Inner Critic Blues
You know you struggle with an inner critic issue when you wonder if you SOLO table top RPG arcs are worthy of existing.
Yes, me. It has gotten better in the several years that I have been exploring the game in question, but it still lingers. An while I will sometimes anonymously post the resulting story arcs in a fleshed out narrative form on sites designed for that purpose, most will likely remain within my own journal for the game. (I mean, probably One never knows.)
The point being even once I complete a story arc in the game, and I have decided it is probably not going to be shared, I am prone to say, “well, you cheated a little bit when you interpreted that dice roll” or “if this happened on TV the fandom would sneer.”
The only legit self-response to this sort of attitude, (as well as the only legit response to any outside saying such things to you) is the following:
Who gives a shit?
Now it’s important to consider that the product in question may not in fact be as bad as said inner critic tries to convince you it is. That’s one reason they are called inner critics; they bitch at anything.
But for a moment let us suppose the inner critic of one of my game arcs, or one of your stories stumbles upon a mini-point?
The proper, professional response remains the same. Need a refresher? Here it is:
Who gives a shit?
Why should there be no shits given, even if there is a slight truth in what some of your own criticism present?
First, you are probably hearing them during a draft phase. All early drafts suck, that is just how it is. Anybody who claims otherwise is selling you a podcast or something.
Second, as I have talked about in previous posts, the process is the essence of value much of the time anyway. If I opted not to play my RPG (the only one I play, by the way) unless I could come up with an arc, characters, plot worthy of TV, I may never play. And playing beats not playing, creating beats not creating.
Even ChatGPT, which I generally eschew tends to agree with this. I once asked it on a lark about my worries over producing memorable, stunning narrative arcs during play that would impress more seasoned players. Even the unreliable, problematic goofy AI was programmed to respond to these worries with, in essence:
Who gives a shit?
When current AI is even more forgiving than you inner critic is, it’s time to reevaluate whether it has even the slightest value to your creative journey.
Look, it’s natural to have an inner critic. You are highly unlikely to silence it fully and forever. Just remember to prioritize it to a very (very) low level of importance, let it say what it says, and then keep going. Because you can always fix what ails your creation, or you can opt to enjoy just the process of making it.
Art lies in this reframing, as much as in anything else, as far as I have come to believe.
Respect the Writing Process, But…
“Honoring the process,” is either a mantra in the world of the artist, or a cliche, depending on one’s perspective. Perhaps it alternates. One thing is clear; this exhortation is ubiquitous.
Actually, right or wrong, the anecdotal survey suggests that it more often arrives in either form within the sphere of those who struggle to gain an external toehold with their creations–those who do not sell much or at all. Those lacking a consistent viewership or readership, as they case may be.
Those such as myself.
And while I acknowledge that commercially successful and/or critically acclaimed creators have just as much likelihood and right to full embrace process over outcome, beyond a certain point of success our capitalist, attention-and-acclaim-driven society tends to reward inferior creations more and more, satisfied as they are with the mere name attached to them.
Process is rendered incidental to the highly successful, unless they possess a particularly intense commitment.
Those of us in the perpetual trenches of art, (reasons often unknown) are far more often faced with the necessity to focus on process.
It comes easier to some than to others, this directed attention on the making-of as opposed to the enjoyment-of by others.
Yet simply, “focus on the work,” and “revel in the process” are often too cold, clinical, void of inspiration to those who seek even a modest audience.
Count me among such folks.
Intellectually I accept the wisdom of a toiling focusing on the process over results. My heart, however, sees this as the tedium born of surrender, if I am not careful.
So I tell myself that to write stories and novels that may never be read despite my best efforts is about bringing as many fully-formed worlds into existence as I can before I die.
Sounds dramatic, if not morbid. It’s probably a dash of both.
Nevertheless it is the element of transcendence I require in order to tap into at least some motivation for writing and creating.
