Out of the Dark

Why is it so hard to be creative, when creativity fills my thoughts in every waking moment of the day?  Time dribbles away, leaking past in gaming, watching television, reading inane articles on the Internet that don't even interest me.  And yet I allow it to continue, never patching up the leaks, never taking control and changing the way I live.  It has become too comfortable, too ingrained in my habits.  I am only productive when I leave the house (and the faulty built-in plumbing of my artistic side) and venture into other places.

But I'm not satisfied with this.  Today I found myself longing to do something more, to create something new, and yet still I wasted the hours with mindlessness and a restless dissatisfaction.  I found an old accordion file of story fragments and ideas from decades ago.  Character sheets, snippets of writings, unformed ideas...  I barely recognized some of it, it was so old and forgotten.  But it was also inspiring, a cross section of a creative life I had let slip away.  So here I am, using these convenient and blank pages to brainstorm.  I want to write again...  but I have no idea where to start.  So lets try to make sense of the chaos in my head, of the conflicting desires and tangled stories that aren't fully formed.  Maybe by the end I will have some sense of where to go.

When I was in high school I started a project called Angel's Tears.  My first great 'novel'.  Maps and character diagrams, magic systems, races...  it spiraled out of control and I was too young to be able to juggle it all and glean from it something with structure.  I brought it back out of retirement about 5 years ago, intending to re-shop it for a Nanowrimo. After a chapter or two I realized that it was simultaneously too complex for a first novel and too 'high school' for a good novel.  Back into the slush pile it went.

So then I took out Pantheon.  At the time, it's working title was 'The Wilds', and it was the bastard child of fragments of many things.  An old world-crossing role play from high school, a Dungeons and Dragons game from college, and my own passion for Norse mythology.  I restructured it, I applied my newfound knowledge of the adult writing process, I changed everything about it, and I started in.  Miraculously, I made it through all 50,000 words of Nanowrimo that year.  It was a record. But then I made the mistake of looking back...  and all the flaws in it leapt from the pages and beat me bloody, wrecking all forward progress and leaving my poor aborted story dying on the tiled floor.  I kept changing, adding, building, changing, removing, changing...  trying to fit it into some mold that worked.  I swapped characters, I notecarded, I tore up notecards and notecarded again.  I read the Poetic Eddas, I dropped storylines, I added storylines...  For ever change that enriched it I felt like it was also losing some spark of what it had been that I loved.  For years I pushed on doggedly, wrenching it and twisting it, desperate for it to succeed.  I still want it to, I love it and I don't want to let it go, but perhaps it, like any living thing, needs time and space to recover from the abuse I heaped upon it.  I suppose that takes it out of the running for now.

So what then?  Nothing else I have even begins to approach the state of development that I feel I need to write something.  Fragment at a time, bit by bit, let me lay out my whispers and perhaps one will raise it's voice.