I feel that I’ve made some progress. And as I’ve mentioned, this progress, while good for me, has not been good for my ability to motivate myself. Where once storytelling was for me a method of release of tensions, it became a task to be completed. Where it had once been if not exactly joyous, then at least to some small extent a process of almost-healing, it had become merely work. Where once writing had been an almost entirely inward activity, it had become almost completely outwardly focused. And while the writing became focused out, the process of finding publication remained focused on the inward requirements of the editors – which is to say that my writing found no “home.” I received acknowledgement of the quality of my writing, but it did not apparently “speak” to the emotional requirements of those in positions of power and went therefore unpublished. This was not satisfying. This did not give me any sense of achievement, any feeling of reward for the amount of work I was doing.
Fast forward a little, and the political and social climate of the nation took a decided turn for the worse. The grinding, petty, close-minded zealotry of those in public office and those who supported their regime brought back the old levels of anger and frustration and fear, without any hope for release. I knew myself well enough by this point to know that writing would not be sufficient to combat this level of despair.
I stopped writing. For a long time. Things went from bad to worse, in so many ways.
But I didn’t stop fighting. Haven’t stopped. That Dark Side has not been and will not be triumphant. I’ve made an effort to come back – if not to those ancient, dark roots, then at least to the process of writing. Tried to apply the process, all unfocused, to both old works unfinished and to new responses to my perception of the world. And while there have been results, some even almost satisfactory, I’m still not hitting the marks, still not feeling that I’ve actually completed anything. The process is, I think, acceptable; but the source still too much a muddle. Writing from anger, even from a desire to address sources and issues of frustration, does not any longer drive creativity. New sources of creativity, new perspectives, continue to tickle at the back of my mind, but not yet with any kind of obsessive push to write – it’s still work, and little more than that. Process without apparent product. And while I have now a “home,” as it were, all else is seemingly still in transition.
And then I wind up asking myself, can any new source, any new philosophy, be used in the adaptation of an older work started in a place strong with the Dark Side? Can a novel started from a place of fear and hate and ended through a grinding will to simply finish ever be sufficiently altered to reflect a renewed sense of purpose derived from a “better place?” Or should such a work simply be scrapped, abandoned, left to rot, in favor of something wholly new? Could even a few characters be sufficiently divorced from the dark world in which they were created in order to teleport them to somewhere otherwise wholly fresh? Can those (I swear to god literally) thousands of hours of work ever be salvaged? (This, by the way, is why the Subscribers section of this site is not yet up and running.)
Well. All these questions and more will be answered. Someday.
And y’all thought writing was easy, just words and paper and ego. Heh.
