You asked: What is my creative process like?

Well, today it’s not very smooth. Although it’s nothing like how awful it was during the eighteen months I was blocked. So, let’s see. This topic seems kind of boring to me. But maybe it will help me write something else I want to write today.

For approaching five years now, approximately, I have woken up in the morning wanting badly to write. My ratio of desire to write to actual writing is 4 or 5 to 1, and the ratio of what I write to what gets published is 2 or 3 to 1. I’m a perfectionist and a lot of stuff I think about doesn’t make it to written words and a lot of stuff that makes it to words doesn’t make it to you. I can’t always explain what stops me. Some things predictably almost never make it to the screen (something that is so excruciatingly personal that even I can’t publish it, or reflections that cross the lines that Servetus has drawn around what she will say in public, or stuff that’s likely to give me more grief than I want to take on that day, or things that appear half-baked or to need more thought) but sometimes I write things that I don’t publish for reasons I can’t explain, and then abandon. Like approximately 90,000 words of a 120,000 word book manuscript for Oxford UP. Sigh. And now I’m writing a novel or novels, too … without knowing whether I’ll ever be able to expose that prose to the light of day, either.

Yes, I’m cognizant that I’m strange about my writing in ways that do not always benefit me. I’m keeping my day job — in which I have to do a surprising amount of writing, too.

Anyway, incubation: I experience an audible running inner dialogue for my waking hours, not just about Richard Armitage but about everything. For the last five years, I have kept a notebook next to my computer where I jot things down. When I’m reading on screen, I also screencap quotations and save images that prompt my thoughts in a particular direction and I keep them in a folder for inspiration. With exception of pictures of Richard Armitage, words are always more inspiring to me than photos — although sometimes I see photos that illustrate what I’ve been thinking about. Sometimes ideas percolate over months, other things hit immediately and I write about them at my very next opportunity. I have a special page for spoof ideas because I exploit them only under very particular circumstances, although if one hits when my mood is “right” for elaborating, I will make the effort to be timely. Every now and then, I see an opportunity to publish something I’ve already written that suddenly appears relevant. To answer a specific question — I don’t really have a filing system for things that relate to Richard Armitage.

The threshold hardest for me to cross on a daily basis marks the boundary between idea and text. In order to do that I have to generate flow and the process to do that can be precarious. I try to write every night — even if flow eludes me — because I suspect writing is like running (although I have never run) or any other repetitive activity; the more you do it, the more automatic it becomes while the longer you neglect it, the harder it gets. I hope I’ve trained myself out of block at this point but I experience a certain amount of trauma on that point.

When my free time was organized differently, I usually started with morning pages (often not in the morning, and I also type rather than writing. Longhand I reserve for moments of extreme distraction or need for strong concentration [as when recording memories precisely], because while it can increase my focus, it also drastically slows down the stream of words). That was the main thing I took away from Julia Cameron. I still do morning pages on weekends and some evenings now. At the moment the pages are mostly important if something bothers me enough to keep me from writing and I can’t figure it out — which happens a lot less than it used to do as I’ve become more adept at using my Richard Armitage fantasies actively to get at what’s eating me. And I do that in my head, as necessary. I used to write a lot of them down; less so now although I still record some of the main themes and it’s been something I wanted to write about more this year — the utility of Armitage fantasy in self-liberation and how it’s worked for me.

Next comes topic selection. It depends heavily on my mood, but not just on that. I consider current events (does something happening in what we learn about Richard Armitage’s life and career or in Armitageworld merit or provoke comment?) but also try not to get in a rut as a writer or fan. I think about audience members and things they’ve said, and it would be a lie to say I’m not writing for a specific audience that I imagine in my brain (as I noted this fall, when a shift in my picture of my audience caused some severe turmoil). Some nights original writing just won’t come (often when there’s too much new information to process, and that’s an initial intellectual step for me — uptake) and on those nights I limit myself to remarks on things I’ve enjoyed or that made me think, and I try to catch up with notifications and conversations that are going on privately. I frequently have a chat window open in FB for conversations with my Armitage besties, and admittedly sometimes on evenings when I want to write I get too enmeshed in conversations about some of my preoccupations or bêtes noires to drag myself away. Or, lately, I might get involved in a conversation with Pesky, who’s editing his latest book manuscript and also experiences his own share of issues with avoidance. Usually, writing at adjoining tables enhances our writing virtue, but not always.

When I have chosen a specific topic and think I am ready to blog about it, I open a new post on WP (or if I am working on my other project, a window in MSWord). I tend to do this before mobilizing all of the other writing support mechanisms, because sometimes I can simply sit down and let go of my fingers and stuff pours out. If I know that a post will have a picture or pictures, I try to locate those first because looking at them while I am writing is helpful and because interrupting myself to look for something can be destructive to the stream of words. If everything goes right, the words come out and my brain gets occupied with the words and flow emerges. What I seek for is a state of mind in which I am completely caught up and forget that I exist separately from words and thoughts and feelings. Worship in another way, if you will.

