 Sometimes at events, I get asked what I do when I have writer’s block, and I tell them I have two answers: one helpful and one totally unhelpful. The unhelpful answer is that I don’t get writer’s block anymore, or at least I haven’t gotten it in the past five to ten years. The helpful answer, however, is that one of the reasons I don’t get writer’s block anymore is because I’ve accumulated so many tips and tricks over the years I’ve been studying writing that whenever I’m faced with the blank page, I have a tool to help me deal with whatever is stymying me at the time. An exercise. A map. A craft book. Something.
I do think writer’s block is real, and I don’t think it necessarily has to do with how many tips and tricks you have or how long you’ve been doing this or how skilled you are, but perhaps with any number of other factors, including emotional, psychological, or situational ones. But as I haven't experienced this for a very long time, I don't think I'm quite the right person or in quite the right place to discuss it here. I can, however, share some of the tricks I use when I’m stuck on a scene, or a chapter, or a character, when I’m having trouble figuring out what comes next, what turn to take, or how to approach something. I wish I could remember where I discovered this tool so I could credit it properly, but if anyone knows, please let me know (I’m on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook) so I can edit this post! This is one of those easy tricks. No need for charts or graphs. Just a blank space and something to write with. And when you’re stuck, just make a list of 10 things. 10 things your character could do in this situation. 10 things they could be feeling. 10 motivations they might have. 10 potential sources of conflict. 10 places this scene could go. Start with whatever comes to mind. Usually, these are the most obvious answers and the easiest ones to come up with. Let’s say your character needs to get into a locked building. How are they going to do it? They could: 1) bribe someone to open it for them, 2) steal the keys, 3) break a window… But once you’ve exhausted the obvious, it gets more difficult… and more interesting. They could: 4) come in through the sewer, 5) jam the door while someone else is opening it, 6) fake a heart attack to distract the guard, allowing their compatriots to enter… And by the time you’re near the end, you start to really stretch your imagination, coming up with wild or even irrational possibilities. They could: 7) buy the building and demolish one of its walls, 8) impersonate a guard or other person who has access to the building, 9) hire a lockpick who might very well double-cross them… The goal of this exercise is to exhaust the boring, uninspired possibilities of a particular problem and to challenge yourself to come up with something unexpected or nuanced or compelling that you wouldn’t have otherwise thought of. Not all of your answers have to be workable. In general, 1-3 will be unimaginative, and 8-10 will be preposterous, but this is, I think, a good thing. Because giving yourself the freedom to write down all the outlandish things that could happen allows you to stumble inadvertently upon the things that are believable or interesting or surprising, often somewhere between 4-7, that will help you get unstuck. I use this trick all the time. It’s great for when I’m not sure what would happen next, or when I’m unclear about what a character is feeling at a pivotal moment, or how to clamber over some narrative obstacle I’ve set up for myself. It gets me out of my own head, and it gets me thinking beyond things that have to make sense to things that could feel right or true for the story. And whenever I’m done with my list, I always have something new to try, and even if I don’t end up going with one of my 10 things, I’ve started writing again, and that’s a win. Next week: BOOKS ON CRAFT. One of my cousins has been working on and off on a musical for a few years, and this holiday season I bought him two of my absolute all-time favorite books on writing. Do you have craft resources that you go to time and time again? What books do you consult over and over? Whose sage advice always seems relevant? Let’s peruse some resources next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Enjoy yourself. <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  When I’m on deadline, I have a tendency to work myself into the ground. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that my process is naturally slow. From that two-year percolation period before I ever write a word to the half hour I will spend writing and rewriting and rewriting a single paragraph because it needs to have the exact right rhythm, it just… takes… time. So when I have a deadline to meet, I am almost constantly worried that I won’t get my manuscript done in time (I often lose sleep over it, which is the opposite of helpful). Do you know that high-pitched ringing, that eeeeeeee, that you sometimes hear when there’s some kind of electronic malfunction going on somewhere? Well, that’s my brain on deadline.
Anyway, this is on top of the fact that I’m also kind of obsessed with work. I was that kid who got straight As in high school (and one B+ in college that haunts me to this day). I love discipline and determination and chipping away at something day after day until it’s done. It makes me feel accomplished and fulfilled, and when I’ve got a task to do at a job I love, I can’t seem to stop myself. All of this to say that when I’m on deadline, I’m stressed out and I work all the time and even though writing occupies this space in my soul that cannot be filled by anything else, I am pretty miserable most of the time. Which brings me, finally, to the topic of this week’s Work and Process: art and suffering. Art is difficult. It’s hard trying to make something new or true or that contributes something to the world. It’s hard holding an entire world in your heart. It’s hard taking some of yourself and packing it into three hundred pages or a sculpture or a song and sending it out the door for strangers to review and critique and judge. It’s hard putting a dollar amount on something that, to you, is invaluable, because it comes out of years of experience and thought and joy and maybe pain. Art is hard. (But I think it would be a mistake to say it’s harder than other work. There are all sorts of demands on people in other professions, and the demands of being an artist aren’t by their nature more important or more intense or more anything than the demands of any other job. I’m just not super interested in romanticizing or elevating the role and the pains of the artist over the roles and pains of other careers.) Still. It is hard. Maybe because there’s no objective rubric for success as an artist? You could make a lot of money, but that doesn’t necessarily make you a good artist. Conversely, you could be making something really and truly beautiful or transcendent or paradigm-shifting, and you might not be able to keep the lights on because no one’s buying your work. Maybe we talk about how hard we work or how much our art costs us because we equate hard work and pain with value. If it takes so long or so much to do something, then it must be worthwhile, right? Maybe we cling to and display our suffering because if we hurt so much, then it must be for a good reason. Right? I was watching the second season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, an award-winning original series on Amazon, a couple months ago. I have criticisms of the show, but in general, I do find the banter captivating and the acting compelling and the costume design totally enthralling. But there was this one storyline in Season 2 that made me want to throw a chair. It plays out in a number of ways, but here’s a telling example of how it shows up: In Episode 7, the titular character, Mrs. Maisel, charms her way into the