Novel forms of insanity

During the last few months, I’ve put the current novel to one side, in order to work on writing and recording the secret audio project. There are ten new short stories, and they will be happening in a way you can hear later this year. (More information when it’s happening!) I wrote those in response to a request, with some sense of an intended audience, and a desire to get some of my own eccentricities into the mix. The result seems to involve a lot of very dark humour.

There’s a practical limit to how many things I can do with my brain at a given time. Normal life involves this blog, plus other Pagan content at Patheos.com http://www.patheos.com/blogs/agora/category/columns/druid-thoughts/ and Pagan Square http://witchesandpagans.com/Nimue-s-Wheel/Blogger/Listings/nimue-brown.html. Most days I spend time working as a Press Officer for the Green Party – blogs and press releases, some of them requiring a lot of research. These things normally leave me enough time for some creative work, but if anything else turns up, it doesn’t take long for me to reach capacity. Frequently other things turn up. Books to review, requests for articles, and in the last couple of months, a book in edits as well.

It is undoubtedly easier to write a novel when the only thing you really need to focus on from one day to the next, is the novel. All the thinking time goes on characters, plots, interactions and world building. In an ideal world once you’re in the flow, you stay there, writing through the night if needs be, free to sleep when it fits the call of the muse. In practice, it is not usually like this, and the life of the writer does not actually allow a person to work in a way that most serves the next piece of creativity. Perhaps with a first book you can do this, but once you’re out in the world, or if you have to think about paying the bills, writing is not directed purely by ‘the muse’ but by when you can grab half an hour of thinking space.

Then what happens? Yesterday, the picking up of a novel I had barely thought about, much less worked on in the last six weeks. Trying to remember what I was doing and where I was going, and to find the same voice and the same flow. A half an hour dash of putting words onto the page, hoping they fit with the other words. While I’m doing it, novel writing is a high like no other. It absorbs me entirely, and I pour heart and soul into it. This is not to say that I love it more than other forms of creativity, but that each one is a very different process. Novel writing is a special form of insanity, involving the devotion of lots of time to things that do not exist but need to be plausible. Long conversations with imaginary people about things that did not happen. Deep emotional investment in that which never was and never will be.

That in itself is enough to do odd things to the mind, but then there’s the other process, of going from words written to a book manifest in the world. The need to shift gears, grab a business hat, study contracts, consider marketing, and get out there and sell the work: To an agent, a publisher, and then anyone who might read it. Dealing with the people who do not like it, trying to work out which bits of criticism are valid and which are best ignored. Performing the strange dance that is ticking boxes for commercial success and creating something that does not look as though it was made simply to tick all the boxes.

When I am writing, all else is forgotten. When I surface, all kinds of other things creep in. The doubts and questions. What is the point of all this? What good does it do? Is it merely delusion and self-indulgence? When you’ve just spent an hour talking to pretend people, it is not difficult to imagine that the idea of putting a book into the world is just as make-believe.

I know how much richer my life is for there being fiction in it. I have loved novels ever since I was capable of reading them. I have valued those other lives and imaginary worlds that other people’s writing has allowed me to enter. I’ve also seen how the joy of creating catches other people, and the effects of dealing with the non-writing side of the process too. Write, and go a bit mad, with the industry, the economics of it, the juggling. Do not write, and also go mad, with the not writing. If there’s a way round either, I have yet to find it.