Writer’s Blogk…Being Creative Sucks

I’m just going to say it up-front: I hate having to be creative.

Don’t get me wrong. I love writing. It’s really one of the bestest vocations ever. The best thing is that the reality of writing is that it’s 90-95% craft. Once you’ve figured out you, the individual writer, writes; a lot of the process is mechanical. Making sure the words, and the sentences, and the structure makes sense.

What about the other 5-10%? Most of that is pretty fun, too. Writing the story. Inventing new characters and placing them in (hopefully) interesting situations. True, there’s a lot of grunt work there, too, but this is imagination grunt work.

What’s the problem then? For me and a few other writers I know, the problem is with coming up with the next good idea. One that is more-or-less original, is both timely and timeless, and has the right amount of depth for the length of the intended final product. This is what keeps me awake at night.

Right now, my current creative nemesis is the "reimagined" TV show, Battlestar Galactica. I’ve really enjoyed watching this gritty and timely science fiction exploration into very important themes. What I really hate is that so many of my ideas-in-development go "poof" every season. It’s not that if I took my pre-existing ideas and wrote them they’d be derived or directly influenced by this show–but it’s very possible others might think so. As a result, I’ve had to abandon scores of possible stories, for the time being, that I’d been eager to see grow. Damn you, Ron Moore.

One of the things that’s killing me is the scope of stories covered by this show. Not just from the sentient machine angle, but also on the faith/religion angle, and the resistance angle. So many of my planned stories fell within the triangle of these vertices. These are themes that I’ve explored in various stories over the years, and I’m not likely to change any time soon. BG just makes it tougher to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

I’m about a month-and-a-half away from agenting the current novel, and that means I have about a month-and-a-half from having to develop the story for the next one. Clearly the religious machines story that was next up is getting spindled, and while I have stories I can work on, none of them is screaming, "Write me! Write me!"

April is going to be interesting, and immensely frustrating.