studio of a very fancy, often inebriated, notably secretive artist, Declan Howell, who is rumored to have painted something so beautiful, he never shows it to anyone. Quite taken with Mrs. Maisel, however, he invites her behind a hidden door where, voila!, this most beautiful piece of art is displayed. He calls it “perfect” and “the greatest thing I’ve ever made in my lifetime.” We, the audience, never get to see the art, which I think is a great choice, actually, but we are treated to this story about both the art and the artist: DH: This was going to hang in my home. When I had a home. And a family. I had that life. This was… this was going to go there. But that was then. And this is now. I will never have that life. MM: Now wait… DH: I’m not trying to spin a melodrama. I’m being very realistic. The chance for that life is gone. MM: That’s ridiculous. DH: It’ll never happen because everything I have, I put into that [painting]. Nothing left. MM: I think that’s very sad. DH: Well, that’s the way it is. If you… if you want to do something great, if you want to take something as far as it’ll go, you… you can’t have everything. You lose family. A sense of home. But then… look at what exists. In other words, he sacrificed everything to create this exquisite, magnificently beautiful piece of art. No family. No home. No friends (I’m assuming). No joy. That, he is saying, is the tradeoff. That is the cost of art. THe chance at a well-rounded, fulfilling life. Later in the season, there are a couple other events that present this choice between art and happiness, and they all say the same thing: You can be great, but you have to do it alone. You can make great art, but you cannot live a satisfying life while doing it. To make great art, the show seems to say, you have to suffer. Where did this idea come from? This trope of the tortured artist? This cultural narrative we tell over and over again, that art must come at the expense of joy? That genius is the work of pain? Was it Hemingway and his drinking habits? Plath, who died by suicide? Was it Van Gogh (Even though I’ve read that he wouldn’t work when he was ill? Couldn’t produce the works of art we so admire and revere?), who famously cut off his own ear? Why, for something to be good or worthwhile, does someone have to be in pain? I find myself buying into this narrative, this myth, too, to varying extents. Look at how hard I work! Look at how much sleep I lose! Look at how miserable I am! That means I’m doing something important! But as much as I want to be acknowledged (by myself, I think, as much as others) for my hard work, this equation of suffering → art is one that I want to resist. Suffering can be a part of art, sure. I think there’s too much suffering in life (and human history) for it not to be. Huge parts of The Reader Trilogy are concerned with loss, pain, trauma, grief, and I think these aspects of suffering are integral to the project. But suffering should not be the price we pay for our creativity. Something beautiful or valuable or genius should not have to come at the cost of our happiness, health, and general well-being. Art should not always have to be borne of pain or misery. Rather, I would like to lean in to the idea that art can come out of balance, safety, security. Virginia Woolf (who, like Plath and many others, also died by suicide) wrote that in order to make art, a woman requires five hundred pounds and a room of her own, or, the space to create and the ability to pay the bills for that space. She doesn’t require agony. She requires security and a place to work without being interrupted. Similarly, I’ve found that I do my best work, I am at my most productive and my most creative, not when I can’t sleep or when I’m sad, or isolated, or anxious, or unwell, but when I’m functioning, and my basic needs are taken care of, and I have healthy relationships with myself and with other people. I don’t think my creative muse actually wants me hurting or incapacitated. She wants me to show up every day with a clear mind and a healthy body, ready to work. Hardship may be unavoidable--we do live in the world, after all, with other people--and I think it can or perhaps even should, to some degree, influence what we create, but I don’t want to believe that it has to be part of the creative process. I don’t want to believe that suffering is this cost, this toll, this price, that artists must pay in order to make something great. I want to stop glorifying the trope of the tortured artist, because I don’t want our artists and our geniuses and our creative people to have to be in pain for us to reap the rewards of their creativity. I want to continue working on changing the way I think about myself and my work and my process, so that I can have a healthier relationship to my art and develop more sustainable practices, because this is something I love, and I want to keep doing it for as long as I can. Next week: 10 THINGS. I very rarely get completely stuck on a scene, chapter, or project, and that’s probably for a number of reasons, including my stupid ambition or my belief in revision, but it’s also because a few years ago I stumbled upon this one trick that helps me get through most of my everyday quandaries. Lemme tell you about it next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Stay gold. <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  During Week 5, I mentioned that I am a structure writer--I conceive of my projects first by their shape and only secondarily by their themes, characters, and plots. I think this is connected to the fact that I am a visual thinker. I have to see something to grasp it. This means I print out my drafts so I can view an entire page as I edit it. I make spreadsheets for my revision plans. I lay out my plots with index cards and sticky notes so I can take in the whole complex thing in a single glance. (I wonder if this means I’m also a tactile thinker, since I prefer working with objects that I can physically move around? Perhaps that's a meditation for another Work and Process!) Being a visual thinker also means that I incorporate a lot of maps and charts into my revision process. After I completed one of the many drafts of The Reader, for example, I charted the page count by chapter, like so (minor spoilers if you read the chapter titles):  Along one axis, I listed all the chapters, including the legends we hear from the narrator and the passages Sefia reads in the books. Along the other, I tabulated the number of pages in each chapter, color-coded according to which character my close third-person narrator was focused on at the time. With my book laid out this way, I could see which chapters were extravagantly long and which which were skeletally short, indicating pretty clearly where I needed to examine my scenes for excess description, dialogue, or action, like Chapter 11, Chapter 15, and Chapter 28, which all had page counts well above the others. Color-coding each chapter by point-of-view character (at least, roughly--there are some chapters in there that are told from other perspectives) also allowed me to see the distribution of story lines across the whole book and make sure they were evenly woven together (mostly!). Or, in 2014, I was in the middle of the revision round of Pitch Wars, an online contest where unagented writers work one-on-one with more established authors, editors, and other industry professionals to revise their manuscripts, after which pitches and first pages are posted online for agents to review and request, if they so choose. I was struggling with the pacing, the forward movement, the ebbs and flows of tension and action, but I couldn’t figure out exactly where and how I needed to revise, so I made the following chart::  Again, I listed all the chapters. Then, I marked each chapter with a color: blue for a chapter primarily focused on talking, red for a chapter primarily focused on action.
