A Commitment to Chaos Muppetry
On cutting the strings of expectations
For the past several months, I have been trying to figure out a more efficient way to write something new. I’ve been reading craft books. I’ve been trying out different plotting methods. I’ve been using diagrams and templates and all sorts of things intended to help me craft a book faster and tighter.
And I’ve been miserable. I feel utterly drained of creativity. I can make words, some days, but they feel lifeless and flat. There’s too much weight on everything, too many other voices in my head. It leaves no room for natural flow.
Why have I been putting myself through this? Flatly, fear. The fear of obsolescence. The fear that has followed All That DAW Stuff. The fear that taking too long with my next project will mean everyone in the world forgets about me, forever. The fear of disappointment and disappointing. The fear of publish-or-perish.
I wanted to make something good, good enough to get me back on track, and I wanted to do it faster than I’ve been able to do things in the past.
What I’ve done to myself, though? Is just made things worse and made them take longer.
And yes. I know. There’s no One Right Way to write a book. There’s only the ways that work for you. It’s a lesson all writers learn, I think, and perhaps some of us have to learn it multiple times. Perhaps all of us.
Sometimes, though, those fears make you want to see if there could be another way that works. Half hope, half desperation. But clearly, none of what I’ve been trying is getting me anywhere.
I need to shake myself loose.
So, it’s back to embracing Chaos Muppetry.
I need to give myself permission to wander in my creativity, rather than pre-examining every scene with a “How will this work?” “How does this serve the story?” “What purpose does this have?” mindset. That can come later, but trying to do it at the start is absolutely stifling me. So many of the craft books I’ve been reading want me to do that analysis before I write anything, so that I don’t waste time, waste words. But it’s not wasting words. It’s telling myself the story. As for the time… well, trying methods that don’t work hasn’t saved me any in the long run, now has it?
I need to set aside expectations — both those I’ve imposed on myself and those I perceive (or imagine) coming from others. I need to conquer my own perfectionism, and I need to stop worrying about what my agent or a potential editor will think. They can’t think anything until I’ve actually written something!
And I am really going back to basics at this point. I’m closing all my Scrivener projects (and yesterday, I had four open simultaneously), and I’m opening a Google Doc instead. I’m going to try to write something each day, but I am placing absolutely no limitations on what that means. It won’t be sequential. It won’t all be on the same project. I may not even have projects in mind some days, but will just lean into freewriting and see what comes. When I do write multiple snippets within the same story, they might be contradictory to each other.
I need to explore — and to remind myself why I like writing. Figuring out how it all works, what serves the story, that can all come later. I can’t do that before I know what the story is.
I’ve said before that, while people love to talk about “plotter vs pantser,” I think of myself as a story gardener. I nurture some seeds, and I see what grows. I don’t always know what sort of a plant I’m even dealing with until it sprouts. Some things that I think will blossom, don’t; some things I’m not expecting turn out to be the most beautiful blooms or verdant leaves.
I need to give myself room to see what grows.
Because y’know what? This is how I got to the Aven Cycle.
Back in 2011, I had barely written anything fiction in years, thanks to academia and my first Grown Up FT Job. I had to get back in the habit. So I started with just 100 words a day. I slowly grew that into longer writing stretches. I played, I experimented, I wrote whatever came into my pretty little head on a given day. Many, many, many of those scribblings never panned out.
But some of them, by mid-2012? Were a draft of what would become From Unseen Fire.
Solidarity, friend. My brain can't seem to figure out where the story is supposed to go until I spend a LOT of time in the world and the characters' heads, and I'm stalling out trying to come up with a plot beforehand. Except pure pantsing also didn't work out so well for me, as my first novel was a 300K word monstrosity that needed a ton of time both cutting words and imposing a structure. So I'm hoping to find some middle ground. Did you find any of those craft books helpful, at least conceptually?
I don’t know whether I’ll ever finish anything long again; I don’t know whether I’ll turn to short stories or poems, where my writing began when I was a kid. I don’t know whether any of it will get published by anyone except me in forums like this. I just keep writing (fearfully, anxiously, sometimes slowly, sometimes less slowly). I like Scrivener only because it lets me keep watch over all my little mutant writing babies in one place where they can grow up (and maybe grow) together. It’s the attic my friends and fam will stumble on, open slowly, and say, “WTF was he up to?” Then, maybe, “Hey, this is kind of interesting.” That’s the farthest reach of my current writing goals.
I hope you keep going.