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More writing, simplify map, agony and ecstasy

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date: 2019-08-27
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All of writing, all of creativity is selfish. To take some idea or some concept and to set it down on paper and say, "I made this" is selfish, of course, but to then take that thing and show it to others with the expectation that they might get something out of it as well is taking that several steps further.

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The first poetry I remember writing was back before high school. At some point I picked up the poetry bug and decided I was going to try my hand at it. Finding it hard, I quit after the first poem I wrote. It was something really, *really* bad, too. Something where all I knew about poetry was that it should rhyme, so I sacrificed...well, everything in search of a rhyme. Readability. Sense. It was horrifying.

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> I assume you went looking for one of these execrable poems of yours?
I did. I wasn't really able to find much from The Before Times, but I found a few from shortly after while prowling through my LiveJournal and archives of my old site in high school.
> [RedFox! Productions](https://web.archive.org/web/2005*/http://ranna.babylonia.flatirons.org/), right?
Gah, yeah. I was a kid, alright?
> If you say so.
September 26, 2003:
<div class="verse">I.
Borne through air,
Close my eyes.
Wind ruffles hair
Soul sighs,
Heart flies;
I’m the wind.
I flow east:
Over the plains,
Over land creased.
Current refrains,
Cloud stains
As I build.
Trees bow at my
Will
To move drives me
Onward
I push through
Mountains
Do nothing but
Divert
The rain as I
Flow.
II.
Borne through air -
Rise up high -
Driven there,
Earth nigh,
I sigh;
I’m the wind.
I flow west:
Past the lakes,
Water my guest;
Thunder makes
Noise, wakes,
As I storm.
Sand flies at my
Force
Builds as I
Push
Across the
Land
Flows beneath my
Self
Means nothing to
Wind.
III.
Borne through air,
Through the night
And dawn fair.
No fight,
Only flight;
I’m the wind.
I flow south
On the ocean,
On delta’s mouth
My motion
Just notion
As I breathe.
Waves break as I
Drive
Past the thin
Sands
Lift themselves to my
Body
Waxes as I
Press
Through the stillness of
Night.
IV.
Borne through air,
Around the world
And forests I tear;
Ferns furled,
Trees burled;
I am the wind.
I flow north,
Across the ice;
I roll forth
Past spice –
So nice –
As I change.
Men bask as I
Warm
Drops of rain
Fall
Colored leaves
Shiver
Because of the
Chill
Wind blows on
Past.</div>
> It's not without its own sense of charm.
I suppose. It's crude. It's a bit heavy-handed.
> Your others are not?
Well, okay, fair. I like to think that I've improved nonetheless.
> Are these old ones not creative? Are they still just play?
The more I think of it, the more I think it's that they're just too...work. They're not creative, because they're too mechanical. I had realized that writing wasn't just play, so I stopped playing altogether.
> Wrong answer.
Tell me about it.
January 11, 2003:
<div class="verse">What hath man wrought!
When faced with the question of love
Or seeking peace with the answer thereof,
Or faced with life peril-fraught,
Created a god, or several, to satisfy
Some need to fulfill or deny
A lacking -
A slacking
On someone else's behalf,
Or his own behalf -
And on the world a question of faith brought.
And when a man, endowed
With the ability to make his own God,
Does so with nary a nod,
And finds the god shan't be cowed,
What does he then?
And when a group of men
Make their God
With nary a nod,
And cow him easily, rightly
To them, and find him tightly
bound, what then, with a god bowed?
What then, indeed, should a God,
Now lesser than his creators, do
When his creators move to gods new?
Is he then still a God?
Or is that when God dies,
Not bloated with swarms of flies,
But forgotten?
Not rotten,
Forgotten and immortal, what then?
Does he hope to come again,
Rising a second time, perhaps again to be God?
One would hope that the God, being omniscient
Would realize he was no longer, otherwise
Might he become destructive? Likewise,
A god, waiting patient
Could become restless,
Try to leave his creators breathless,
Again,
But then,
Be pronounced a heretic
By all but the hermetic
And others of the new God ignorant.
So hence a people divided
Those of Whispers and those of Nanon,
Fight to the tooth and fight to the bone,
Until over Whispers Nanon presided;
And when those of Nanon took
Speech from the Whispers so as to look
And not hear,
They here
Those of Whispers with
Supposed powers of myth
Of creation with speech's remnants provided.
So it was before the fall of Whispers that
Faith of most all lay in technology,
Remnants of religion lay in astrology
And superstitious fears like the black cat.
Only after the fall did the faiths
Of only the Whisperers turn to mysterious wraiths
And gods,
But the odds
That one of the gods was taken more seriously
Than the rest was small, and not mysteriously,
The small bit of Faith quickly passed as society's scat
Now, it's come that those of Nanon have all but forgotten
Those of Whispers except perhaps in myth
Maybe portrayed as consorting with
Black cats or something equally rotten.
But for the Whisperers, the city
Of Nanon is very real, also denial of pity
Of sunlight,
For sunlight
Is blocked by the city directly overhead
And the Whisperers know of only shadow instead;
Only death out from beneath the city to be gotten.
The magic that's spoken of those
Of the Whispers, is often made
Out to be more, but because of their stayed
Speech, only whispers remain in quite prose.
So through the long stretches of time,
The Whisperers, through long stretches of rhyme
Can make -
Only make -
What they wish, with words divine,
Benign, or malign,
And in their creations complete trust repose.
So begins a story, often told but never yet writ
Of a divided people still the same
And the rise and fall of a god played like a game.
While not true itself, it is truth lit:
As men continue to create and live under gods,
What would happen if the gods, at odds,
Warred and fell,
Raising hell
In the process? What would happen
In a society misshapen
If a wrathful god fell and no one cared a whit?</div>
> Ah yes, your Keats phase.
It was a mixture of Keats and Larry Niven, I think.
> That is intensely Madison.
Thanks.
I had recently read *The Ringworld Throne*, so I was thinking about vertically stratified cities, and had also been on a Keats kick ever since reading *The Hyperion Cantos*, so I decided I would write a sci-fi epic poem to support my conlang.
It's a mess.
> Could be worse.
Could be better.

