Mitch Krpata, of Insult Swordfighting writes of getting to the middle part of any creative projects as:
The middle must be familiar to anybody who’s ever taken on a creative project. When you start, you’re fueled by enthusiasm. You haven’t yet run into any tough decisions. Your first failure is still some ways off — for all you know, it may never come! (It will.) You’re high on possibility. This time, it’s all going to work, and it’s going to be even better than you could have imagined.
It might take days, weeks, or months, but eventually you find yourself in the middle. This is a place of self-doubt, where enthusiasm has given way to a feeling of obligation, more often of a responsibility that you are shirking. You feel no closer to the opposite shore. You can’t even remember what it was like when you started. Every step you take feels like it’s leading you nowhere. You’re stuck.
This is where most people give up.
I’m right smack in the middle of my very last short story. After this, I’m done with my collection. Or at least, I hope I’m done. Then I can take my time with the edits and second, third, fourth, fifth drafts. But what matters is the first, and I’m stuck right in the middle of it.
I just can’t quite seem to figure out where the story goes from here. I know how it starts, and I know how it ends, but I don’t have a very strong coherent center just yet.
But as Mitch writes
The only way out is to keep walking, although with a creative project the path isn’t so clear. Less like walking across a bridge at night, and more like muddling through a desert in a sandstorm. You have to grit your teeth and hope you’ll make it out alive.
Dickens, Hardy, Tolstoy, Hawthorne, Melville: to such novelists, originality with language is mere fashion; it will pass. The larger, plainer things they are preoccupied with, their obsessions—these will last: the story, the characters, the laughter, and the tears.
John Mayer’s songs always resonate with me. I always feel like he does.
What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
If games are just movies with interactivity, if they don’t have anything that’s their core competency, then you can’t really use them effectively. Now, one of those core competencies for games is a certain kind of nonverbal complex communication, right? You play a game for hours, and at the end of it, you hopefully have this somewhat sublime complex understanding of something that’s hard to verbalize, because you got it nonverbally.
This article profiles a game designer who I hugely admire by the name of Jonathan Blow. Blow is famous for creating the radically brain-opening video game “Braid”. Michael Abbott, a stellar writer on video games, defends Blow and deconstructs what it means to be an “artist” in the most passionate of definitions. I can’t help but feel the thrill in my soul that one day, in the domains of writing and photography, I want to be like Blow.
The old man could’ve sat anywhere in the mostly empty bus. But he chose to sit next to the pretty young thing. He wasn’t going to pass up the rare opportunity to be in such close proximity to a beautiful flower. The old man closed his eyes for a moment and breathed in the comforting smell of her shampoo. When was the last time he smelled such a heavenly fragrance? Oh certainly, the sweetness of youth ignited a dark part of his brain. For a moment, he was young again, for a moment, he was alive. She had pale, bone-thin wrists, the kind you could grab hold of and it would bruise easy. It set his heart racing. And when she had to get off at her stop, she breathed an “excuse me” and squeezed passed him, her bare legs brushing against his well-worn knees.
Occasionally, something sticks. And then I follow that. The only image I can think of is a man walking around with an iron rod in his hand during a lightning storm.
Arthur Miller
Writing, for me at least, can be summed up as being out in the vast expansive field of your imagination, with a tiny divining rod, searching and searching, watching and feeling out for the slightest tremble of inspiration.
Then you get to work digging into the ground. And this is the important bit, inspiration without hard work gets you nowhere. If you feel that orgasmic jolt of an idea at the back of your neck, but don’t crack open the writing pad or put fingers to keyboard, the ground water remains buried.
Oh, and this ain’t no ordinary ground water. This ground water moves. It never stays still, and because of that, if you aren’t digging at it constantly, it’ll move on again. Start writing a story, but don’t keep at it day in, day out, and sure enough it’ll dry up and your interest dies with it.
But don’t be discouraged, sometimes you go for ages without the tremble of the rod. Sometimes you’ll pick up on something, start work on it, only to find that you came up with a dud. And this can be frustrating especially if you’ve written extensively, only to have it fizzle out. Unfortunately, these things can’t be forced. You’ll just have to wipe the tears from your eyes and keep searching again.
Perhaps the writer’s eternal struggle is just that.
Perhaps you can just dispose of the divining rod entirely and dig where you stand, and hopefully come up with an underground spring. It may just happen. You never know if you never work at it.
From Wiki:
“Daniel Dennett has a deflationary theory of the self. Selves are not physically detectable. Instead, they are a kind of convenient fiction, like a center of gravity, which are convenient as a way of solving physics problems, although they need not correspond to anything tangible — the center of gravity of a hoop is a point in thin air. People constantly tell themselves stories to make sense of their world, and they feature in the stories as a character, and that convenient but fictional character is the self.”
Since I was 13 - 14, I always had this grand notion that I was at the center of the universe, as I was seeing the world through my eyes and that everyone else were supporting characters to my story. And that my worldview was the accepted one (talk about my ego eh?) Well yes, in a sense, I wasn’t wrong to believe in this perception. Because it was the truth from my personal perspective. And yet, I also thought I was crazy and no one else would believe that they were merely just secondary roles in my play.
Now it appears that I had stumbled upon, at an early age, a philosophical theory of self that has already been academically theorized. I wasn’t crazy after all then, just human.
Dream as if you will live forever, and live as if you’ll die today