Without this impetus to define new lives, worlds, realities, (or in the case of my non-fiction thought processes), I’d do what my Autistic mind does so well; keep everything in my head. After all, if nobody is going to enjoy what I create (as per the pattern of my entire career) why put effort into getting such things “down on the page?”
Probably because to resign to this is to allow all such creations to die with me when the time comes.
True, my computer files, scribblings in notebooks and stacks of printed sheets may, and likely will be consigned to oblivion once I die. The odds of them being consumed by anyone appreciative party at that point appear miniscule.
Even so, my creations are fully in the world. I have put my mind and spirit through the experience of pulling what I conceive through the magical forcefield of thought into the tangible reality of the senses.
That is a process that might just by mystical, and self-affirming enough to be worth the effort mores than the clicking away into the void of an empty room within an empty world that doesn’t want what my spirit offers.
If you struggle with finding the nobility of creating for “nobody,” embrace this notion of external realization of your ideas. It may not bring in the audience you long for, but it has a chance of making the process a powerful one.
That is what I am telling myself lately, at least
Oppression and Expression: On Privilege
A rush of inspiration leading to a hastily scribbled lyric or poem on a TGI Friday’s napkin is expression.
The first sentence in a year(s) long process of writing an epic 100K word fantasy novel after just as long a time pondering it is also expression.
I’ve said before, as recently as the previous post, that self-expression is vital.
It isn’t universal, though.
My life afford a certain, though limited privilege regarding the most obvious acts of creation and expression. I am working class, and often exhausted to be so. But thankfully for the time being and hopefully forever I have shelter and food, and of course white skin.
I have the room, the time, and partially the identity today that allows me the sacred privilege of usually being left the hell alone.
You, or another reader of this page, my novels, or any of my creations of the past certainly may not enjoy all of those things at once. Even my minimal complement of these heart-affirming, life-protecting statuses shields me more than a person who lack one or all of same.
Not all born authors can write their books. Not every dancer hears the music of their life.
But this illuminates a vital truth about creativity and self-expression; It’s only two true components are personal authenticity and lack of shame for same.
If you cannot create a book today, create a path to work that’s more scenic. If you are too afraid to write your song, clamp the noise-cancelings on your head and put someone else’s on repeat.
To partner with expression is to engage in expression.
Those of us that are barely privileged, such as myself, and those who are mega-privileged but retain their humanity express our own thoughts in corporeal form so those that perhaps cannot at the moment can nonetheless feed their hungry souls with our cultural sustenance.
My self expression of a story may allow your authenticity when you read it for snatches at a time behind your desk, or in your temporary hospital bed.
Or worse.
I do not ask everyone, under all circumstances to either ignore their reality by creating constant art. Nor do I insist that her song, my book, their movie be consumed as mere blind numbing agent. I only ask that whether your own or someone else’s you keep the seed of expression buried somewhere within you, no matter how dark it gets, so that when the sun does return, that seed is nurtured.
Art will not cut away every shackle. But the belief in art, anybody’s, will keep the deepest part of you alive long enough to know you cannot be eradicated without your surrender.
What to Write in an Age of MAGA.
My novels consist of:
-A story where a Greek God visits Earth.
-A snowed-in cozy murder mystery.
-A woman with the power to actually see promises.
-President James Garfield in the afterlife.
-A piece so experimental, sometimes even I have to refer to my old notes to remember what I was thinking exactly.
-A group of refugees in a bombed out city post civil-war trying to mount The Tempest.
And just a few days ago, I began my next novel; the genre is space opera. (I think, the definitions can be so fluid for such things.)
Do you see a partial pattern?
I’ll make it easy for you; almost all of my novels involve an element of the fanciful, the alien, the Divine.
One might also say a cozy mystery, though fully human involves a larger than average suspension of disbelief.
What I have not written to date is a searing indictment of, or soaring literary account against a moribund society replacing freedoms with oppression, vitality with violence.
In other words, I haven’t yet used my fiction as reflection of the deteriorating state of American societal and political norms. (Or for that matter the revelation that we have always been much closer to collapse than we like to tell our kids.)
