Cleaned out

I feel strange, since I finished writing Living Conditions.  Like I want to write, but there's nothing there.  It feels like the equivalent of having been on some sort of mental cleansing diet for two months, channeling every bit of inspiration, every bit of emotion, every idea, everything I have to say directly into one story.  I feel drained, like there's nothing bubbling out that has to be said, no fountain of ideas constantly trying to burst its way free of my head.  Emptied out.  Maybe that's the way it should be.

By the time I reach the end of a story, the characters are so alive, so vivid in my head--and the conclusion of their journey is at that point so obvious, so entirely unable to be any other way--that it feels like the writing came easily.

It didn't, of course.  It never does--each phase has its own special challenges.  The obsessive rereading is about the only part that ever does come easily.  But once the characters are so alive to me and the plot so solid, the writing is very different.  It's more feeling out the edges of an amorphous fog in my head, pinning down the specifics, fixing the rough edges of the first clumsy attempts to capture something I didn't understand, and filling in the gaps in an existing solid framework.  In the final stages, the creativity happens instinctively, and my conscious mind is fully focussed on the mechanics of making it happen and drawing every possible nuance out of what I've already got.

I don't feel like a creative person.  I feel like a mechanics person who happens to stumble over creative ideas, and is then unable to leave them alone until I do them properly.  The idea of looking at a blank page and having to Do Something Creative...  That's not me.

I remember feeling this way after His Son's Father, too.  And The Mother of Invention, for all it was short, because it was... intense. Promise Ring was such a learning curve that by the time I finished it, everything I wrote was already better.  But for ages, nothing I wrote matched up to what I felt I'd acheived in HSF.  Of course it didn't.  HSF was complete and polished, all its various bits and pieces tucked into place and aligned.  Certainly nothing matched MOI with its polish and double meanings, likewise with all its bits neatened and straightened away.

Living Conditions is more than either of those.  It's twice the length of HSF, with four times the depth in the characters.  And four times the complexity and meaning of MOI.  All settled into place and content.  Perfectly complete, if not completely perfect.  Of course starting on a cold, incomplete story can't compare to that incredible rightness of slotting those last few puzzle pieces into place on something that's on fire in my mind.

This feeling of insufficiency will pass.  I will write things that feel mediocre for a while.  I'll keep feeling a bit flat for a while. I'll go out in the sun.  Play with my children.  Reconnect with the real life friends I've been ignoring because I withdrew into my shell trying to get those words out of my soul and onto the page.  Sorry, guys.  Remind myself about the life I've been sleepwalking through for the last little while, because it still doesn't really feel as real to me as the story does.  And I'll follow my heart.  I'll write what I can, when I can.

I've been through this before.  And soon, something new will start to burn inside.  Then I'll be writing again. And I don't have to worry about whether what I'm writing is mediocre or not, because I can't help myself.  Even if I tried, I couldn't stop the next story I write from being even better than the last one.  Or the next one, from being even better than that.