Creative Energy: Renewable, but not Limitless

First, apologies for my absence and for missing the later half of the Rule of Three Blogfest. I had an unexpected interruption to my internet access which made finishing it pretty much impossible. I will try to post a conclusion to it this Friday. I don't want to leave the story hanging especially since I know that some of you were enjoying it. Though I confess, my heart isn't in this one and I'm still not sure how to end it.

I've really been suffering lately from a huge slump in my creativity as far as my writing goes. And I've finally made the tough decision to acknowledge what was draining my creativity away and to do something about it.

Back in June for Alex's It's All Fun and Games blogfest I mentioned that I've been playing The Lord of the Rings Online for over 2 years, after having gotten hooked on MMORPGs a couple of years before that. One of the things that I loved about LOTRO was the large community of extremely creative individuals that I became involved in on the server Landroval. Landroval was the unofficial Role Playing server and there was always a lot going on. It wasn't long before I got caught up in the world of RP and exploring the depths and corners of J.R.R. Tolkien's lore through my characters. I learned A LOT about Middle-earth during my time in LOTRO and became something of an expert on Tolkien's Elves. I even got into the habit of hosting somewhat involved RP events open to the whole server.

Performing the Music of the Ainur

And then there was the music. You see, LOTRO has this unique system that allows you to use 9 different in game instruments to play music. You can freestyle it manually through the buttons on your keyboard, or you can create special musical notation files (abc files) that allow you to play complex pieces of music in sync with other players. Over the past two years my husband and I have become experts at creating these files (which involves maneuvering the music around to make it work within the musical limitations of the game) and have run our own band doing regular concerts. And, I must say, we were awesome at it. We could take any piece of music out there (in midi form) and convert it into a fantastic sounding abc in game. I converted everything from Beethoven to the Beatles to (one of my most recent songs that I'm uber proud of) Time Warp from Rocky Horror. I converted the Nutcracker Suite and it was amazing. I converted most of Carmina Burana and used that, along with other music, to recreate the story of the creation of the world of Arda (what Middle-earth is only part of) for a special performance in game. It was the most amazing thing I've ever done.

That was in September. And it dawned on me that I was pouring so much of my creative energy into LOTRO and its lore and music that I barely had any left over for my writing.

Because, my friends, creative energy is not limitless. I think sometimes we tend to think it should be. After all, creativity is just this ephemeral thing. It's just ideas. But it's not just ideas. All those stupid people who are always asking authors where they get their ideas from are getting it wrong. EVERYONE has ideas. Every single person. People have ideas about all sorts of things all the time. But a writer, a story teller, is someone who takes an idea and makes something real out of it. We take a thought and make it into a story. We are craftsmen and artists and we have to apply massive amounts of energy to our work to make it into something concrete and lasting.

It takes a lot of work to write a story. And you have to be careful how you use your creative energy, because it can so easily be used up on things that are not as important. Like blogfests and challenges and fanfiction and role playing events and music that only exists in a virtual game world.

I've loved LOTRO and the people I've known there and the experiences I've had and the amazing things I've accomplished. I think that I've been a positive force there. I know I've given a lot of myself into that game. But I can't do both. I can't be Fionnuala the Minstrel and Sarah the Author. I don't have enough creative energy for both and I'm no longer afraid to admit that. I realized that I had to choose between them.

Farewell, Middle-earth

I will miss Fionnuala the Minstrel and I'll always be grateful for the time spent in that community. The people I met in LOTRO will probably never know how grateful I am to them for all the support and encouragement I've received over the past couple years from them. All the times when they complimented the stories I wrote about my characters and praised my music and were awed by my events. All of that is what gave me the confidence to finally, after so many years, consider taking writing seriously and make a real effort to become an author. I cannot thank them enough.


But it is time for me to focus on being Sarah the Author. There are so many stories in me. I want to tell them. I want to share them with the world. I want to finally do it. No more excuses. This is the future I want. I'm going to go make it happen.

