okay so the assumption is that the general flow of a creative process happens like this.
- come up with an idea
- act on the idea
- refine the result
- done
the thing is a lot of the time we have obstacles that get in the way of following this process through to the end, there are a lot of outside factors and values that need to be in place to end up with a specific, finished piece of art.
there are tons of ‘is this actually worth my time’ checkpoints you have to go through in order to make it to a product, and a lot of the way we’re culturally supposed to think about art and ideas just completely misses this ‘okay but should i ACTUALLY do this’ step
i think this is where a lot of writer’s block comes from- we have a disagreement around ‘what is valuable to do right now’ between Core and Structure
a lot of Structure’s go-to arguments for getting things finished and done are DRMed to hell and back (presumably in the name of Finished Products for Capitalist Consumption). this is… hard to convey, it feels like there is at the same time incentive to work on things that feed into self-perceptions (maintenance of structure, ‘i am a writer/novelist/artist/whatever’) and incentive to cover up those incentives with “better” ones that look core-adjacent (“art is good and producing art is good”).
this is. kinda shitty as a framework for actually producing good art, though, art that you like and want to share. and the thing is, i am not actually certain how to reliably engage with other motivations. I have them, i’ve accessed them before- most of the writing i’ve actually acomplished working on the werewolf union book for example has been written out of a desire to communicate, to inspire good people. that was completely, 100% sincere. but every move to pick up the pencil since has been motivated by things like ‘i want to stop being such a layabout and actually contribute to society’.
like first of all, fuck you, i do and have. Secondly… gods it’s so fucking frustrating? working through trauma from consensus has previously been boring as all fuck. and i think that’s the problem with the whole ‘refining the idea’ approach. i am so done with an idea once i’ve scried out how it’s going to go. part of the reason i engage with art in the first place is that discovery process, and when there’s nothing left to discover, there’s nothing left for me to do but slog through the dull, tedious process of typing it all out for others to maybe, possibly or not care about.
this leads to me having a lot of ideas i ‘should’ be working on but which feel like death to even try and consider.
two
part of me always wonders if there’s a tech or habitual fix for this. i think this is a recurring problem of mine- reach out for some device or method that saves all the scraps of my ideation process. anything not created when sitting in front of a computer or notebook is more or less instantaneously lost, and we’re fucking fed up with it. our entire creative process currently runs on ‘strike while the iron is hot’ novelty-seeking, and if i could just capture all the ideas we have, we might get something finished just by virtue of RNG and large numbers.
course that’s anything but a consistent way of keeping up communications. i’ve been treating art as a given here, something we want to make for $reasons, but that’s just coming at the problem backwards. incentive to appear like an artist does not an artist make. so whatever! i’m not an artist. i’m not a writer. i forever abolish those terms from my self-model. and no cheating, either. no ‘girl in college who writes sometimes,’ nothing.
i’m not ’trying to be a writer,’ i’m trying to write a novel. that feels like kind of a big difference.
three
alright, so we roll with that. what happens when we turn that into a drive? “i’m GOING to write a novel BECAUSE…” Whether or not there is actually an answer to that question determines a lot of how we’re going to be spending our free time in the next while. and i can’t just make it magically so by typing ‘BECAUSE i want to communicate with people’ into this document. we’ll have to see how it goes, i guess.
part of why i need to write these notes for ourself first, i guess. anything else is just a side benefit, an externality.