What excites you?
Me? A lot of things, but I’m pretty sure the best way forward is to NOT get into the nitty gritty details right now…
A few years ago, I was attending Can-Con Ottawa and fantasy writer Charles de Lint was sitting on the panel and he said something interesting:
If you’re not excited and happy when you’re working on your novel, you’re not writing the right thing.
— Charles de Lint
I’ll be damned.
Since then, I’ve taken great precautions to follow that advice. At the time, I was working on an untitled novel, and guess what? I wasn’t excited. No hard-ons for yours truly. I still finished the first draft, but I have no intention of ever going back. Did I lose nine months of my life? You could say that. The positive way to see it is to think about those 120,000 words as more '“money” in the bank towards my million.
I might also scrap it for parts in a distant future, who knows.
The best way I’ve found to STAY excited is simple:
Keep it a secret.
Which has its pros and cons, but what can I say? Whenever I share my ideas too early —aka when the project is still a fragile embryo—, I lose interest and spilling the beans flushes all the excitement along with it. Because of that, it makes it hard to collaborate, and it makes for REALLY boring lunch talks with the girlfriend:
“So, what are you working on right now?”
“Oh, I have this super greatly duper awesome idea.”
“Okay?”
“Well, I can’t really tell you about it, ‘cause my subconscious’s a dick.”
It’s like with Spider-Man. You remember how exciting it was in the first two movies (Sam Raimi’s) when Peter still had a secret identity and had to change in back alleys and kiss MJ upside down? After he's unmasked, it's less exciting for some reason.
On that note, I’d REALLY like to share with you that ground-breaking idea I have for my next novel. It goes like this…………………………….
Yeah, I can’t tell you. But that’s okay, in two three years, you’ll know all about it. You can even read it if you want.
The sad thing is, I have no idea if I'm going to do it. It might not feel relevant or exciting anymore after I finish Land of Stone (QUICK UPDATE: Just finished rewrite of Act IV, almost done!)
And when you lose your excitement, when you’re in that dark place, that lull, that’s when it gets rough: “Okay maybe I'm done with this writing thing, maybe I've run out of ideas that excite me. Maybe I'm finally ready to quit like a quit everything else in my life.”
That's when it usually hits you. It strikes from a place you didn't expect and BOOM. “Oh, this is so brilliant! And fun, I sooo want to do this!” And you call yourself a fool for having lost faith one more time. Because you know the tricks. You know what the creative equivalent of the diamond-shaped blue pill looks like.
Every single time, the main thing is to feed ideas to your dickish subconscious (through reading, watching and just living out your best life.) That’s how you get excited: you follow the rabbit hole of what catches your interest at the moment (I once wrote a whole short story based on a rabbit hole that started with Green Day lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong), and pray the Holy Saint Julia Cameron and let the Law of Attraction and other New Age crappy concepts do their magic.
As I write this, I'm nervous again because I don't really have my next novel in the pipeline. Like a virgin on prom night. I do have an idea or ideas, but it's missing the spark. It's hard to explain. The core idea is interesting. I even have a strong feeling about two of the characters. It’s just missing the final spark. The ignition that will blast it off to space.
Today, I’ll choose to have faith, not something I do often. I hope that it comes in the shower, during a walk in the forest, or in the middle of our upcoming camping trip.
Or I may stumble on something else entirely and go with that instead. Like wouldn’t it be cool to see X combined with Y? (Even with non-existing future ideas, got to keep it a secret).
Having ideas, getting excited, it’s not easy, but it’s a process. The tricky part is that often, it’s counterproductive to try and force it out. Like right now. I have NO idea how to end this newsletter, and I’ve been trying to find something good for the past couple days. Didn’t rise this time.
Oh well. It is what it is.
And WTF is that spidey dance? I never saw those films, but man... what was that?
This is so true. Reminds me of something similar about how telling people your goals is a mistake, because your brain gets some of that dopamine hit that you'd get from actually hitting your goals, and so it makes you less likely to actually go out and do it.
"This year I'm going to do X!"
Better to just "wait and see what I'm going to do"...
This article talks about this:
https://www.petershallard.com/why-telling-people-your-goals-is-a-fatal-mistake/
Got it from this video where the guy is like "This year I'm going to do absolutely nothing" (but it's not true, just doesn't want to say what he's working on):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY7R4NiSuAs