Pushing Too Hard

I don't know what happened. One morning I just sat down and opened up my blog dashboard and my brain shut down. Have I been pushing myself too hard? Getting involved in too many things? Joining too many blogfests and challenges? Probably. It feels like the creative center of my brain just shut down. Probably from overwork. I feel like I haven't accomplished much. But when I think about it rationally, I realize that for the past several months I've been enjoying a spurt of creativity greater than any I've experienced so far in my life. Then one day it just gave out on me.

I closed down my dashboard and I've barely looked at it since. I missed Alex's blogfest. (Sorry, Alex!) And I failed to return interview questions by the date my interview was supposed to be posted. (My apologies, E.R.!) But I desperately needed to walk away for a little while. I have barely read a blog or thought about blogging for over a week and, honestly, it felt good. In hindsight I see that I was running on fumes for the first part of this month, barely getting by, not receiving the inspiration I've grown accustomed to. If I even so much as thought about my stories my brain would slow to a sluggish crawl.

I realize what a real danger pushing yourself too hard can be. Unfortunately, it's a tendency of mine. I've been pressuring my brain to come up with new ideas, new material. I've been attempting to create an entire world in my mind. I've been demanding much of my creativity, but not feeding it enough. It finally said, enough is enough.

I think this is why it's so important for writers to continually read as well. Reading feeds our creative brain. The more story it soaks up the more it understands and can produce. And thus it's important to give it a steady stream of new material. New stories, new ideas, new techniques to take in and process and add to your author's toolbox.

It's been several months since I read something new that was really good, good enough to fire my own imagination. (Though I have to admit, that last rocket boost from Lord Dunsany kept me going a good long time.) Which is probably why my creativity started to sputter and die. But recently the final book in a trilogy that I found quite fascinating finally came out and as soon as my husband was done with it I dived in. And despite its flaws, this book has been like a feast to a starving man for my imagination. Particularly since the plot happens pretty much entirely in Hell and the author spends a fair bit of time world building the various circles and regions therein. This is of interest to me because one of my novels will have large sections devoted to action happening in the underworld of my fantasy realm. I've learned a lot from this author's treatment of a similar type of landscape. The wheels of my creative brain are starting to spin again.

I was even able to open up blogger and write this post without my brain turning to goo. Though, admittedly, I feel way out of the loop now. I'm not even going to try to catch up on most of the blogs I've missed. I'm just going to look ahead and get back into the swing of things going forward. I've got blogfests to prepare for! And I've learned something from this whole experience. Don't push your imagination too hard without giving it regular meals. And take a break when you need to.

That Creative Spark

Today I'm posting for Christine Tyler's Sparkfest! She's asking the following questions:

What book made you realize you were doomed to be a writer? 

What author set off that spark of inspiration for your current Work in Progress?

Or, Is there a book or author that changed your world view?

I meant to post on multiple days this week to address the various angles of these questions, but, alas, it just didn't turn out to be practical time-wise. (It's been one of those weeks... by which I mean every week.) So instead here's one really, really long post (you've been warned) telling you everything you never thought you wanted to know about me and why I write and how I came to this point in my writing journey. It wasn't so much about a spark as it was a single glowing coal that somehow slowly spread into a bonfire. Let me tell you all about it.

From "Reader" to "Writer" to "Author"

I started, as most of us do, as a reader. My home life wasn't particularly pleasant during my childhood so I hid in books. I was a shy child who lacked any sort of self-confidence at all which meant that making friends was like one of the dangerous tasks that are always given to heroes in myths. I found it was easier to absorb myself in books. Stories and characters were my friends. But for several years worth of voracious reading it never occurred to me to turn my own hand to the craft.

