Excerpt
From the Foreword:
I did not intend to write this book. It's even fair to report that I only realized it was a book after I'd written about half of it. That may sound strange, but I'm guessing that if you're a writer, or anyone creative (meaning everyone), you've done stranger stuff while coming up with things that enhance your life.
Bottom line: I came to this work at a hard time for me.
I'll discuss specifics later in the text, but suffice it to say my brain had not been in the right place for some time—or at least not in a place where it had been letting me focus on the things I like to focus on while I'm writing. I wish I could explain that better, but the brain is a weird thing. It's reclusive sometimes, and it's no stool pigeon. I can't make it talk to me about certain things, like why it does what it does. All I can say for sure is that despite my brain being a reluctant passenger in a body that's been trained to go to the keyboard almost every day, it was not helping.
Some words would come, but the flare wasn't there. The passion—dare I say, the sometimes joyous satisfaction that is part of doing the work—was missing.
I admit I was more than a little scared.
What if the spark was gone?
What if I couldn't do this anymore?
What if…
I have identified as a writer for a long time now. What if that was over? Or worse, what if it was all a sham to begin with?
It's not a sham, though, because of course it's not.
The existence of this book proves that point.
To me, anyway.
Because what my brain let me accomplish in this period was exactly what I needed it to let me accomplish. I thought a lot. I pondered. I examined, and I reassessed. I am an engineer, after all. I am the littlest bit analytical. I learn by thinking or intuiting (keyword there, intuiting), then applying; screwing things up, then assessing them, and then doing it all over again. Perhaps you are just like me. Engineer or not, I think it's a human thing.
In the early stages of becoming a writer, the problem with this cycle for me was the assessment part. My analytical tools were not good when it came to understanding story, character, and all the things that go into creating a piece of work that works. Once I got rolling in that category, the issues came more in the application stage, meaning there were only a few hours a week I could work in, so my angst was about time management and administrative planning. It was in this phase that I learned to be a faster and more efficient writer.
Getting through these hurdles was aggravating, but they were also mostly expected. These are problems of learning curve and prioritization, both issues that can be attacked by outside activities. I went to conferences and read books to learn the analytical frameworks I needed, and I dealt with scheduling in the way a lifelong project manager does—I got up early in the morning to create more hours.
What happened recently, however, was more brutal because there was nothing outside of myself that I could change to address the fact that my brain would not intuit.
It was tired, and it was empty.
Call it writer's block if you want—though I think that's far too coarse of a diagnosis. I did not feel blocked. Except…well…maybe in one way that I'll get to later, though that feeling was not really a blockage.
It was more that I'd run through a million hoops and just wanted to sit down for a bit.
The problem, though, was that, at the time, I didn't feel my struggles to enjoy the act of creating words as a manifestation of fatigue. Instead, I felt the problem as if it might be a complete loss of that thing that has made me who I am.
Until I let myself do a paragraph that eventually ended up as part of the "Same Thing Every Day" chapter of this book, and suddenly I'd done a couple thousand words. And then, after polishing that chapter up, I found myself writing the next, and the next, and the next, until eventually I realized that my brain was writing its own book. So, I went along for the ride and out came this little manifesto of what it means to me to be a writer. Some of it is topical (I don't think, for example, I could write a good-faith work on the universal truths of art and writing without some acknowledgment of the 800-gigabyte AI gorilla in the room), but much of it is about how being a writer, or a creator of any type, seems to work.
For me, anyway.
And since this topic is so personal, it means that at points this book can be a pretty intimate conversation.
What things mean for me may not be what they mean for you.
But, then again, they might just fit.
Or they might fit if you twist my thoughts this one way. Or that. Or shine a different light through them. Or whatever convolutions your brain works on that mine does not.
That's all good.
My brain wrote this book to heal itself.
So, perhaps, it might help you do the same thing. Or, better still, perhaps it can serve as a vaccination of a sort, and give you that little dose of thought to help you deal with things in such a way as to maximize your enjoyment of making your art.
I say that because while this book is focused on what it means to be a writer—how you become one, maybe, and the issues facing writers as they go through their more difficult stages, I think you can use it to explore what it means to be a person who engages in any form of creativity.
Because, as I've said a few times in the past, so much of this writing gig is about keeping yourself in the right emotional state to do your best work.
And I think that, too, is an idea that fits pretty much everywhere.
