In the interest of creativity I need to get back to the freewrite. I don’t really have words for the creative cascade that happened to me, but I felt it deep in my soul. I started loosing the connectedness to all things creative and fell into a hole of rote-ness. In other words, everything I wrote felt basic or worse, derivative of something else. I lost track of new ideas. I couldn’t generate anything that felt original and my writing suffered for it. There are a few reasons why this happened…
- I realized that I needed to monetize my ideas: Once I decided that I needed to get paid for the good stuff, I let the bad stuff take precedence as free public writing. I kept all the good ideas bottled up and, often, didn’t even write them down. As you can imagine, they ended up going away.
- I got stuck in ‘mode’: As a person who primarily gets paid to write cyberpunk, I thought in cyberpunk. However, I am a great deal more than that. I have an imagination that is well rounded and is open to exploring all aspects of things… well, I cannot imagine romance very clearly. However, I locked in on cyberpunk and tried to focus too much energy in that direction. The truth is, cyberpunk is fairly one dimensional in nature and while there are plenty of stories to tell there, it does not satisfy my creative mind.
- I stopped being competitive: Fully blaming lady Talis for this. I used to be uber competitve, and it wasn’t something that really bonded me and my partner. I made an active attempt to mellow out and not be that hard ass New Yorker I once was. Mellow Talislegger is a weak sauce Talislegger. I need to find that competitive fire to be a solid writer. I need to find me a good nemesis who, while I love and respect as a writer, I want to out do. He exists. I know his name. I will not name him here… Voldemort style.
- Success made me comfortable: I’ve published a crap ton of work. I’ve published in so many books that there are times when I read something and realize after the fact that I actually wrote it. Heck, I read a short story about a cyberpunk rigger the other day and thought: I like this. Then I realized… I wrote this. That level of success makes you lazy.
- I got distracted by other challenges: Always in the back of my mind is the desire to be a truly bad ass offensive coordinator (at least at the high school level). I feel like I would be wonderful. I was decent at the youth level, but never had the chance to commit myself fully to the endeavor. There is this old saying about dropping out of society and working for XX years to do nothing but achieve your goal and how bad ass you would be with that kind of focus. What they don’t say is how difficult that would be if you kept holding on to other foci.
So those are the big reasons I’ve sucked lately. All this is to say I believe each one is correctible and I am truly tired of sucking and not being the best version of myself as a writer. So, Freewrite Friday needs to come back. I need to get back to being a bad ass.