Themeattics

It’s a lack of clarity that creates chaos and frustration. Those emotions are poison to any living goal.

Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free

It’s been one of those weeks.

You know the kind. Sunday night you go to bed ready for the morning, head full of plans and the energy to hit the day running. You wake up just as ready, just as able, and run headlong into a brick wall. The things you wanted to move don’t budge, the plans you made do their best impression of Lot’s wife, and that energy winds up nothing more than lightning in a bottle with no outlet to vent it.

Anecdotal, of course, but I think there’s little worse for a creative person than to spend hours attempting to create and making nothing of value. Who knows how many thousands of words I churned out for this new book’s outline only to toss them. Nothing is sticking, nothing is flowing. Nothing is inspired.

Maybe that’s what I get for talking shit about the Muses. Or maybe, just maybe, this is something I should have expected. As I mentioned in my last post, I’m not an outliner when it comes to my writing. This process is new and, now that I’m eyeing something far grander than my current novel, I’m finding it hard to stop my mind from crawling out across all the threads. The book starts at X time, but the history of the continent goes all the way back to Y and the continent has pockets that trace their lineage and culture back to Z. Regions, peoples, cultures – building these sorts of worlds is like solving linear algebra with no defined variable.

So, what do I do with that? Well, I can tell you what I’m not doing. I’m not backing out of the outlining process. If it’s shown me anything it’s that I don’t know nearly enough about the world I’m trying to build or the characters that live in it. That’s no way to write, not if I’m trying to make anything worth reading. I’ve been treating this as if it’s some sort of chicken-and-egg problem – I can’t build this character because I don’t know about the place he’s from, but I can’t visualize the place without conceptualizing the character, so which do I do first? I don’t know about the places around that place either or the history of the region or blah blah blah. Circular reasoning all around and I’ve gone nowhere. The answer itself is pretty clear, the issue is forcing myself to do it.

I need to choose, and let me tell you, I am horrible at making decisions with no restriction. It’s a problem, particularly when the choices are near limitless. Most of the time I try to pawn those kinds of things off. I hate picking where or what to eat, what to watch with others, what to do with unscheduled time. Hell, I can barely pick my own characters in fighting games, just ask a few of my friends who I spam choices to all the time. It’s bad.

Honestly, until that last paragraph I hadn’t really pinpointed the source of my frustration, but I think that might be it. Inaction. I’m always on my soapbox about the need for discipline, but what is discipline without action? They’re parts of a whole, which makes this past week an exercise in poor discipline. No wonder I’ve been grumpy.

Action, then. Choosing. Stop chasing my tail and focus. Let the conceptualizing of one part breed ideas for the rest, note them, but do not chase. Not yet. Not until I can look at this one item and say, yes, this make sense. This not only fits in a world, but its presence lends character to that world. This gives color and shape to the story influences the things around it.

Worldbuilding is hard. Then again, so is everything worth doing.