Why I Got Stuck [Field Notes]
And what I found about myself and the creative process
Dear Readers,
As some of you who read my note know, I recently got stuck with my newest short story, „Artem’s Trouble”. As a discovery writer, I just had this idea of Artem showing up at Hugo’s door, cursed (and maybe even worse), with Hugo helping him get out of this.
Besides this, I had only a vague idea of what kind of mess could Artem have gotten himself into. I knew it would have something to do with the war in Ukraine, probably some kind of espionage intrigue etc.
And then time came to delve deeper into it. To think what exactly would that be. To look into all the possibilities of Russian espionage and sabotage in Poland. Probably something to do with arms shipments.
Time passed, I was doing some research, brainstorming, but my mind was blank. As in, completely blank. Zero ideas. As if revolting, in resistance.
I’ve had problems with going forward with a story in the past, but in those other cases, after some time, a bit of research, brainstorming and just thinking about it helped solve the problem.
Here, the time was passing, and nothing really happened. I felt like I was banging my head against the wall. I began to wonder, what the hell is going on?? Why no breakthrough? Why am I only getting more and more dispirited, feeling more and more empty and flat?
Then after a particularly mind-melting, ineffectual session I went for a walk.
And then it dawned on me.
Do I really give a fuck about espionage, arms shipments, dry intelligence work?
Isn’t all this premise missing all the ingredients that I really love writing about?
Then I started to think, what is it that I REALLY love writing about? What is it that makes me want to push through when I’m stuck or overwhelmed, not knowing how to go forward? What keeps me up and motivated?
I looked into the common themes with all my hitherto writing and a few patterns began to emerge.
They all had either a) glamour, high society social event or b) history, culture, artifacts, adventure, and they all had c) romance or friendship. There are also (duh!) magical and mystical elements involved. It’s all fun and pleasure for me.
With this concept they way I envisaged it, yes, there was friendship (Hugo helping out a cursed friend) but that’s it. No glamour (arms shipments in airport warehouses? boring), no big social event (just solitary investigations…), no history, culture, artifacts (just military equipment). Apart from the curse/possession theme I already wrote in the first part, it didn’t seem there would be a lot of magic.
But I thought I loved espionage stories! This should have been cool! It sounded cool!
But it’s one thing to love something as a reader, and a totally different thing to write about it as a writer.
We might enjoy certain themes, topics and moods as a consumer, but they are just not our natural material to work with. And there’s really nothing we can do about it.
And writing pure espionage story meant I would have to figure out all the logistics, all the minute logical details, all the intrigue, which bored me to hell. And honestly, whenever I read espionage fiction, I gloss over those details and completely forget about them after five minutes. And yet they are necessary, the story has to hold together and make sense.
And it was completely different with other stories. I absolutely enjoyed finding out Jean-Claude’s signature spell in A Thread of Magic (if you haven’t read it, do it, it’s really cool), I loved coming up with the details of sister Euphrosyne’s escape from Constantinople in 1204 and her journey around the Mediterranean, and I had huge pleasure in inventing Hugo’s grandfather WWII story.
Sometimes wrangling all those details brought me headache, but I loved the material, it was simply my kind of materia prima.
It’s a very long way to say a very simple truth – it’s really important to recognize and know what your true material is. Because sometimes resistance is not just generic resistance against the effort of writing which you need to overcome by just sitting down to write. Sometimes it’s your soul resisting working with material that is just incompatible with your creative DNA. No amount of pushing through will help in this case. Even if you manage to push through (at an enormous psychic cost, I imagine), the effect will be lifeless, lackluster and dull.
We need to look deeply into what we really love – and then it’s our duty to our creative selves to work with this.
(There’s also another aspect to this – about me wanting to diversify and tell something new for fear of repeating myself. But that’s for part two of this story.)
So now let me go back and rework Artem’s story in line with what I love to cook with.
Yours,
Piotr
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More adventures await…
Amazon: I have published my previous short story, “Theodora’s Necklace”, currently paywalled, as an ebook. It’s available to buy here.
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