These talking/action categories were something I came up with because I could feel most of the chapters pulling in one direction or another, but I don’t think they’re particularly insightful classifications. Talking chapters were dialogue-heavy. The characters were discussing what had just happened to them, usually in the previous chapter, making plans for what to do next, or using words to try to achieve their goals. Action chapters tended to be hikes, fights, explorations, or escapes--scenes where the characters were doing more than they were thinking or talking. In the years since I came up with this tool, though, I’ve also learned about scene/sequel patterns, which group scenes in a more thorough, purposeful way, but at the time I didn’t have that language or those organizing principles, so, well… talking/action it was! And, importantly, seeing my book laid out this way helped me to pinpoint areas that were just too conversation-heavy, like Chapters 12-14, Chapters 22-The Place of the Fleshless, and Chapter 27-29. In general, these are chapters where the characters were discussing what had just happened to them, making plans for what to do next, or using words to try to achieve their goals. So I went back in, to those blocks where three or more chapters were conversation-centered, and I revised them to cut the extended dialogue pieces, add more knife fights, and turn those blue chapters red! Ultimately, I love shapes and structures, but sometimes I need a little help to understand what I’m doing and how to do it better, which means I have more charts and things to share with you soon! “Maps” will be a recurring topic on Work and Process, as I reveal how I approach other aspects of storytelling, such as stakes, the hero’s journey, and telling a story with multiple points of view. Until next time, fellow storytellers and cartographers. Next week: ART AND SUFFERING. I think it’s hard being an artist for a number of reasons. Putting your dreams and your heart out there for the consuming public. Carrying worlds inside you. Forcing and contorting your process into weird and painful shapes in order to meet your deadlines. But, next week, I’d like to push back against this idea that artists necessarily have to suffer for their art. Necessarily have to be alone. Necessarily have to be in pain in order to make something great. Dispel some myths with me next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Abracadabra! <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  I make no secret of my unabashed love of revision. It’s my favorite part of the writing process, when I have the basic shape of the project and can finally see where it needs to be chipped away, added to, refined, and polished. I am happiest when I’m dismantling pieces of a book that aren’t working or spending half an hour picking out the exact right metaphor, rhythm, syntax for a single paragraph.
I came to my adoration of revision early in my study of craft, when I was at UC Santa Cruz. In my freshman writing seminar, we were required to produce a 20-page research paper on one of our readings. It was hard. I don’t think any of us had written anything that long and academically rigorous before, so we were all struggling, and about halfway through the quarter, after we’d turned in drafts of our ragged, pitiful attempts, my instructor said something that made me totally rethink the way I approached writing. Revision, she said, is re-envisioning. It seems so simple, after the fact, but at the time, it completely blew my mind. Revision is envisioning your project in a new way. Coming at it from a new angle. Seeing what else it could be. Approaching it from the perspective of knowing that you can tear down whatever you want because you can always make it better, make it whatever it was supposed to be from the beginning, only you couldn’t see it at the time. It felt freeing, knowing that I wasn’t beholden to the words I’d already written, to know that I could delete them and rework them and write new ones, better ones, ones that were truer or more beautiful. What’s so scary about that process is, I think, the feeling like if you have no limits on what you can delete and deconstruct, there’s the very real possibility that you can mess up all the hard work you’ve already done. But I learned something else my freshman year of undergrad, and it was actually in the same quarter, during my Introduction to Creative Writing course. We had a guest speaker (I wish I could remember who, but I’ve since lost my notes from those classes), who came in to talk to us about her books and her process, and she told us that all her second drafts were monstrous. But that’s okay! she said. Let them be monstrous. I remember sitting in that small lecture room, feeling like everything had changed for me… again. Because this was a new freedom, too. The freedom to write something bad. Something ugly. Something flawed and messy and misshapen. To know that I could write long, thick arms of subplots that would unbalance the whole narrative and to know that that was okay because I could always reshape them later. I could always cut them entirely, if I needed to. I could remove huge chunks of story, leaving a project looking skeletal and half-lumbering toward its ending, and in the end, the story would not only survive, but it might just be better for it. (Spoilers for The Reader below.) In The Reader Trilogy, for example, for a very long time, up until the 30th draft or so, Nin was supposed to live. Sefia found her in the Guard’s prison, broke her out, and ran away with her into the Delienean woodland, where Nin, having had enough of Sefia’s family’s hijinks, abandoned her. I still love that plot, because it shows how complicated Nin is. She still loves Sefia, but because of her involvement with Sefia’s family, she’s lost her job, her freedom, her sense of self… and by the time Sefia frees her, she’s just… had enough. She sees Sefia’s okay with Archer, and she makes a choice for self-preservation rather than for love and loyalty. The problem was that the ending of The Reader was so much better if Nin died. If Sefia saw Nin die. If the loss of one more person in her life tipped her over the edge into the person she had to become. So I killed Nin, and I killed this beautiful nuanced subplot, and I didn’t look back. Because it made the story stronger. Revision is re-envisioning. Let it be monstrous. These two concepts not only gave me freedom, they made me brave. I could try things that were risky (and you know how much I love risky), that could damage weeks or months of work… or that could bring everything together in a way both unexpected and inevitable. I could abandon storylines. I could create or destroy characters. I could chop entire chapters if I had to. I could be bold. Because with revision, I could do anything. Next week: MAPS & PACING. A couple weeks ago, I mentioned that I am a structure writer. I have to grasp the structure of a project to really understand it. I think that’s because I am by nature a visual thinker. Which means that when I’m working on a project, I make lots and lots of maps. Since this is a craft blog series, I’d like to share some of them with you, in case they help you in your work and process as well, starting next week with a pacing map I made while I was revising The Reader. Let’s forge ahead next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. In the words of author Chuck Wendig, art harder. <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  When I was studying to become a teacher back in 2011-2012, I came across this concept that completely changed my thinking about education: the zone of proximal development. It’s the space between what you can do right now and what you can’t do yet, a space that you can cross but only with help. In education, you want to design lessons that sit in that zone of proximal development, challenging students to step up their current skills while providing the support they need so they don’t get discouraged. I loved this. It encompassed so much of what I already adored about learning but had never articulated before: the challenge, the satisfaction of success, the desire for new challenges and new successes.
