Creativity

Physical Therapy For The Soul

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

My creative side has felt, for lack of a better word, arthritic throughout the Pandemic. It was there, I created, but neither as fast nor as joyfully as I had before. Sometimes I was scared, as it felt part of me was ossifying – creativity is part of me.

My remedy was to do what I do – organize. I kept to a regular plan for things like writing my blog posts. I planned – and re-planned my various works. I made time to read and to write. Even when I didn’t feel it, I did my best to move forward.

It wasn’t always joyful – sometimes I had that bone-on-bone sensation of grinding grimly forward. There were days my only pleasure was checking off a task or noting I’d written for an hour. If I kept knowing, I knew I’d get back to being myself.

While I persevered, I would feel that creative spark, that joy of making. It might be for a day or a week, but it was there. As long as I kept moving forward, the drudgery gave way to bright shining moments of creation.

In time, especially as of late, I began to feel like my old self. That spark, that flexibility, that urge would come more and more. I’m sure some of it was hope as the Pandemic promised an end, but some of it felt like another experience.

A few times, I’ve had to have physical therapy for an injury. I realized what I experienced here with my creativity was similar. I’ve had pulled, damaged, or stiff muscles addressed with regular and specific exercises. My creative returns felt the same as those days I realized that the pain or stiffness of a damaged muscle was going or gone.

What I did with my planning and scheduling and at-times repetitive drudgery was doing “physical therapy for the soul.” With enough exercise, my old mental flexibility and ability returned. I had given myself creative therapy without knowing it.

A lesson to take from this is that perhaps we can treat creative damage like a physical injury. We may need a rest or a break, but we may also need regular stretching and work to restore ourselves. The key is to see it as treatment – we should not treat the creative loss as a reason to punish ourselves. Some injuries you can’t “walk off.”

Instead, we should treat ourselves. We should find what will help us return and heal. I could have been more gentle with myself, and if I face this situation again, I can be more prescriptive.

Steven Savage

Questioning Your Way To Solidity

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

Fiction is a canvas upon which you can do anything, and that’s why its limiting. When you can do anything, you have so many options you become paralyzed.

My friend Serdar talks about this, by comparing it to how many brands of Toothpaste we have:

“Choice paralysis is, as you can guess, a major issue in creative work. Because you have complete control over what you put into a story, that can manifest as being stranded between too many choices, and you end up in a Toothpaste Meltdown, goggling at the screen and drooling into your keys.”

He goes on to analyze how the choices you make are best shaped by what fits the story you want to write, and asking the right questions. This is something I see (to no one’s surprise) in my work using Agile methods.

Agile methods are obsessed with asking “what is valuable for the customer/end user/etc.” The basic idea is find what’s important, rank things in order of the importance, and start from the top. If you’re not sure, then you have to ask more questions about who your audience is, what they want, etc.

That one word, Value, helps say so much.

In my recent work on my novel, A School of Many Futures, I started a massive edit after getting editoral, prereader, and my own feedback. What helped me was asking what chapters, scenes, etc. did anything for the audience. The result shocked me.

  • Two chapters merged into one, moving the plot along.
  • Several scenes were thus combined, making them richer and snappier.
  • An entire sub-subplot and mini-character arc emerged from the above deeply enriching the overall story.
  • A cat who appears perhaps twice, became a useful way to exposit (hey, people talk to cats).

All because I asked what matters to the audience. What had value, to them.

This doesn’t mean I shirked on worldbuilding – this is me. It just meant that I found a way to tell the story, in the world, that worked better for the reader. I violated none of my obsessively detailed continuity, I merely found which option told the story best.

So next time you’re stuck with the “toothpaste conundrum” in your writing, ask what your audience wants and write it down. Then sort these ideas in order of what is important to them. Start from the top and go through your list.

Even if the audience is just you, you might be surprised at what you really want . . .

Steven Savage

Why I Wrote It – A Bridge To The Quiet Planet

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

A Bridge To The Quiet Planet was my return to fiction. It exists because someone said writing genre fiction is worth doing, and I said, “I should do that.”

That’s it.

The author in question was Magen Cubed, best known for her Southern Gothic Series. Her story is about a monster-hunting modern himbo cowboy and his neurotic vampire boyfriend. Their misadventures include wild romantic hookups, monster politics, and a chihuahua. Honestly, Netflix should option this even if they may need some “fade to black” when things get steamy.

She wrote her thing, and her Twitter statements on the way genre fiction is open made me think about my writing. I hadn’t done fiction in years, and I suddenly had the urge to return.

I have written about worldbuilding for ages – it’s been a specialty of mine since my teen days. I’m fascinated by good setting construction, and it was a vital part of my previous fiction work. Even a decade-or-so break from writing fiction wasn’t a break from worldbuilding – I was the guy to bounce ideas off of, read beta editions, and so on.

But oh, her Tweets about why you should write fiction reminded me of how I missed bringing a world to write.

Then it began. Ideas began to come to me . . .

. . . I loved anime and video games, and specifically the techno-fantasy worlds where science and sorcery existed . . .

. . . but those worlds often never extrapolated on what this meant. Sir Terry Pratchett and Dave Barry came to mind, ideas to explore this world of gods and computers more closely . . .

. . . a pair of heroines began to evolve, one a kind of Hermionie (Marigold), and Mei Hatsume of MHA (Scintilla) . . .

. . . they lived in a world scarred by a massive war, as many fantasy novels have so many ruins they are post-apocalyptic . . .

. . . and the world valued stability, and that meant I threw in the schemes renegade god to screw things up . . .

And there we had my return to fiction. A Bridge To The Quiet Planet was a road trip where a bunch of modern fantasy tropes traveled to a planet-side graveyard for gods. I won’t spoil.

Thus I had a novel, my first in ages.

Overall I’m pleased with it. It’s a road trip story, mainly to have fun traveling through the setting and the implications of what one reader called “a typical fantasy world in the space age.” Though I would do parts of it differently, there are also elements I’m very proud of.

There’s also a sequel in the works – A School of Many Futures. I play with several tropes there (The Big Book Of Plot Secrets, Magical School Adventures) and go for a more complex mystery ala “Knives Out.” It’s harder to write than the first because I’m pushing myself to make a more complex, richer story.

The novel awakened my fiction-writing urges, so I decided to write at least three books in any setting. The truth is, I know I’ll be writing fiction for awhile – maybe the rest of my life.

All because of the right Tweet at the right time.

Steven Savage