Creativity, The Captain of the Ship

Creativity takes a commitment. You must love it, first. Then you must indulge it, second. Then you must show up for it, and that is where the slippery slope begins. Excuses are easy. Too busy. Too tired. Too pointless. But the creativity feeds itself; that's the beauty. It generates its own energy and gives it back. I don't have to bring it anything but my attention. It surges forward. Why then do I resist it?

Today could be the beginning of change. Time is fleeting. I may be stuck but time passes anyway. Maybe my stuckness is all in my head. I tell myself there aren't enough hours in the day to get it all done. I have to negotiate with myself about myself. And in that negotiation there is little leeway. 

Ubiquitous cute cat pic.

I need to write more. I think if I did, I'd feel better. I say this, think this, yet I don't write more. My crit partner said to put a note on the frig of the thing that is troubling me most, and in a month, if it is still troubling me, then I'll know it is a real problem.

Here it is: I don't write enough. I don't allow myself to write enough. I procrastinate and think I can't do it. That it doesn't matter. But hey, I know many writers feel this way. Knowing this doesn't help.

The same crit partner told me I'm too hard on myself. I would agree. I just moved and set up a new house and resettled my family while trying to work and be a mother. But I don't like excuses. Creativity should steer the ship. To write. To live. To motivate.

Meat Grinder and Cookie Monster: Lessons of NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo (the annoying acronym for National Novel Writing Month) ended two days ago. A week before the last day, I thought I could skid to the finish. I didn't. Thanksgiving punched a hole as big as a turkey dinner in my daily word count. Full disclosure: I stopped writing the Wednesday before turkey was served and never picked my novel back up again. Just 11,500 or so from winning.

But is NaNoWriMo about winning? It's about writing, and writing isn't really about “winning” in the competitive sense. I wrote for 24 days straight, and each day I reached my word count. It wasn't easy for me. It pushed me to write more than I usually do in a day and to spend less time on making my sentences perfect. My process, so far in this noveling endeavor, has been to write as the ideas form in my mind, so my schedule might be every day or every third day. Sometimes, months go by between projects. Last month, I forced myself to write every day, including weekends, and move the story forward without looking back.

NaNo long-hand? No way.

I'm not unhappy with the product so far (vs. I am happy; I use the double-negative on purpose). I think my work is a good start, a structure. If anything, NaNo crystalized my conundrum. My writing habits have tended to evolve one way (a haphazard practice of writing when so moved), but the month showed me I could do it another way. It was harder, yet my work turned out relatively okay. Not everyone has the same experience. I asked a writing chat group what others felt about their NaNo novels, and one writer said: a pile full of crap (my words). Many writers think the idea of writing a 50K-word novel in a month produces ill-formed stories. In the throes of a bad moment or two, I could relate. Plotting has never been my weakness; selecting the words right has been. Admittedly, I wanted to run my book through a meat-grinder on a couple of nights. Or at least a chapter. A paragraph. A freakin' sentence.

However, most of the time, I was jazzed. I dealt with household/work/parenting duties during the day, and slammed out a couple thousand words between 6-10p (usually longer). Easy? No. But a foundation went up in record time for me, and once the ending is written, the book will be okay. Not a Nobel. Not a Booker. But okay. Worth the extreme schedule. It felt extreme. Hyper-focused. A little more than neurotic. Brain-freeze-y.

I ignored a lot of ordinary stuff and my pets more than usual. Piles formed. And, in a sigh of relief, I've spent the last few days focusing on the mundane. I haven't gone back to the book yet, and the guilt sets in. I've been made aware that I need to start writing every day. Probably not 2,000 words a day, because that felt a little taxing, but a couple of hours.

I'm not going to toss out a grand judgment on the value of NaNoWriMo. A couple of my “buddies” (virtual writing friends on the site) exceeded their goals in handy fashion. A fellow friend from Texas wrote 100K before I'd landed on Day 24 with my paltry 38,500. I'll never be that guy, and I'm okay not being a word monster (cookie monster, maybe). I produce what I produce and keep going. Nothing I write is “wrong” – it is just written. Maybe someone will read it. Maybe not.

The point of the exercise is to get into a routine. Allow yourself (myself) the time to do the work. It is work. The drafting, the editing, the rewriting, the proofing. It is a job. And if you want to make a living as a writer, you must do the work. Who am I trying to convince? You or me?

Intellectual Property Mashup

The internet is a black hole for artists. It's a copyright Bermuda Triangle.

This is such a convoluted topic, I'm almost too wary (and weary) to tackle it. Don't take any of my opinions as legal advice. If you, as a creative person, fear someone "stealing" your work, then take advantage of all your legal avenues to prevent it.

Here's my take: Once I put something out there, it's out there. I hope no one uses my work for profit without my consent, but there's no way in hell I'm gonna know every infraction. I do know some. I have a Google Alert set up for my book title. More times this year than I care to remember (probably six?), an alert has popped into my email box informing me that my book is downloadable for free on a site that doesn't have permission to distribute it for free.

It used to irk me. Now, I figure, maybe a few people will read it and like it enough that they'll actually buy something else I've written (or will write).

My house sits on a large lot. At one corner, three neighbors, whom I've yet to meet, place their trash on the very edge of my property for pickup each week. At first, this irked me, just like the free downloads. Now I see that it doesn't really harm me much. I've even thought about building an aesthetically pleasing trash bin for them to use. It's just a matter of being neighborly, in a way.

Are those free download sites making a killing off my download? Selling ads as an aggregator? I doubt it, but I don't know. Frankly, it doesn't harm me much. Or at least, if it does, I don't feel it directly. I worry sometimes when I find things on the internet that I want to use but can't find a way to properly credit the creator. It's not easy to know who created what online.

But my creative work is my work. I put hours and worry into it. I'm not going to give it away outright. Far from it. I'd like to make more money from it, but doing so isn't easy. My advice: Do what you can and when you can to keep your work protected. Then, let it go. It's going to be out there whether you double-down on surveillance or not.

For an overview of copyright issues for writers, see this post by Writer's Digest.