But it wasn’t until a few years later, before I’d published a trilogy or signed with an agent or even finished a novel, that I realized how the zone of proximal development applied not only to my work as an educator but to my writing as well. I was working on The Reader, desperately hoping that I’d somehow be able to pull it off, that someone would want it, that someone would buy it, and it was at this vulnerable and pivotal time that I saw a live video chat with Markus Zusak, author of one of my favorite books, The Book Thief. The link to video is now broken, unfortunately, so I can’t remember exactly what he said, but what I got out of it was this: I only want to write the books that maybe I can’t write. And it was like for maybe the second time in my artistic life, I’d been seen. (The first might be that colleague I mentioned in Week 4, who told me to stick to my guns when all my other classmates were telling me to write like someone else.) Because that’s what I wanted (want) to write. Things that challenge me. Things that are juuuust out of my current reach. Things that I have to stretch and learn and grow and expand for. Things that are at the far edge of my zone of proximal development. Those are the projects that excite and invigorate me. Those are the projects that only I can write. Those are the only projects I want to write. Do you watch The Good Place? It’s a sitcom by showrunner Mike Schur (Brooklyn 99, Parks and Recreation), and the basic premise is this: The characters are dead and have been sent to a non-religious version of heaven, the Good Place, but one character doesn’t actually belong there because she's a human trash bag. While she tries to maintain her cover as a good person, she starts taking ethics lessons to become an actual good person. Hijinks ensue. The show is hilarious and uplifting, and it takes narrative risks and makes amazing plot twists, and the whole thing just feels, to me, beautifully refreshing. There’s also The Good Place: The Podcast, wherein the cast, crew, editors, designers, writers, and other people involved with the show discuss each episode, and it’s also funny and uplifting and creatively inspiring. Okay, but in case you missed it, allow me to reiterate: It’s a half-hour network TV sitcom about ethics. In the first episode of The Good Place: The Podcast, showrunner Mike Schur talks about how each episode, in addition to being funny and dynamic and narratively compelling, also explores an ethical concept, like moral particularism or utilitarianism, for example. So: jokes on jokes on jokes, plot twists, and ethics lessons in a sitcom. To me, the whole concept just feels so stupidly ambitious, and I mean that in the absolute BEST WAY. Doing something that shouldn’t work but totally (for some reason) does? And is also totally great? And maybe changes the way we think about sitcoms or network television or storytelling? Yes please. This is how I try to approach my projects, with, to quote The Good Place, “a ton of unearned confidence.” For example, The Reader is a young adult fantasy about a book within a book told in three timelines and eight perspectives. (As further evidence of my stupidity and ambition, I give you The Speaker: ten perspectives and three timelines, and one is told backwards. But let’s focus on The Reader for a second.) Should I have tackled this nonlinear, multi-perspective metafiction epic as my first novel? Or even my second? Probably not. Did I do it anyway? YOU BET I DID!* That’s because I don’t want to write things I already know I can do. Give me the stupidly ambitious. Give me the projects I maybe can’t write. Give me the distant edge of my zone of proximal development. Give me difficult and the brain-breaking and the world-expanding. I want to tackle things I haven’t mastered yet. I want to write something short! I want to master the cliffhanger chapter ending. I want to do a four-book series. A seven-book series! I want to say something about the things that are important to me, and I want that something to be thoughtful and nuanced and worth saying. I want to make people go, “That shouldn’t work but it totally (for some reason) does!” My ambition is vast. My aspirations are high. I just hope my creativity can keep up. Next week: WRITING IS REVISING. Not everyone loves revision, but it happens to be my favorite part of the writing process, and I’m so excited not only to be diving into a new batch of revisions on my current project but also to talk about how I approach revision with you! Cuddle up with your screen next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. P.S. I got to work with a puppy in my lap this week! <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings. *I mean, whether I was successful is, of course, up for debate, but even though there are things I would change or do better if I was doing it again, I feel like I did what I could with what I had at the time and I just hope to keep doing better in the future. =]  Today I’d like to start in what might seem at first glance an unlikely place: the end of The Matrix Revolutions, the third installment of The Matrix Trilogy, released in 2003. For reasons we probably don’t need to discuss here, I kind of wish The Matrix Trilogy had stopped with the first movie, but The Matrix Revolutions did teach me one thing about storytelling that’s stuck with me for over fifteen years. It’s the climactic battle between Neo and Agent Smith, in the homogeneous, greenish-hued nightmare the Matrix has become, and Smith declares that he’s seen the ending of the fighting, and it ends with Neo’s defeat. There’s a battle that probably would have been better with a good deal less flying around, and finally Neo admits, “You were right, Smith. You were always right. It was inevitable.” He lets himself be absorbed, because Neo being absorbed by Smith is the only way to defeat him.