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> If you went from a mockery of creativity to a mockery of play, when did you settle down and just write a damn story?
I think it wasn't too long after, actually. I wrote [*All of Time at Once*](https://writing.drab-makyo.com/fiction/all-of-time-at-once/) in April of 2004, and that was the first time I started to think, *ah-hah, okay, there's a rhythm to this, a pace, a set of mechanics as well as an art.*
And from then on, I basically dropped writing in favor of music for months. Sure, there were a few others scattered around there. [*Tu pater et mater*](https://writing.drab-makyo.com/fiction/tu-pater-et-mater/) in May of 2003, and [*Light*](https://writing.drab-makyo.com/fiction/light/) in June of 2004, but other than that, I kind of just dropped it.
> Why?
I graduated. I left language arts classes behind. I went to school for an engineering major.
> One you were supremely unhappy in.
Right. And then when I started writing again, it was music.
I wrote a few essays I was reasonably proud of, but it took another four years before I decided to actually sit down and give writing a go in a more structured setting, and then only because of NaNoWriMo.
> Ah yes, your "boy meets girl with a twist" story.
Yeah, [*The Consequences of Dissonance*](https://writing.drab-makyo.com/fiction/consequences-of-dissonance/).
> You originally named it **Coming to Terms with Being a Terrible Person**.
I did, yeah. I was fresh off my relationship with Kayla and well into a relationship with Kanja, and had a head full of hatred for who I used to be.
> And who you were becoming.
Well, it wasn't *Coming to Terms with Having Been a Terrible Person*, was it?
> Fair enough.
It wasn't a bad story, really, nor even that poorly written. I've even thought of revisiting it sometime. It was sort of a coming out story, but a coming-out-for-the-second-time sort of thing. Gay boy starts dating a girl and has to go through the social process of coming out as bi.
> As Madison?
I suppose. I went through my own series of comings-out, so maybe I have more insight into that now.
> And you're less of a terrible person.
Doubt.
> There are perfectly cromulent reasons for you to think of yourself as a terrible person in the past, and even as a terrible person in 2008. Or even one now, really. You're just less of one.
Always improving, I guess.
> How did it feel to come up with a schedule, a goal, and a plan, and then to stick to it?
I never finished the story.
> But you won NaNoWriMo that year. You went over by eight thousand lines.
I guess.
> And you're dodging the question.
That's why, though. It felt good while it lasted. It felt good during that hypomanic rush to actually complete something, to come up with an outline and actually work through it.
Then I finished NaNo with several hours to spare and tried to keep going, but there was something missing. I felt rudderless. I kept trying to poke at it, but I think I was working as well as I was because of the deadlines. I was still trying to balance the work with the fun that go into a creative endeavor.
> Did you stop having fun, or did you stop doing the work?
I think it's more complex than that. There was fun to be had in the race to the finish line. I think that's why NaNo is so popular. And doubtless it was work, of course.
But with the fun of having already won gone, I was faced with the fact that I had less outline than I had originally thought. Pantsing, as the community so eloquently puts it, may work well for some folks, but I was mostly left feeling uninspired and unmotivated once December hit. The same thing happened with *Getting Lost* and *Inner Demons*. I started strong enough with the basic idea as I tried to write by the seat of my pants, but without a direction or even any goal, I lost steam and wound up disheartened.
> Do you not do well without goals, then? You don't seem to have one for this project.
It's not necessarily that. More that, the shorter the project, the less planning that's required. I do much better with articles and short stories than I do with novels. At least so far, given the amount of planning that goes into each.
This project is working as well as it is because of my heavy reliance on these side-quests. I can break a story down into manageable chunks so that, by the time I might start losing direction, they're about overwith anyway.
Besides, I have you to help.
> Me? Little old me?
Yeah. It's much easier to have a conversation than it is to plan out a story. You keep taking me in directions I don't mean to go.

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> So if the goal of this project is to write about the ways in which creativity interacts with various facets of your life, what are your goals when it comes to creativity itself?
Huh.
I'll have to think on that one.
> I'd say I'll be patient, but you know I won't be.
Yeah.
I think the goals for my creativity are to find a happy medium of entertaining and applicable for others to consume as well as enjoyable for me to create.
> Vague.
I guess. I could list specifics, but I don't think that's quite what you're asking after.
> No, vague is good. It's good to have something you'll always fall short on, because that'll always give you reason to strive for improvement.
That "if you hate who you were in the past, it's a good sign that you've improved as a person" sort of thing?
> In a way. If you hate your old work, it's a good sign you've improved as a writer, musician, developer, whatever.
That makes sense.
Though I do have concrete goals. I'd like to write a book. I'd like to finish some outstanding music I've still got hanging around. I'd like to maybe work toward getting a job in something other than tech.
> So what you're saying is that you'd like to be happy?
I suppose so.
> Good luck, kid.