January Books: 3/4 (Five Golden Wings)
Hi ho, squiders, you’ll be happy to know I haven’t touched video games since my post last Thursday, which follows established trends and is not surprising in the least.
I wish I could say I was getting other things done, but aside from a bit of painting and some work on my class, most of my time is still being spent on Scouting work, so I may need to think about my expectations on myself until we’re past this point of the process.
Last week I finished reading Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. It’s one of the writing books I inherited from my mother and was published in 1986. It consists of a series of short chapters talking about different aspects of writing, but unlike many of the writing books I’ve picked up recently, it was about the feeling of writing. The vibes. The act of being creative and being open to the world around you.
It felt, to be honest, like a breath of fresh air.
Someone in one of my writing groups recently expressed how writing to publish changed their whole outlook on writing, and how she wished in many ways she could go back to that earlier creative work, where the creative part was the point. Writing without worrying if it was any good, if the plot made any sense, if it was marketable.
And she’s 100% right. I feel like many writers–and creative people in general–go through a process. They start creating as children or young adults for the love of the craft, for the fun of it. But people reach a point where they feel like they should do something with it, and everything changes. And as far as I can tell, you can’t really go back to before you knew about story structure and rising arcs. Some innocence has been lost.
And many people give up on their creativity altogether.
Something to think about. Is there a way to reclaim more of that freedom that I used to have? Some way to find joy in the art of writing without wondering if it’s any good? I’d like to restart the morning pages and see if that helps, though thus far I haven’t managed to get them back into my routine. Hopefully by the end of the month.
Sometimes I wonder if I should just write the most inane, self-fulfilling story I can manage, but I do worry that I wouldn’t be able to manage it anymore, that my brain will tell me I’m wasting time I could be spending on more “serious” projects, or that I’ll try to self-correct in the middle.
On a semi-related note, the friend who I sent my November story to (if you recall, I started a new story for November to write just to write, with mixed results) said it was super intriguing, and how mad she was that the story wasn’t done. That was nice to hear! So I’ve added the story into my project list for the year, to return to when it makes sense.
But yeah, I don’t know. It feels like I should be getting more done, that I’m letting my career slide, that forward progress must be made. But maybe I do need to spend more time with just creating to create.
I just wish I was as good at it as I used to be.
See you next week, squiders!