This line is actually a reference to The Matrix Reloaded, a whole movie ago, during the first battle in which Agent Smith tries to absorb Neo, and Smith says in that sinister-but-matter-of-fact growl that probably only Hugo Weaving can pull off, “It is inevitable.” And he’s right. And the reason he’s right is because after that moment, there is only one place the story could go, only one showdown, only one way to stop him, and it all leads (at least theoretically) to this one moment, this one, inevitable conclusion where Neo lets Smith take him. But for something to feel inevitable--an ending, a plot point, an OTP--the writer has to put in a lot of work planting the seeds and training them to grow toward their target. This week, in honor of my friend Meg, one of the contributors of Writer’s Block Party, a great blog on writing and publishing, I’d like to talk about how I approach that work, at least in part. (Some hints/spoilers for The Reader Trilogy below.) First, I want to refer back to last Sunday’s post and note that I am a structure writer. I conceive of my books through the major beats or crisis points in a story and the arcs that connect them. Before I ever begin drafting, I know at least some of these points, so I can write toward them. For example, all the way back when I was first drafting The Reader, I knew these major story beats for the final book:
To have these beats feel organic (that is, unforced) and meaningful to the story, I had to start introducing them early. I think of it like planting seeds in the narrative. Start them early, keep them growing by returning to them, and have them ripe by the time the story needs them. A note: My general rule is to reference something--an arc, a plot point, a joke, a meaningful interaction--at least three times. Once to introduce it. Twice to remind the audience that it’s there and to strengthen their expectations for it. A third time for the payoff. I think The Avengers (the first one) does this particularly well with Agent Coulson’s Captain America trading cards. First, they’re a joke, poking fun at Coulson-as-fanboy, as Black Widow asks Captain America if Coulson has asked him to sign his trading cards yet. Then the joke pays off when we see Coulson describing the cards to Captain America: “It’s a vintage set... It took me a couple years to collect them all… Near mint… Slight foxing around the edges...” But the third time the cards are mentioned, their meaning has changed. It’s just after the midpoint, and Loki has escaped, Coulson has died, and the Avengers are more divided than they have ever been. Nick Fury throws the bloodied set of cards on the table, trying to motivate the Avengers to unite. As an audience, we’re fresh off Coulson’s death and we’re reminded of what a pure nerdy boy he was, how dedicated he was to the idea of the Avengers, and how much we want to see them assemble too. (Do it for Coulson, Avengers!) As I said in Week 4, one can and should, of course, break this “three times” rule if it suits the narrative, but it’s a good one to keep in mind as you’re planting the seeds for events to come. From The Reader Trilogy, let’s take “how the protagonists would defeat the Guard” as an example. A lot happens during this crisis point--magic, death, ship battles, various other shenanigans--and a lot of it involves Cannek Reed, the outlaw captain obsessed with immortality. To get him to this point, where someone so consumed with his own survival is willingly running toward his own death in the hopes of making a better world, I had to plant a lot of seeds, and I started early, in The Reader. The third time we see Captain Reed, he’s five years in the past, at the bottom of a maelstrom. This scene is actually from the end of another of his quests, one that we never get to see, but it plants two important pieces of The Reader Trilogy’s climax: an important artifact that comes into play during the final battle and how Reed is going to die. It’s the latter, knowing how he’s going to bite the bullet (so to speak), that turns Reed into the character he is, the one obsessed with conquering death. It’s the whole reason he goes to the edge of the world, where he discovers an important piece of information for the climactic battle. It’s also what drives him to search for the Trove of the King, a journey that starts in The Reader, causes his adventures to intersect with Sefia’s, and takes him all the way into The Storyteller in search of another important artifact. Every time one of these artifacts or pieces of information is mentioned, it becomes more memorable and more important--to continue the metaphor, like a vine growing through the story, toward a crisis point I knew I’d have from the beginning. In this way, these narrative vines are woven throughout the novel, hinting at events to come. Of course, I don’t plan everything. In fact, revision is one of my favorite parts of the process because it allows me to plant even more seeds (for characters or plot points I discovered as I was drafting) and train even more vines, braiding them together and tightening the narrative until (hopefully) the beats of the story flow from one to another, as inevitable as a river flowing out to sea. Next week: STUPIDLY AMBITIOUS. You might have noticed in my weekly work space photos, which are at the top of every Work and Process post, that I’m currently outlining a New New Secret Project. It’s been awesome… and so far out of my comfort zone, because I’m not an outline writer by nature, that it’s been a real challenge. But I kind of love that. Next week, I’d love to talk about challenging yourself. How do you level up your skills? When do you set new goals for yourself? What inspires you to do better, whether in concept or in process? Bring your hot beverage of choice and meet me next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Cheers. <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  Can we start today with one of my favorite poems, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot? (You can read it at The Poetry Foundation for a little lovely kick of language!) Among many other things, I love the sound of the words, how they’re strung together, their surprising harmonies, but what I’d really talk about today is what I think is the central question of the poem: How should I begin?
Prufrock starts with an invitation: “Let us go, then.” The speaker is ready to start his journey, but again and again, he hesitates, wonders, “Do I dare?” and “Do I dare?”, stops, thinks of all the inevitable conclusions to his journey, asks, again and again, how should I presume? and how should I begin? and, still, after all that (and it is a long poem), never actually begins. Sometimes, I feel like embarking on a new project can be like that. There is so much to do before you even write a word. I read. I research. I mull. I make playlists. I watch movies, TV shows, documentaries. I travel, if I can. I make notes. I build theogonies, magic systems, family trees. My friend Erin Summerill, who is perhaps the sweetest and most energetic person you’ll ever meet and also the author of the Clash of Kingdoms series, pre-writes. She recently mentioned to me that she had over 100 pages of pre-writing for a new project, absolutely putting me and my pitiful few spreadsheets and scattered notes to shame! So, with all of this research and note-taking and pre-writing to do before we ever actually make anything, how should we presume? And how should we begin? At what point do you stop studying 17th century ship battles or pause the YouTube videos on how to make a bow? When do you, unlike our dear immobile friend Prufrock, take the first step into your art? I imagine it’s different for everybody, but, in case it was helpful, I thought I’d share the two things I always need before I ever write the first words of a new project: the world and the beats. The World Although I’m not a thorough world-builder by nature, I do need to have some sense of the world of my book before I begin writing it. For me, that usually involves geography, time period (or for fantasy, analogous time period), technology (including magic, if it’s that type of story), values, some historical context, and the characters or various entities that will push or pull the story in one direction or another. When I started The Reader, for example, I had a map of the world (Kelanna), a rough technological mash-up from the 17th (ships) and 18th (guns) centuries, a magic system (Illumination), an illiterate society, and my main characters. In retrospect, I could and should have done more preliminary work on Kelanna, because as I went along, I discovered there were holes in my world, and I’d either have to stop writing to figure it out or just avoid the topic altogether. (How do Kelannans keep track of time? I still have no idea.) Many more masterful world-builders than me do this work ahead of time, and one of my goals as a writer is to develop more thorough world construction techniques. (I’m currently delving into The Planet Construction Kit, recommended by my friend, writer, and professional LARP designer, Ben “Books” Schwartz.) Because I only need the bare bones of a world before I start writing, I often start with just the bare bones, and that’s something I’d like to improve upon. The Beats Now, the one thing I absolutely have to have before beginning a new project and cannot for the life of me do without are the major story beats: the crisis points where the tension is highest or the characters have the most to lose, the turning points where the status quo changes so dramatically, it can never go back to the way it was before. (Some spoilers below.) When I started The Reader, for example, I knew:
That left a lot of story to cover in between, of course, a lot of dots to connect, but knowing these beats gave me goals to write toward and a sense of the characters’ arcs as well as the arc of the novel, and this, more than anything, is what I need to begin a project. While the world-building is certainly important and should not be dismissed, where my storytelling heart truly lies in structure. I am a structure writer. (Not to be confused with a plot or outline writer.) Structure is what excites me about a new project. Structure is what I fall in love with. I conceive of my novels by their direction, their contours and ridges, their silhouettes, their beams and bones. I understand my work by how it feels in my hands, by its framing, by what it’s going to look like against the horizon when it’s done, and that’s what drives me to take that first step into my art. To go. To dare. And disturb the universe. Next week: PLANTING THE SEEDS. For all I am a structure writer, I don’t naturally outline my projects before I begin them, and that’s because I’m also a discovery writer by nature. I love the feeling of knowing I’m writing toward something, but not knowing exactly how I’ll get there until I’m actually typing the words, until my characters are surprising me with where they want to go and what they want to say. Ever since learning this about me, my friend Meg RK has been asking how, if I don’t plot out every little bit of my novels, I can foreshadow so deeply the events to come. Well, I’m finally giving Meg her answer. Climb aboard the Foreshadowing Express with Meg and me next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Write on. <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  Since I first started studying writing seriously in 2003, when I enrolled in my first creative writing course at UC Santa Cruz, I’ve heard my fair share of prescriptive writing advice: Eschew passive voice. Vary your sentence structure. Kill your darlings. Reduce your word count by doing a global search for every “that” or “just” or instance of filtering in your manuscript and delete them all in a sudden, wild exorcism!
