also normal". It's much easier to feel like joking around when you spot something in a paragraph that you just have to stick a "kick me" sign on and giggle at... than it is to feel pressured into coming up with something funny every page and worry you're just being cynical or childish with no variation.
Combine that with the sickening soup of perfectionism, social anxiety (you're planning on publishing this stuff after all), and in any case a bad habit of disconnecting from other leisure hobbies to fuel a passion that is producing zero results, and "doing the idea justice" feels like being asked to walk to Mars.*
* On that note, f**k whoever started the idea that you have to get the first line of your work right. This unhelpfully vague, stressfully high-stakes bullshit has regularly killed projects I was otherwise eager to sink my teeth into. Given some of the passion projects piling up here, I have a special HATRED of advice like this.
Why is this such a problem?
"Can I just not do the thing, please?"
"VE DO ZE THING NOW!"
Because of the third and especially major among major problems: secrecy.
Cross my heart and hope to fly, stick a basket in my pie... hole.
Secrecy is a fundamental embuggerance. It exacerbates the other two problems of concept management and prose writing to an unholy degree. And it's also unavoidable. That's the devil of it all.
But first, let's back up a bit and start from the top.
Unless you've turned quality control off, writing requires some cognitive effort to translate a jumble of concepts and elements into a functional, purposeful system. That comes with all the problems of construction work: unexpected setbacks, missing or inadequate parts, the projection that looked so rosy in the planning office turning out to be woefully optimistic, and that moment where you're just gathering momentum, only to be called away to deal with another job elsewhere, and then coming back to find that something crucial has collapsed and you have no idea why and the assistants on-site can't or won't talk about it and it's set you back weeks.
Oh, and you're worrying about the public or your boss breathing down your neck all the time. More on this later. It ties into the secrecy thing.
"I'm certainly not jealous. A lady never gets jealous. She merely becomes competitively motivated to self-improve."
"But you really do suck, dear! That's just facts, mwa ha HAAAA!"
See, there's a self-interested and a public-interested aspect to these problems, starting with the concept stage. The public one is obvious: if you go around telling people what you're going to do, not only will you spoil the surprise, but you end up disappointing them if you fail to deliver.
The selfish one is... well, also obvious: a blabbermouth can't complain if someone steals their publicly available idea.
I really hesitate to mention the selfish one, because it does not paint me in a flattering light, but there's no denying a kind of prestige and status afforded to the better class of writer, even in a relaxed context: after all, you still want to get results, and people prefer consistent content, not unreliable suppliers.
Unfortunately, that trucks in a load of competitive emotions. Envy, resentment, possessiveness, suspicion, anxiety, even passive-aggressive hostility and bias: doesn't matter how high-minded you want to be, if the emotions sneak in via the back door then you've got to waste time and energy dealing with them, without succumbing, and ultimately without losing time feeling unproductively terrible.
Get paranoid enough, and even allies can become rivals in your mind. The idea that would have given you credit for coming up with it ends up giving someone else credit, and by simple statistical logic there are plenty of people faster and more competent than you out there. If you're already struggling with the work itself, why make it harder by giving someone else a free lunch? Yet at the same time, the chance of promotion also comes with the risk of demotion. If you keep spilling ideas and other people actually get the job done, what incentive is there for your audience to stick around you?
The audience after reading this far.
That loss of nerve bites when it comes to realizing the dream too. If you look at the list of fics on the right side of my home page, you'll notice that there are no "cancelled" or "on hiatus" fics after 2018. There's a simple reason for this: they destroy morale.
Back in the day, whenever I was really desperate not to see sunk costs, I'd try publishing an unfinished fic. This was also in the hopes of generating enough public interest to stimulate a followup, maybe even finish the job.
Needless to say, it never worked. The only time I ever followed up on a published fic was when I added to Magical Deathmatch, and that ended up merely delaying the inevitable. Whereas I've at least managed a couple of projects by keeping their draft stages secret for as long as possible (Queen of Assassins is my best case, as I finished it a year after starting it). Something about the public eye tends to wither rather than enable or encourage continuation.
Which brings us to the social aspect of secrecy.
"Nervous." Oh yes, there's a reason I relate so hard to Fluttershy.
Look, I'm not saying people who read stories are bad or even that I've been particularly worse off compared to some/most writers. Critical feedback - praising or prodding - is essential in the long run. And goodness knows an engaging comment is a boon worth savouring. So long as it doesn't go off the rails, I like trading comments with people as much as anyone else who likes a good ol' stimulating discussion on the train of thought.
But for whatever reason, the social aspect of writing has conspicuously been the toughest for me to grapple with, even if only in my head. Coming up with ideas? So easy that I'm more in danger of getting overwhelmed, and that's not an insurmountable problem for someone willing to get their list-making, critical-path-analyzing, organizational hands dirty. Writing itself? Actually not that bad once I get over the initial uncertainty and resistance. Getting into the immersive zone is that glorious moment when all the problems melt away and you're figuring out how to master the game on nothing but your wits and the excitement of creative discovery.
Stick a judge in there, though? Goes to pot. Damn near every time, it goes to freaking pot.
