Creating Off Course

tyunglebower ♦ March 20, 2024 ♦ Leave a comment

It’s important to keep writing through some difficulty. While it is no sin to start many writing projects never to finish them, if you want to get anywhere in regards to a work that others can enjoy and possibly pay for, you obviously have to finish. And finishing means, as I said, a good amount of pushing through when it is not exciting.

To be blunt, writing, even if you love it, can be a pain in the ass. But a pain in the ass a writer must be willing to face, I dare say, more often than flee.

Add to this my personal preference to not abandon something once I have started, and you get someone who avoids project hopping as though it were a stinging insect buzzing around his thoughts.

I was well into adulthood before I even allowed myself to DNF a crappy book I was reading.

All that praise for consistently and preference aside, there comes a time when we creatives have to be flexible.

I don’t mean to be willing to take a plot in an unexpected direction, or compose a song that is more upbeat than one initially intended. This is flexibility within a project, and it is crucial to creativity of all kinds. The flexibility I am referring to here is a flexibility of one’s plans–one’s overall focus.

This is where finishing what I start comes in.

I have only ever “iced” two novels in my life. Both times it was only after much deep consideration as to whether they were going anywhere, and whether I was in the head space to complete them. I stand by my choices to back away from those projects, one of which I had spent years working on. Yet the choice bugs me to this day in the back of my mind because, again, if I say I am going to do something, I do everything I can to do it.

Every now and then, though, it is either clear that something is not working and will never work, such as the two shelved novels I have mentioned. But on occasion, a new idea begins to eclipse your current idea for a project, and you cannot ignore it.

Well, I don’t think one should ignore it, when it speaks loudly and regularly every day to a creative.

That is what is happening to me for the moment. And while I cannot fully express the nature of the idea/project that seems to be eclipsing some of my plans for the next year or so, I can say that to pursue it with the vigor it deserves would (probably) mean putting some of my other writing plans on hold. (In this case, not a full cancellation though.)

This is a bit of a tight rope for someone like me. If I am not careful, I could be as I was during my childhood and teen years, which is running this way and that starting many things that pooped into my head finishing none of them. Now I’ll repeat what I said at the start of this post; if you are a writer who gets joy from writing the beginning of something and never ending it, than this is better than not writing at all. Goals vary. Speaking for myself however, I know that if I am to ever present a fully formed project to the world for its enjoyment, I have to err on the side of stubborn and finish what I begin.

That is why, as with the iced novels I mentioned above, I maintain even now some degree of regret for starting something I could not finish.

However, to be a creative is not only hard work and no play. If we are not open to the playing our imaginations are attempting to conduct with us, we lose a large portion of what it is to be creative in the first place. Work and plans are eventually required for most of us, but if we rely too heavily on them, adhere with a rigid tenacity to a previously announced plan at the expense of all other things, we kill the spontaneity that drives art. I do believe we can lose that within us if we entirely ignore it for too long.

You will again have to forgive me for my lack of specificity at this time. I am only just pulling the eclipsing idea together myself. No doubt it is a little frustrating, a little off putting, especially for an Autistic dude who likes to live on plans. Yet if this new potential project accomplishes what I hope to accomplish for the people I hope to reach, it will be worth a delay of some of my other things.

Indeed, it may not even require a delay at all. I will not know that for a while yet. Yet to paraphrase Hamlet, “the willingness is all.” And I am willing this year to be taken somewhere else in my writing than I set out for at the start.

I hope if you are an artist of some kind, you too are willing to be taken off course for a while, if a siren song calls to you. Unlike that Greek myth though, it need not end in tragedy on the rocks.