Today is the last day of June. My summer is over a third of the way completed. Since I last wrote an essay for this website, I have written or edited 119,931 words. (It'll be a round 120k by the time I finish off this essay. I can say that because I only need, like, another ten words to get what I need to finish that number. Yup. There we go. Over 120k words.) I sometimes give a comparison for how many words that is, but I'm not really in the mood for that today. Let's just say it's a lot of words--especially to have written or edited in just thirty days--and move on.
I had two writing retreats this month--one with my friends in the writing group and one by myself. During those seven days of constant writing (from 9:30am until 5:00pm or so every day, three with mates, four without) I wrote the sequel to War Golems that I mentioned before. I also handwrote a bunch of thoughts on two of the books I finished listening to (Little Britches and Man's Search for Meaning) in my writing journal. The big non-fiction contribution was a multi-page spanning response to parts of It, which I'm rereading even though it has all sorts of inappropriate and objectionable content. While I was at the cabin on Wednesday evening, I decided to take a walk and listen to the audiobook of It whilst looking for a shady place to park and read the book, which I had held in one sweaty hand. I ended up getting run out of my ideal spot by some hornets (no, I didn't get stung) and instead just made the mile-long circuit of road in front of the cabin, all the while listening to some of the Losers' Club's experiences. When I got back from my walk, the cabin was too warm for my tastes, so I sat outside with my reading journal and began to write and reflect, using It as my starting point. Some of my most thoughtful and honest writing that I've ever done is in that journal. In a lot of ways, thanks to that book and the writing journal, I understand myself better than I did when I left for the cabin this past Monday. Considering the source for that sort of growth…well, it's an unexpected confession, methinks. While I don't really plan on rehashing any of what I wrote there (at least, not yet), I did want to take a few minutes and chew on some of the implications of this week. On one hand, having written another book--writing over 50,000 words between Monday morning and Thursday evening--is an experience worth celebrating. Writing itself, the physical act of pen on paper, fingers on keyboard, is an enjoyable one for me. I may have said this before, but I am not like some writers, who prefer to having had written, rather than writing. I'm pretty content with how my time is spent when it's pushing words around on the screen. And the idea that I was able to write so much so quickly was also rewarding, almost like a way of legitimizing myself. "I can write a 91,000 word novel in one week, given the right situation. That's pretty cool." I mean, NaNoWriMo is great, too, but there's a different sense of accomplishment, sitting in my office at the end of a week with a finished book that wasn't even halfway done seven days back. I spent a lot of time reading, writing (obviously), watching movies (I saw Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom for a second time on Monday), and thinking. Lots and lots of thinking. Lots of stories. Religious stories, comic stories, fantastical stories, horror stories--my stories and others'. While I didn't have any large transcendental shift in my appreciation of narrative, it was rejuvenating to spend such a dedicated amount of time in considering all of the different ways we share and spread stories. It also made my efforts feel rather pathetic. I spent each morning with a "working breakfast" where I would edit War Golems before whiplashing myself (mentally) by shifting into War Golems 2. I fell in and out of love with both stories on an almost hourly basis, thinking one was superior to the other, they both were rubbish, or that I was maybe doing okay with both. Pretty normal stuff. While I could look back, at the end of the day, with pride and pleasure at the quantity of words I wrote, I was never really satisfied with the quality of them. It didn't help that I was reading It and that book is, frankly, incredibly written. Like, on a sentence-level kind of thing, It is a shockingly good. Moving up from there, King has an ability to evoke particular emotions and spot-on observations, rendered in a way that stand out and make me want to consider them more (hence my reading journal). And then the complexity and depth of the story, spread out the way it is, beggars the imagination. Oh, and it's shocking, too, what with the incredible amounts of sex, swearing, and violence. King is not sparse on details for anything, good or bad. The problem, for me, is that I inevitably felt like I was trying to compare my writings--my story and my style--to King's. This is stupid on a lot of levels, not the least of which because it's his 17th book (or thereabouts), to say nothing of all his pre-publication work. War Golems 2 is my 12th completed novel and, like all of the others, it's unpublished. (I have 18 books that I've either put substantial work into or finished.) There really isn't a lot to compare my efforts to King's except that 1) we are both writers, and 2) we both go by the name "Steve". This happens when I read Paradise Lost or Hamlet, or when I watch an excellent film, or play a memorable game. I'm inspired, and simultaneously intimidated, by the creative work in front of me. I want to do something like that (whatever it may be), but then I look at that thing and say, "Well, it's already there. Why should I bother writing something like it?" Or, worse yet, "My stuff isn't that good. I don't know why I bother at all." This is the strange two-way valve of inspiration and creation: I have to pull in things that make me want to improve, but I run the risk of it overwhelming me when I try to compare. When I juxtapose myself to others, I have to take care not to add value judgments on what I've done, that I not have the perceived worth of my efforts be what's being compared. All of this is to say: I didn't want to edit my manuscript so I sat down and wrote an essay, instead. I am a king at procrastinating. |
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