It's something I've noticed in other aspects of my life too, but the mere potential for being judged (the act of getting another independent mind involved, namely since I don't automatically trust them) is like putting a jammer on a plane. Suddenly, everything's not working, all that pilot training comes to naught, and you just hope you can walk away from the crash and afford - though dread - to get another plane up and running, wondering if... when it'll happen again.
Doesn't do your love of flying any favours.
"Spike, I don't care if I get flak for it, get me my flak!"
At least I hope now you can appreciate the scale of the problem. There are paradoxes on every level. You want to do something nice for other people, but you don't want to spoil the surprise, though that very secrecy runs the risk of leaving you alone to fail. You want to gain more respect for what you do - feed off it regularly, even - but you don't want to leave it vulnerable, though - again - that very secrecy makes it hard to seek support when you're half-afraid someone's going to exploit it or ruin your efforts. You don't want to disappoint people, and it hurts to be dead silent. You don't want your efforts to be wasted, and it hurts to struggle alone. The work itself is fine, but sooner or later it inevitably involves other people. Those people are, in theory, the ones who should benefit the most from the project, but they're also (if only by psychological illusion) the biggest threat to getting it done. Writing's hard, and in specifics you can never, ever tell people why without the risk of making it even harder to the point of total impossibility.
It's ultimately the secrecy that kills. As bad as the job itself can be, there are so many ways to make it worse by throwing off the tarpaulin for all to see that you might as well keep it concealed. Like it or not, you end up logically cornered into secrecy.
At least, I do. It's depressing to think there are people better at this than me, but I suppose they're at least spared the same frustrations.
"Aren't they?" "Uh dunnuh. And I dunno if being proved wrong would make me feel better or worse."
The question is: what to do about it?
Alas, I can't fix it. For selfish or noble reasons, secrecy is a necessary part of the code. I just have to face up to it and move on.
If nothing else, I hope this goes some way to explaining why I'm so often silent, except for the most extreme cases where the stress overrules and I end up posting a negative blog entry (as I've done multiple times in the past, such as at the end of 2018 - that was a profoundly difficult year for me). Ah, the things I could tell you... Imagine the topics I could talk about, if only their associated fics were guaranteed to go public. Or go well.
So I can't tell you why I've been silent* for seven months and thus all of 2024 so far.
* Ignoring blog posts, PMs, and comments. I meant fics.
I can say that it's nice to actually tell you something without getting into a worryfest about spilling too many beans, so for now I'm playing the "personal catharsis" card.
"A problem shared is a problem negated. At least, that's my understanding of the Pinkie mathematics involved."
Pre-emptively saying now that I don't want a flurry of advice either. I know you mean well - someone's miserable, you want to cheer them up, it's a natural human impulse - but in terms of morale, I don't think it'd do my anxieties any favours to feel dependent on someone else on top of everything else. I'm figuring this out on my own.
So, if I have any point I want to make, it'd be... "Yeah, writing sucks sometimes, don't it?"
Actually, I feel better getting that off my chest already. Heck, writing this down helped to clarify a point or two for myself: the secrecy angle wasn't forefront until just recently.
I'll see what I can do in the meantime. Pragmatism dictates a bit more digging and experimenting here, so I'll get on that. Hoping to get a fic out sooner rather than later, but I've long struggled with the twin problems of short story simplification and longfic commitment, so I ain't expecting any miracles.
Until then... 🤔
Mirror, mirror, on the wall...
...uh...?
That's all for now. Impossible Numbers, out.
Incidentally, I'm not usually one for unwieldy headers, but that edition title might be my favourite yet.
Writing definitely sucks sometimes. Felt that way a lot until very recently.
5790893
Oy. Almost all of this is close to where I’ve been stuck for a couple years now. Minus the progress in the background.
I wish you well with it, and have no useful advice to offer!
You are right on the money with not posting unfinished things. I am a chronic not finisher and I totally get the desire to post unfinished things. To get some dopamine, or to have some people to talk to or just so that it wasn't all a waste. But when ever I posted anything unfinished the response was kinda meh. And it leads to a weird spiral - at least for me - were the next thing will also be rushed out unfinished to make up for the first unfinished thing failing.
I've already decided for myself to only post finished things from now on. I think thats solid advise.
5792431
well actually as the enjoyer of one of your unfinished things... maybe it's not that black and white. I certainly prefer something over nothing.
5791231
You know that bit where you've been building up to that one scene you really want to write, only your perfectionism kicks in and declares you'll never do it justice? Damn, man.
At the moment, I'm reduced to a combination of brute-forcing it and taking long breaks to heal. No updates so far, no obvious progress*.
* Which hopefully leaves the door open to non-obvious progress?
5792431
Notwithstanding your point in the second comment, I think on balance it's a matter of long-term discipline versus short-term gratification. Sure, publishing gets a quick hit, but I suspect it also makes one less patient and more "untamed" about publishing, to self-destructive and disastrous consequences.
It has been a really hard lesson to learn.
Ah, but knowing is half the battle, right?
I sure hope so.