More often that doesn’t happen, or at least not immediately or fully. So, like every writer, I have preconditions and crutches for successful writing experiences.

Preconditions: I need to be healthy (not acutely sick), awake, fed, watered, sober, comfortably dressed in loose and nondescript clothing, sitting in my best writing posture at a table in public (café or library or office — it’s hard for me to write at home because I am constantly distracted by the possibility of taking a nap), in a space with the right temperature and non-fluorescent lighting and a fair amount of white noise / background distraction, with stable Internet access. If any of these factors are missing, I get preoccupied with whatever my brain perversely decides to fix on. This can be especially bad with food or beer cravings.

It’s hard to describe the emotional space where I best experience flow as a writer. I call it the “sweet spot.” Maybe the best adjective for it would be phlegmatic. That is to say: I have to be in a very emotional state, one that was extremely rare for me until I encountered Armitage, to have the sensations that lead to an emotional post — but in order to write about it, I have to come down from there so the words come and so the state of mind becomes describable. Frequently, I have an idea for an emotional post, but I can’t bring myself to go to the emotional place and that tanks it. Similarly, I have to be awake, but too much caffeine prevents me from making an argument cohere. If I’m too tired or sad, then I have to get to a place where I loosen the boundaries of personality that typically protect me against myself in those moments.

I use various tools to move to the sweet spot. Once the preconditions are met, I have music that I listen to — usually repeatedly, to create a kind of trace-like background. I’ve listened to “Time Passages” on the order of five thousand times in the last five years. If I need to move down, then calming music; if I need to move up, then funk or something with a strong rhythm, that makes me think of dancing and allows me to type in rhythm. Pictures of Armitage or scenes of his that I’ve clipped to rewatch because they have particular effects on me. Fan fics that I find particularly inspiring. Poetry. I tend to find that certain kinds of pornography open the boundaries of self if I am feeling really sad, and I’ve got one particular favorite at the moment, as does alcohol, but that’s a tricky strategy and I try to make a beer the end of a successful night of writing because it is rarely the harbinger of the beginning of one.

I also have implemented a rule that if I try for more than 90 minutes to occupy the sweet spot and can’t, I close the window on whatever I’m writing and read or do something else. Part of my ongoing internal dialogue includes a frightening amount of self-criticism and a few thoughts that would be disturbing if I let myself pursue them, and there’s an odd paradox to the fact that I now use writing as a way to separate myself from shame but that it’s also frequently a source of shame — and that I’ve found this technique via fandom, a place that does not lack for shame and shaming. It’s important for me not to get involved in castigating myself for an incapacity to write. I do not, however, clean my apartment or (as mentioned above) go running. I say I’ll try again tomorrow. And I do.

When words come, I try to write out a complete summary of the steps of what I’ll be writing (if it’s analytical) including photos — or a series of bullet points with the dominant trajectory or movements of a more emotional or personal post (writing is a way of processing and publication perhaps the sign that I have processed enough for now). Then I try to write in paragraphs. I do edit partway through, mostly because it’s easy for me to put what my seventh-grade English teacher called “sentence garbage” in my prose as a way to smooth the word flow, and that stuff (interjections, unnecessary appositives, meaningless adjectives, superfluous prepositions, overly scrupulous parallelisms, and the like) interferes with readability. If I feel my brain overheating, I stop and add tags, photos, captions, and so on for a while. I do use the trick of trying to stop in the middle of something to make it easier to start the next day, but I am not always successful.

When I finish writing, I feel good — soberly high — and also calm, liberated, at peace with myself. The troubling aspect of the inner dialogue stops for a while.

To get from prose to publication, I have to believe that what I’ve written is the best that I can write about that thing at that point. This is because I can’t see what I do at this blog as a source of shame. I have to believe that I’ve done the best job to communicate what I wanted to say that I could have done before I hit publish. Which doesn’t mean it’s perfect. But the boundary is the feeling that I couldn’t have done better with what I have available and the hypothesis that I am not going to get anything more that would improve it in the near future.

So … that’s it. For it what it was worth.

KellyDS has recently described some effects of her creative process, and I think it would be interesting to hear other people’s take on this. Since you asked and you have blogs, Tree, Guylty, Fedoralady are all tagged, but if you’re too busy to write, I totally understand. (This is one reason I customarily decline blog awards.) Anyone else who would like to write about what inspires and motivates them to do what they’re doing as fans in whichever creative medium should consider her/himself tagged as well.

~ by Servetus on January 25, 2015.