This isn’t to say I never will write such a story. I have no such idea in the cue, but speaking in broad fashion there are whispers of whispers of ideas along this line. They are just not in the realization/acceptance stage.
Should they be? Should I, as an author, or you, if you are also an author, take on such genres and topics as part of our responsibility to the situation, and those who are/will suffer from same? Should we set aside whimsy and fantasy and weirdness and redirect our collective pens at the swords of encroaching tyranny by way of the stories we tell?
Should we be more timely?
I don’t know, should we?
That’s not the cop out it seems to be.
We creatives should continue to write, to create, to paint, to sing, to perform that which speaks to us most. There is nothing so dangerous to and rebellious against a tyranny than free, unfettered expression of self. A commitment to ballet while the world crumbles around you should not be confused with the proverbial Nero fiddling while the empire burns. It is a refusal of silence, a denial of diminution into passive, obedient cogs in the death machine that builds itself around us daily. Hourly.
Is there an element of escapism in providing readers, viewers, audience members tales of elves and starships, magic wands and mechanical men? For certain, and I would question anyone who refutes the utility of the periodic escape from this world.
Yet it is without a doubt more than that. It’s but one movement in the Dylan Thomas symphony to rage against a dying of our light.
Somebody will write the “important” fiction. (A term I use so loosely as to be laughable.) Perhaps at some point you will. Or I. But it won’t mean a damn if you lose yourself to write or read it.
Live.
Long Day’s Journey into Process
I have never rushed my work. Most of my novels took 11-12 months to write, and another six months or so of proofreads and edits. A few of the early ones did not even get that far until I set the rough draft aside for two months to let it “rest” in my head.
Though I have self-published my work, I have always been as deliberate as possible when doing so. My name is on the work, after all, I am not about to release sloppy products out there on purpose. Had I been able to afford professional editors more often, I would likely have availed myself of them. I wasn’t going to let a measly thing like budget, however, stand in the way of me sharing my stories with the world at large; I meticulously did it myself.
In the last year or so, what with my mother’s death and a few other less severe life changes, I have not merely been deliberate in writing, I have been virtually inert. As I construct in multiple facets of life a new normal out of the salvageable rubble of the previous longstanding normal, I am gradually writing again. (As I mentioned in a previous post about grief while writing a novel.)
After such a painful and irregular hiatus from consistent production, one might assume I’d be chomping at the proverbial bit to crank out new work. That isn’t the case, and furthermore, I foresee myself embracing the process of longform content creation even more than before. (My days of one novel per yearISH are unlikely to return.)
A bit of process almost every day may or may not result in a finished draft later sooner than my previous pace. Yet I imagine it serves as a reminder of what I am doing, and why.
To sustain the proper esteem for what imagination, creativity and story telling as a whole do for myself and the world (sometimes) I intend to commit to the state of writing, as much as the writing itself. I want to prioritize the engagement with parts of myself connected to the collective subconscious of creativity that everyone from Shakespeare to Shatner has committed themself to in one way or another in pursuit of their version of art.
I always respected this engagement–counted myself fortunate that I possess sufficient abilities to make use of it the way I do. Yet in previous years I saw it perhaps as a sacred vehicle by which I could arrive at a destination of story craft–whereas now I intend to treat it more as a sacred cottage…stationary, familiar, powerful in its own right even if there is eventually a world beyond it.
An aspiration to “stay a while,” if you will, but not dragging my feet and procrastinating on the latest project.
I do this in my theatre life all the time. 90% of being in a production is process, hopefully leading to an exhilarating but brief presentation of the accumulated result to the world. I am an actor that loves to rehearse a lot, and would hate to go on stage with inadequate rehearsal behind me. (Which on occasion I have had to do, and would be happy never to do again….)
Not sure why I have never come to the same conclusion about the process of writing. Perhaps because theatre is communal and I have no choice, while writing is solitary and I can get ahead of myself.
Whatever your passion projects are, I encourage you to join me in a more intentional submersion into process itself.
What is your process?
Ty Unglebower 