It finally began, I believe, when one year in elementary school we had an exercise for Spelling that required us to write a story based on some of the words we were learning. I forget what the words were, but I wrote a silly little story about a female Indiana Jones type character and her search for an illusive artifact. I dashed it off without a thought, it was just a school assignment, but my mother enthusiastically praised my writing skills. And I realized that it had been fun. So for several years I wrote casually, just for the pleasure of it, stories which mostly were never finished. But I didn't want anyone to read them (especially the embarrassing Indiana Jones the Girl stories that were my guilty pleasure) and spent a lot of time waging a war against my mother for control of my papers. She knew most of them ended up getting thrown away and would always go through my garbage. Eventually I started tearing everything up into little pieces. Ha! Take that! Still, writing to me was just a game played by a lonely girl who wanted to forget how miserable she was. 

Then I encountered The Lord of the Rings. Those books changed my life irrevocably, and not just because they eventually led me to finding my wonderful husband. But it was upon reading them and being transformed by the magic of them, that I knew I HAD to write. It wasn't a game or a casual pastime anymore. It was a need. I was compelled to try and create an imaginary world of my own. Ah, but I had started with Tolkien and so everything I wrote and imagined was so, so very pathetic compared to that ideal. Not to mention the blatant plagarism. I was new to the fantasy genre at that point in my life and I had no idea what I was doing. I'm afraid those early stories were uncomfortably similar to LOTR, right down to having a character named Arwen. Yes. Seriously. 

But I am grateful for those days.I think all writers go through a plagiarism phase when their creative brain has been soaking up all the stories you've read for years but you haven't yet written enough to have found your own unique voice and style. So your brain resorts to recycling all the stories you've loved the most. Some authors even manage to get published during this phase, but I think it's better to work through it in private before you submit your work to publishers. I hope that all the time I spent writing Indiana Jones fanfiction and LOTR-esque imaginary world fiction has sufficed for myself. 

Still, during all this time it had never entered my mind that I could write professionally. It was all personal and private and I didn't want anyone else to know about my writing much less read it. So what was the final catalyst that made me think in terms of writing for an audience? Probably my husband. He was the first person I knew who has very similar taste in books and whose opinions I trust. (He'll probably laugh at that bit.) He took my writing seriously, encouraged but never pushed me (as my mother had), and seemed genuinely interested by my ideas. 

Even so, it took me a long time to accept all this. I made many jokes about "When I'm an international best selling author we'll be able to..." and it was funny because I was able as close to actually writing a whole book as I am to becoming a famous chef. (Read: not remotely.) I had a lot of vague, nebulous ideas floating around in my head all the time, but they just weren't coalescing into something I could feel passionate about bringing to reality.  The extra spark that finally made me think that I could, possibly, actually be an author whose books other people read came from an unexpected source. 

 

My husband had recently been on a Tim Powers binge. He read some of his books and told me about them, but I remained uninterested. Sometimes I think he takes my indifference to various things he enjoys as a personal challenge. (Am I right?) So after I refused to read Declare he took a different tactic. (I'm assuming it was deliberate anyway. I can't be sure, but he's sneaky that way.) He took out another Powers book from the library and briefly mentioned it but didn't try to push it on me. (I respond notoriously badly to anything that is pushed on me.) He just left it lying around. And of course I picked it up, because it had Anubis in the title and I am a bit obsessed with Ancient Egypt.

Now, for the record, this book is nothing like the kind of stuff that I want to write. It involves time travel and secret societies and black magic and thieves and beggars and Mamelukes and an interesting take on werewolves. It ranges from this century to  the 19th century to the 17th century and back to the 19th. Wikipedia calls it a "time travel fantasy novel" but that hardly seems a sufficient description. It's one of those books that transcends genres, while I have my sights firmly set on writing mythopoeic fantasy.

However, it set certain ideas loose in my head and it made me realize that my love of Egyptian mythology could give me a lot of great fodder for a fantasy setting. It made me aware of aspects of Egyptian religion that I hadn't known about before. And after putting in a little research, it led directly to the idea behind my WIP tentatively called The Last Light.  

Since then the ideas have been constantly inundating me and I've been collecting them and massaging them into something I think can be really amazing. I've never been so excited about writing in my life and that's why I started this blog. Not only to share my enthusiasm but to keep me from giving up. I really want to see this through. I want my stories in people's hands and I'd like it if they were willing to pay me for it too.