I’ve seen this kind of instruction doled out on Twitter, in workshops, at lectures. I’ve had rules like show, don’t tell drilled into my head until I believed they were not only true but unassailable. However, the longer I’ve done this, the more I’ve found myself repelled by rigid decrees of craft. Perhaps it’s my creative and rebellious spirit. Or perhaps I’ve just learned that all of these edicts can be good advice, but none of them work as wholesale, unbreakable writing dogma, because for every craft “rule,” it's likely that there’s a situation where you can and should break it. Adopt the passive voice when it suits the situation, narrator, or character. Hammer at a single sentence structure when writing from the perspective of an obsessive, unrelenting point-of-view. Keep your darling if it’s the beating heart of your work. Evaluate your sentences for rhythm, tone, or voice, and use every filler word with purpose. Summarize when you need a beat of exposition but a lengthy scene or description would be inconsequential to and therefore distracting from the story. To me, it all boils down to studying and improving your craft. By all means, learn the rules, why they’re there and how they work and when they’re useful (or not). Then, if need be, break them. That’s why, when I’m asked what advice I have for writers, there are really only two suggestions I think will apply, no matter the writer, no matter the journey, to anyone and everyone, and those pieces of advice go hand-in-hand. The first: always keep learning. I’m of the mind that no matter how good your craft is, no matter how much you’ve accomplished, there’s always something more to learn, something new to try. I love challenging myself in my work. The Reader had eight point-of-view characters? The Speaker had ten. The Reader had three timelines? The Speaker had three timelines and one of them was told backwards. I wrote a trilogy? Next, I’m going to try writing a standalone. My books tend to be lengthy? Next, I’m going to try writing something under 100,000 words. I feel like there’s always something I can improve on, or something I haven’t attempted yet. For me, craft is aspirational. What else can I do with the written word? How else can I tell a story? How can I get better as a writer and an artist and also as a person? Personally, I do all sorts of things to develop my craft. I read outside my genres. I take classes. I study books on writing. I comb the internet for tips and tricks. I take notes on stories I adore and dissect them bit by bit to figure out how I can write something half as good. I listen to discussions about representation. I learn about power and history and debt and colonialism and culture and oppression and people and the world. I interrogate my brilliant writer friends, trying to learn their secrets. There is a danger to never being satisfied, however. With all of that input (from teachers, books, internet, colleagues, etc.), you can easily lose your own vision, that burning flame of an idea or inspiration that first made you want to tackle this story, this poem, this piece of art. You can try to write too much like someone else and not enough like yourself. You can listen to too many other voices and not your own heart. So what you create doesn’t end up sounding like you at all, doesn’t really belong to you as the Thing That Only You Could Have Made. Which is why my second piece of advice is: stick to your guns. When I was in graduate school, I was working on this short story of deliciously experimental upside-down fairy tales. I was repeating scenes, switching settings without clear logical reasons, doubling back on my own timelines, and boy did my classmates not get it at all. I once sat through an hour-long workshop of readers telling me to write something a little less weird, a little less difficult, a little more inside-of-the-box, a little less me. After class, however, one of my colleagues came up to me in the hallway and told me I was doing things that were challenging and different and exciting. He told me not to listen to the haters. He told me to stick to my guns. So I did. And I have ever since. That’s why I write ambitious multi-POV, multi-timeline, meta-fantasy epics like The Reader Trilogy. That’s why I tackle daring projects that play with narrative structure and question how we tell stories. That’s why I’m always trying to find that Traci Chee twist and will only attempt a project if I have a clear sense of what my own personal magic can bring to it. I’m not saying that your vision or your instinct is always right. I’ve abandoned ideas I was in love with when I realized they weren’t mine to write, or that I would be taking the place of another writer who could be speaking for themselves or to their own community with more authenticity and nuance than I could ever hope to have, no matter how much I learned or researched. I’ve let go of ideas because I didn’t feel like I could bring anything new or worthwhile to them or the ongoing cultural conversation about them. I've dropped stories because they simply wouldn't work, no matter how much I revised them. That’s the learning part. Learning when you should step back. Accepting when your genius idea isn’t so genius after all. Peering into your own blind spots. Knowing when not to do something as well as when to dive into it with all you’ve got. As an artist, I try to maintain that curious and seemingly contradictory balance: being open to change and growth while, at the same time, remaining true to my vision and my voice. And: Knowing who I am as an artist while, at the same time, being ready and eager to keep learning and improving. This is all a roundabout way, I suppose, of saying that while part of Work and Process is reflection (like I’ve done these past few weeks), another part of it is craft work. In the months ahead, I’d like to share some writing advice with you, what works for or has been helpful to me, but I’m not interested in being prescriptive. I’m not interested in telling you what you can or can’t do with your own storytelling. I am, however, interested in sharing approaches to craft, techniques that I’ve found useful, perspectives on writing that I’ve incorporated into my own process. Please, adopt what’s helpful to you! Leave what isn’t. I look forward to sharing and learning with you in the weeks to come. Next week: TIME TO BEGIN. After all the thinking and the ruminating and the researching and the pondering and the percolating, when do you know it’s time to start a project? How well-developed does an idea have to be before you approach it? What do you have to know before you put the first words down on the page? How much research do you complete before writing a word? How well do you understand your world, your characters, your conflicts, themes, or plot by the time you tackle that first scene or chapter? In other words, how do you begin? Let’s do this thing next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Peace and progress. <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  I turned in a project last week, and for the first time in months, I don’t have a deadline to meet. I’m not consumed with producing words, accumulating pages, anxiously checking off chapters as I count down the days.
