Its ok to change. Something about realising that your future life is a story you’re telling yourself in advance, that power rests in telling yourself a better story.
The same applies for your present self, the act of re-authoring yourself. Not lying about the past, just talking to yourself differently about it. Seeing it for what it was - you doing what you thought was right, knowing what you knew. Learning the only way we can learn. Forgiving yourself for all that entailed.
Because in the past you were different. Tomorrow you’ll be different. The change comes from that narrative. It comes from yourself.
I have been many versions of me. I will be many more before my time comes, gods willing.
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This post and watching two videos by Struthless recently here and here have inspired me to try something new to get my creativity back into a state of health.
I’m sharing this as perhaps this idea might be useful to others struggling with some of the same issues as me.
If you don’t want to watch the (YouTube) videos, their basic gist is:
Vid 1, when he was young, he had trouble with focussing his output. He was doing a bit of everything creatively - art, writing, music, making videos - but improving at none.
He sought advice from an artist he respected, and was advised to pick a thing and do it every day for a year.
He learnt a lot about what he wanted to create as a result of not having to decide what he’d make - he drew an ibis every day, so each day the blank page was already overcome before he even sat down to draw. He got real sick of drawing ibises too, lol.
Vid 2, he talks about using the 70% principle to handle perfectionism and pressure. That is, rather than going into a project telling himself everything has to be perfect, he goes in thinking, if it’s 70% perfect, that’s acceptable. (That number is one he chose, you can set it lower or higher - whatever you think is an acceptable, realistic level to aim for.) Because, as he says, your body of work is only what you’ve completed - and it’s better to publish something 70% perfect than not publish at all.
He also applies it to things like overcoming bad habits. If you tell yourself you can’t have a less than perfect day, you’re much more likely to stop whatever you’re doing after one failed day.
Anyway - the exercise I’ve set myself: to write a scene or poem each day featuring one of my OC’s.
That’s it - any scene, any OC.
There’s no word count, because I want to make this as gentle as possible - so far, a few days in, the longest has been maybe 200 words - the shortest around 50, but I know there’ll be days where it’ll be only a sentence.
And applying the 70% principle, there’s so much less chance to fail. The writing doesn’t have to be perfect, and if I miss a day, it’s fine. As long as I write on 255 days, then that’s 70% perfect - and I can definitely do better than that.
To date, I find myself looking forward to sitting down with my iPad each morning to write the scene. It’s *so* freeing for me personally to not feel obligated to write anything - character, setting, anything - as part of a larger narrative. It’s just a scene without context, like sketching is to art - to just capture an idea, no more.
With my writing, I keep a log of the hours I work, on what, and my word count at the end of each day. I sometimes write quite extensively about the details of what I did that day, and sometimes it's just 'worked on chapter 2' or whatever.
This is useful for many reasons, but mostly giving me a sense of movement when I'm working on long fics (which is most of the time) - there's an element of slog at a certain point, and any means of appreciating progress is something I really need to keep going. I can't recommend this to writers of long fic enough.
Anyway, I haven't been recording my gentle writing exercises in the log, which I began in the middle of June out of sheer desperation, but I've been pretty good with it, though as predicted, some days it's little more than a line.
It really does help though. It got me thinking about what I wanted to write, even though I could hardly do it at the time. It made me start turning new ideas and stories over in my mind - and, though the scenes weren't supposed to be connected at all, they have (inevitably) become part of an overall long narrative that I'm now (finally) able to write.
I think when I posted about starting that exercise, I really didn't give any sense of how bad my block was. I may've missed recording a few days because I'm erratic with journals sometimes, but (not counting the exercises) I've worked something like 32 days since the beginning of March. 10 days since the beginning of May. 6 of those days were this month.
With the exception of this month, the days when I did work were difficult. I wasn't writing with any kind of flow. I was revisiting old pieces and editing, mainly. The last time I wrote something entirely new, longer than a single scene, was the middle of February.
I'm saying all this here for two reasons:
To assure anyone struggling with a serious block that it will end, but also that even if you feel really resistant to it, it can help to do small exercises to keep the creative hearth fire burning. The key is gentleness. I honestly believe that even thinking about writing counts as a writing exercise. Set a reminder on your phone and every day ask yourself 'What would I write today, if I could write?' Maybe on better days you could jot a few notes about whatever pops into your head. That's totally valid as an exercise.
But also putting this here as a reminder to myself. When I'm inevitably at my own fireplace again, lamenting that it's gone out forever, maybe I'll recall that the darn thing hasn't ever gone out - I just can't see it burning from where I'm sitting.
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So after three days of writing this new WIP, It Was Just Red, it’s become clear to me that I’m writing a multi-part fic in response to this post from weeks ago:
Talk about inspo coming from unexpected places…
[It’s me boy, i’m the fan-post speaking to you inside your brain listen to me boy leave the other WIP we don’t need her, come with me and write this new WIP we’ll have angsty times in ancient greece …]
😆 Annnnyway…. I’ll probably start posting sections on AO3 in the next few days as most are quite short, almost standalone pieces, so they are quick to write and polish up.
It’s taken such a weird form, I kinda don’t think of it as a story but something more like a dream (or nightmare) sequence.
There’s a lot of angst, implied pining, internal monologues, and scenes that don’t quite fit into a chronological narrative (yet? maybe it will all tie together in the end?) but somehow, that’s the only way I can really get at what I’m trying to get out here.
It is loosely about a ship (Alexithenes), but so far, this is definitely not fluff and I suspect it’s never going to be.
[Note: I am not directly sharing the original post or tagging the poster intentionally. I have no interest in getting involved in anti-Spartan or more specific character-based discourse - I respect the fact that other peoples opinions differ significantly from mine about these things; I just wanted to acknowledge the inspiration behind this piece of work.]
‘At least I can talk about you in the past tense now, to put you behind me, piece by piece.
I’ll try to do you justice though, I’ve decided.
I’ll write you as truly as I can. I’ll probably fail, but I’ll try.
Perhaps you’ll be my novel.
Perhaps I’ll convince myself that that’s explanation enough for everything.’
