Desperation Your Secret Ally

A while ago I read a really interesting essay by Neil Gaiman about where he gets his ideas. He's rather candid about it, and I've thought back fondly of that essay time and again. But today what's made me think of his essay about ideas is when he talked about desperation. He was desperate to figure out a story for the Sandman comics and gradually worked his way through it.

So I come to desperation myself. I've worked on three or four different ideas, and none of them came together. The ideas were there, but the plot hadn't joined up like the big robot in Power Rangers (the original show from the 90s...we don't talk about the Power Rangers in Space Metaton IV on this blog). 


Bored and frustrated, I reread some of my old things. You know those novels. They didn't quite work out the way you thought they would. You abandoned them before you finished. You wrote until you didn't know what else happened and gave up. I read over my zombie novel, still beloved in my heart despite it only being 34K and very, very rough and discovered magic.


I could make this into a full length novel. It actually wasn't that bad. Sure I wrote it before I knew what a scene was, but still. The character's voice was alive and whole and there. Like magic. From my brain.

Desperation can be an ally. Sometimes you're at your wits end. You've had enough worrying over the book and your future as a writer, and you just want to lose yourself in a story. Given the rough state of the half draft, I also think it's going to be easier to just write in the spirit of discovery. To write out an exploratory draft, and write with abandon, instead of feeling like I need to stay on the path of the plot. 


I've worked out some things for the plot, but mostly I plan to wing a lot of the story. I also plan to do NaNo this year, and I am excited for it.

Sometimes you just have to throw in the towel, give up your writerly notions, and just sit down and tell yourself a story. It's so easy to forget that, but so vital to remember it.


What about you? Has anything good come out of a moment of desperation?

In Which Neil Gaiman Says Something Meaningful and I Post It For the Eddification of All

The title pretty much sums this post up.

I finished reading "Good Omens" by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett last night, and am left wondering why it took me so long to read it. I suppose the number of the people who haven't yet read this book is down in the single digits, and I urge the rest of you to go read it. 

At the end of the book Neil Gaiman talks about how he met Terry Pratchett and how they wrote the book together (as in, together. Not that one of them wrote one half and the other wrote the rest. They would sort of trade off, and write when they knew what happened next). 

I was struck by what Gaiman said about Terry Pratchett:

"He constructs novels like a guildmaster might build a cathedral arch. There is art, of course, but that's the result of building it well. What there is more of is the pleasure taken in constructing something that does what it's meant to do--to make people read the story, and laugh, and possibly even think."

For a long time I've thought about art versus craft. You hear people talk about the art of writing, the creative energy that goes into a novel. Depending on the person, and whether or not they have an MFA, really big words get thrown around that basically mean "Writing is as nebulous as the clouds, and real writers cannot predict the whims of the muse anymore than we can predict the whims of the weather."

Then there's the other camp, the "storytellers". You know the writers, the ones that claim, "I am not shooting for high art, I just want to tell a good story." They pay special attention to dialogue, and characters, and *gasp* might even plot out their novels in advance.

Obviously I am generalizing. I have met people with MFAs who were down to earth and people who consider themselves "storytellers" but refuse to change one word of their deathless prose.

And all the while I am left wondering, "Can't it be both? Can't a person write a really great genre novel and it still have literary merit?"

The answer, of course, is yes, and authors do it all the time. Gaiman and Pratchett are examples. So is Holly Lisle and Orson Scott Card. Sure, they want to tell a compelling story, but there's usually something deeper going on in the story if you care to think about it. 

It's just that I think we're trained to think of it as being only one way or another. Since I write genre novels, I am excluded from the Deep and Literary table. Likewise for literary authors, your books are treated like children who must eat your veggies: you won't enjoy the actual experience, but it's good for you. Builds characters (pun intended).

Gaiman's statement really hit home for me, because I think that's the key to merging literary merit with an awesome story. Art comes after a certain level of competence is acquired. If you can lay down a seamless structure (whether it's through plotting or pantsing and tidying up afterward) it becomes much easier to focus on excellence in characters, plot, and word choice. 

I think a cathedral arch is an excellent analogy:

Wikicommons allows me to illustrate my point.

See how beautiful the architecture is? There's a quite grace to a cathedral arch. But think about all of the planning that went into the design.

You can have both art and entertainment. It doesn't have to be one side or another. 


What do you think? Do you label yourself as an artist or a craftsman? Do you consciously try to merge literary merit with entertainment, and if so, how?