I mentioned this in my first post, but I have a tendency to get caught up in Doing Things. I love completing tasks, the feeling of accomplishment and the concomitant self-confidence of knowing I am A Person Who Can Get Things Done. So after I finish a project, my first instinct, of course, is to leap headfirst into a new one (like one of those long-simmering ideas I’ve had on the backburner for years). But I try not to. In fact, for a few days at least, I try not to do anything. Well, kind of. I try to practice a certain type of not-doing, of not-making, where I’m not creating things but absorbing them, where I’m more still than in movement. I’ve heard some people say that creativity is a resource, like water. You can only use so much so fast before you run out, and once that well of artistic energy is empty, it needs to refill before you can draw on it again. Other people think of creativity more like a muse with whom you’re building a relationship--I’ve heard my friend Diane Glazman, one of the best readers I’ve ever worked with, talk about her creativity this way.--and as with all relationships, it’s reciprocal. You have to care for your muse. You have to build trust. You have to show up for your art so your art will show up for you. However you think of your relationship to your creativity, I believe the idea is the same: You can’t continually take without giving back. You have to feed your muse. You have to refill your well. Perhaps, given enough time, my creativity would replenish itself naturally, through the everyday wonder of living, but at the moment, I have the privilege of writing for a living, so I’m almost constantly drawing on my artistic resources, which means that I need to find ways to refuel and recover my artistic energy when I can. To that end, I try to cultivate some rejuvenating practices, especially when I’m between projects, activities that help me to regain my artistic equilibrium, that tranquility Wordsworth says is necessary for poetry, or to collect new influences and perspectives, or to delve deeper into the things that inspire me. Here are some of those practices: Meditating. I took up meditation a couple years ago, on the advice of my acupuncturist, at a time when I’d worked myself so hard, I could have slept all day and still awoken exhausted. Since then, I haven’t always been great about doing it (especially when I need it most), but in the spirit of my word of the year (breathe), I’m trying to make meditation part of my daily practice. There’s something beautiful and focusing about it, and when I’m railing against my self-imposed inactivity, it reminds me to slow down, to take it easy, because I’m going to need this rest later. I recommend the Calm app, which features guided daily meditations as well as meditations for specific purposes, like dealing with stress or falling asleep. Observing and journaling. In addition to meditating, I’ve been trying to sit still for ten minutes a day, observing what’s going on around and inside me. What’s the character of the light today? How am I feeling? Where is my mind going when I allow it to go anywhere it wants? After sitting for a while, I usually jot down my thoughts in my journal, not for rereading later, but for the benefit of getting my thoughts and emotions outside of myself, where they don’t feel so tangled up and overwhelming. Cleaning and tidying. I suppose journaling for me feels like cleaning, like clearing the dusty corners of my mind and sweeping the floors of my heart, so I’m mentally and emotionally ready for whatever comes next. That’s also why I clean my workspace every time I turn in a project. I recycle and organize old notes. I sort my research books. I dust. I clean the slate of my desk for the next load of books, drafts, and research notes, so I can tackle my next project without clutter or baggage from the old one. Reading for pleasure. When I’m working on something, I have a hard time getting any significant pleasure reading done and I’m usually only able to get through a couple pages here and there, usually of something far outside the genre I’m working in. (When I was working on The Reader Trilogy, for example, I liked to read poetry, like Milk Carbon Black by Joan Naviyuk Kane or short story collections of adult science fiction like The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu.) So I end up doing most of my reading when I’m between projects, picking books off my shelves to settle down for hours with a long read and a cup of tea. Reading for research. I also read to research my next project. Like I said last week, my ideas need to simmer for years before I can really start working on them, and part of that process is filling myself up with influences from history and art and literature. I try to read around three books for research (depending on the length) during each break, so the ideas I find there can continue to mix and cook inside me until the next time I can look at them. Making something that isn’t at all related to writing. There’s something really restorative, I’ve found, about using my artistic energy in a different way. Drawing, music, baking, and egg-painting (some of my oft-neglected but still-enjoyable hobbies) all require a different quality of creativity than writing. It’s so refreshing to make something with a different part of my mind/heart/senses, something sweet or nourishing or beautiful that isn’t at all related to my work. Naturing. For me, there’s almost nothing as rejuvenating as being outdoors. I love the rocks and the mountains and the water and the sound of the wind in the trees, the birds in flight and the predators padding along the paths, the work of the body, the way everything tastes better with a little dirt in it, the bigness and oldness of things out there, the indifference of the wilderness and at the same time, the need for us to care for and respect it. It makes me feel small and alive and connected and vulnerable. It soothes my nerves. It wakes me up. It makes me more appreciative and more grateful. Traveling. I’m not always able to do this, but I love traveling between projects. Like getting outdoors, seeking experiences outside of my usual mental/physical/emotional space readjusts my perspective. I like seeing new places, learning new things, tasting new foods, expanding what I think of the world and how we are in it. There is so much to this planet and its creatures, and every part of it is a new inspiration, a new idea, a new ingredient, a new question, a new thing to learn and respect and value and wonder at. Museuming. In addition to travel, attending museums is a great (and often more time- and cost-effective) way to broaden my intellectual/artistic/emotional horizons. I love immersing myself in other disciplines--visual art, history, culture, science--because they offer other ways to engage with the world, other lenses with which to see what’s going on around me and what my place is. If you’re in San Francisco, I highly recommend checking out some of my favorite museums: SFMOMA, the Asian Art Museum, the DeYoung, and the Cal Academy. Fellowshipping. I’m an introvert and a workaholic by nature, so usually when I’m working, I’m working, and almost all my thought and intention is bent toward whatever story is inside of my dying to get out. But writing can be so isolating if you do it this way, and therefore lonely, stressful, and even depressing. It can be really hard holding a world inside of you, diving into the difficult emotions of your characters, navigating the intersections between art and business, and dealing with the fears of making and sharing something so intensely personal with what can seem like an indifferent or even hostile world. But the truth is