I’m sitting here in my new office, finished work for the day, and trying to figure out why I’ve been stuck for a while. Not stuck, really; I don’t subscribe to that whole writer’s block drama, which is about not being able to finish work you’ve started. I haven’t started anything for a while, and I’m wondering why.
It’s not like I haven’t been busy. I’ve been doing lots of other stuff — bookbinding, moving home and all that, and producing my podcast, but a new novel just hasn’t been forthcoming.
I also don’t subscribe to the idea that artists have to be miserable to be productive. But I’ve been having a really happy time for the past year and a half, and along with the joy of this relationship has come a lot of new activity. Perhaps the truth of it is that artists who are miserable have to be productive because they’re alone; nobody wants to hang around that.
I guess I just haven’t had anything to say, really. And now I’ve moved up here, and something unspoken that I’ve just admitted to myself is that I don’t feel I have anything to say that people here would relate to. It’s the gay thing — not that my work is all about that, but because that’s there, I think it could be alienating.
Then again, my experience so far is that such thoughts underestimate reality. Craig and I went to a neighbourhood meeting the other night, the new people on the block, and once again no one blinked an eye at our being a couple.
It feels, though, like I’m not writing anything because I’m censoring ideas before they gets anywhere close to the surface. What’s that about? Too much online reading of others’ opinions about books and publishing and what constitutes the “right” kind of book. Add to that a decade of writing books, putting them out, and learning that it doesn’t happen like magic, like the stories you hear before you’ve tried it yourself and discovered the realities.
I’m regrouping.
That said, I love my new creative space, and I am actually researching an idea for a novel — the least fanciful, most grounded one so far. I’m just waiting to see if there are enough ideas in it to light me up and carry me for a year and some.
The trick, I know, is for me to communicate with the story and tell the one that speaks to my heart the most, giving not one thought to what the world outside thinks. That might mean turning off Twitter, unfollowing some RSS feeds, and digging deep in myself instead. Ironically, I also know that not thinking about the result is the way to create the best result, whereas trying to be pleasing, measuring the market, and all that usual stuff one tries to do to avoid rejection is the surest way to produce a boring turd of a project.