we’re not alone. At least, I don’t think we don’t have to be. And for me, that alleviates the strain of pursuing a career in a creative field to connect with other writers. To commiserate. To celebrate. To brainstorm. To get out of my head and my heart and my self-doubt. During breaks, I try to reconnect with friends and fellow artists. I aim to have long, leisurely conversations, over hot beverages or on the phone, about our personal lives and what particular anxieties are plaguing us and how our art is going. And not only does this fellowship remind me that I am not alone, it also inspires me, hearing how people I love and respect and admire are going about their creative endeavors, how they’re making and rethinking and revising and pursuing things that are so beautiful and compelling and startling and new. Maybe that’s what it is, for me. Maybe that’s what I need to refill my well, to nourish my creativity, to keep doing this art thing month after month, year after year. Connection. Connection with myself, whom I can so easily lose when I’m in the middle of a story. Connection with nature. With the world. With people. A sort of reaffirming that we are here and we are here together, and there is this deep ocean of art and science and humanity and and music and culture and philosophy all around me, all the time, and nothing I make is made in isolation but wholly part of/drawn from/in conversation with this vast sea of history, and when I refill the well, I’m returning to the waters--restored, reinvigorated, replenished, and ready for the next project. Next week: WRITING ADVICE. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? What’s the worst? What rules did you hate as soon as you learned them? What rules have become so integral to your practice that you couldn’t imagine doing without them? What is the relationship between the rules of writing and artistic freedom? How do you know when to follow the rules and when to break them? Have a think with me next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Onward. <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations,, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  Where do you get your ideas? I’m asked this question a lot at events, and I never quite know what to say because the very truthful, very unhelpful answer is: everywhere.
From movies, TV shows, books, video games, walks in the woods, travels across the ocean, adventures in foreign cities, the quality of rain on the streets, conversations that last into the night, art, music, feelings. In my experience, inspiration can and does come from anywhere, from anything that strikes me, moves me, sways me from wherever I was before to who I could be. But ideas are a dime a dozen. They wink and sparkle and distract. They pile up in drawers and hard drives: ten pages, fifty, unfinished outlines, half-plotted quests, characters without stories to inhabit. Getting an idea is easy. Settling on the idea that I need to pursue, the one that haunts me, the one that I’ll keep chipping away at, even when the work is hard, even when it feels like I’m going nowhere, even when I know it would be easier to give up, that’s the real trick. Personally, I can’t figure that out without time and a little magic. You know, that magic that happens when all your inspirations and ideas get inside of you, when all the disparate sounds, textures, and flavors of your experience get shaken up in the great tumbler of your chest, fusing and combining in all sorts of unexpected ways. That’s one of the beautiful things about art, I think. That wholly individual synthesis. For me, that synthesis takes time. I’ve learned that my ideas have to percolate for years before I can even begin work on them. They’re there--I can feel them bubbling quietly in the back of my mind--but I don’t look directly at them. Maybe I’ll daydream about them as I drift off to sleep or scribble down a character name or a piece of the world-building here and there. I’ll add these things to the simmer. Continue not to look. Wait. See what sticks. The Reader Trilogy, for example, came out of a long and unlikely confluence of Things That Wouldn’t Let Me Go:
It was years of experiences. Years of ideas. An outlaw with an honor code. A magic book. A fantasy heroine that looked like me. An ending that would rip your heart out. I jotted down the first sentences of what would become The Reader in 2008. I didn’t finish the first draft until 2014, ten years after the story’s first character came to me (it was Captain Reed, if you're wondering!). I had a lot of fears while I was working on The Reader. Would I get an agent? Would it sell? Would anyone understand it? Would it find a place out there, in readers’ hearts? But the one thing I never feared was that someone would write it before I could. Because putting together these inspirations in this way? That could only be done by me, and it just took time before I figured out how to combine them, how to synthesize them with my wholly individual magic. See, I think ideas get shaken up inside you, and when they emerge again, at your fingertips, they’re something totally new, something only you could have made. Is this process slow? Oh yeah. At any given time, I only have two or three books inside me: the one I’m actively working on; the one that’s slowly taking shape, like some creature out of the primordial ooze; and a flicker of an idea that’s little more than a premise (or sometimes not even that). But for me, these slow-cooker ideas are the only ones worth pursuing. Actually, I think they’re the only ideas I can pursue, the only ones that I can sustain over the year or three or ten that it will take to bring them into the world. It’s the ideas haunt me, before I’ve even started working on them, that are the ones I know I can make into books. My current project, for example, has been floating inside me, like wisps of cloud, for years. I remember capturing the first piece of it when I was twelve years old, even though I didn’t start serious research on it until 2015, and the story didn’t coalesce until 2018, when I finally figured out how to write it in the way only I could. Of course, it probably doesn’t work this way for everyone. Other people have six novel ideas cooking at once. Other people can write two or three or five books in a year. In the past, I’ve wondered what was wrong with me. Why couldn’t I produce like that? What if I only had one story in me to tell? Why am I so slow? But the more I come to understand my process, the gentler I am with myself. Because this is my process--this is how the work gets done, how the art gets made--at least for now, and I’m learning to embrace it. If you’re like me, and you’re reading this, I hope it gives you a little more patience with yourself and your muse. I hope you believe in the magic inside of you, the experience and perspective that only you can fuse into something wholly and beautifully new. I hope you write the stories that won’t let you go, and make the things that only you can make. Next week: REFILLING THE WELL. I just turned in a project, and I’m in desperate need of a brain break! What do you do to recover your creative energy? Do you have any restorative practices that keep you from burnout? Where do you go to feed your muse? What rejuvenates you as an artist? How do you refuel yourself between projects? Come sit with me next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. As my friend Steve Stormoen, author of The Pros comics says, love and solidarity. <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings/examinations/meanderings/discoveries/bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings. |
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