Overthinking, Overpreparing, Overanalyzing

So, I’ll be honest. The frustration, anxiety, and fear of not starting or writing anything after declaring months ago that I would start… is beginning to boil over in a bad way. On one hand, I still feel like I haven’t found a magic formula to get started… like the core elements exercise I did a couple weeks ago when I studied all the top award-winning short stories. On the other hand, I also realize that that last statement is the essence of my over-analytical, over-preparation, over-cautious approach that didn’t work in 2006 when I attempted my first novelette post-Bacigalupi-swoon, it didn’t work in 2015 when I launched Garage Fiction and wrote thirty-five-plus flash fiction that were basically first scenes with no middles and no endings, and it didn’t work in 2017 when I petered out on GFP 2.0. Like, rationally, I know what finally made me get good at copywriting was simply charging money and doing it because my income was on the line… and the exact same approach of throwing wind to the caution and just DOING IT would get me on the path to getting good at the craft of writing stories and fiction as well… but the emotional side of me, the subconscious, or whatever side of me is hunting for more education still. It keeps saying, “just one more”. Just this one more course. Just this Patreon. Just this one more workshop. Just find this one other thing.

And that’s what I did last weekend. I caught up on and binged two SIWC videos. Cecilia Lyra’s workshop on hooks and John Wiswell’s workshop on short story triangulation. Did it make me feel like I had progressed? Of course. That’s the drug of education. You think you’ve filled in gaps, you think you’ve found a new tool, you think you’re better prepared. Education is a trap when it comes to craft. I knew this going into this third iteration of writing fiction. And yet, here I am again. Back in April or May when I discovered Scriptnotes ep. 403, I was like. OK. That’s good. That’s it. I don’t need more. I’ll listen to this six or seven times and take notes and really let it sink in. But then I still felt like not knowing how to nagivate the middle. So I stumbled on to Brandon Sanderson’s “Promise, Progress, Payoff” on YouTube. OK, Oh wow. This is like writing a joke. I get it now. But wait. There are several types of these plot archetypes. So then I listened to almost fifty episodes of Writing Excuses, season eleven where they go through it all. But then I realized Save the Cat Goes to the Movies has a better taxonomy for plot archetypes. And then my archival indexing organizing mind kicked in and conslidated all this knowledge into a guide of sorts. And I said to myself, OK, after I’ve indexed all these different plot archetypes… I’ll have everything I need to start.

Of course that didn’t happen.

Because I then listened to Sanderson’s BYU lectures twice. And John Pedersen told me to listen to Craig Mazin talking about Last of Us on the podcast. So now I’ve re-discovered audio training in every single minute and second of my down time. Doing errands. Commuting. Groceries. Cooking.

And now I’m like, maybe I need to watch MRK’s short story class and take Richard Thomas’s Story Mechanics course as well BEFORE I start.

I’ve been here before. This was 2007-2010 when I bought every copywriting, marketing, traffic, product development, wealth building class there was so I could be the most knowledgeable marketing consultant on the planet. It is an addiction.

But fortunately, in that scenario, I also had bills to pay. So I landed clients, did work, and kept learning. The beauty of doing paid work is it creates a positive feedback loop. You work, get paid, got paid to learn, bought another course/workshop/seminar, applied that knowledge to the next paid project, and that virtuous cycle builds upon itself recursively until you’ve mastered a professional skill. And listen, I get it… being naturally good at selling (or having done enough of door-to-door sales in my youth along with customer support and a brief stint in cold-calling for a MLM)… that helps. That was leverage I didn’t expect.

Fiction, however and unfortunately, doesn’t pay. Not enough to live at any standard of living except the most indigent. It is a black swan. A lottery ticket. Something that requires a lot of luck to get past gatekeepers, win the favor of critics, and driven by a manufactured groundswell of publicity, marketing, and booksellers, plus celebrity endorsements, and impertinent and nebulous “word-of-mouth”. I’m very much aware of this and given I have always felt empty when not chasing it, I understand that for myself, it’s worth chasing, but there’s a lock in my head after fifteen years of freelancing I need to break. The concept that this is “free work” and I will not get paid (or paid well) for it. I feel like I’ve accepted that this is a hobby. It’s a fun hobby It may even be an expensive hobby in the sense that I could be doing something else that would actually make money, increase our savings, and create more comfort for my family.

And it’s even more expensive hobby when I don’t want to just “write stories” and stick them in my drawer. No, this is a hobby wherein I want to get GOOD AT and I would still like the validation and recognition of peers, gatekeepers and fans. Which means I want to submit stories to pro-rate zines. Which means, I don’t want to embarass myself with bad storytelling. Which means, I am putting my reputation on the line and that. Maybe that’s where the procrastination and drowning in education comes from. Because I am not getting monetary compensated, that just makes the rest of it… even more weighted on my so-called artistic reputation. The ego.

I dropped my ego for copywriting/marketing fifteen years ago. Didn’t have time or energy for it. I thrashed forward regardless of shame, humiliation, or quesy feelings about what I wrote. It didn’t matter because the only think that mattered was that the copy got results, I got paid, and paid well. Life is simple, but also crude and unruly and base, when profit is your only metric. There is a clean efficienct to writing for money. Especially with direct response copy. It’s a world where you can forgo the subjective “pleasing of clients” in the sense of whether they like the writing or not. There is only one metric. Does it get results. It’s why I chose the profession. You can’t argue with CTR, AOV, conversion rates, open rates, CPM. Either my copy worked or it didn’t. The inherent meritocratic nature of DR means no drama, no arguing with clients, no negotiation over rates and the value of the work. And that cleanliness in the work meant my only metric is how much money can I get out of my client… as long as my copy made them money.

And then we get to fiction, given the lack of money, the lack of a clean objective measure, the lack of simple “if x then y” of it… the metric for which I would labor under then becomes this vague, subjective thing of “artistic integrity”. The vision, the intent, the raw emotional honesty, the themes and what I’m saying, social commentary or thoughts on the human condition or whatever. It’s about my voice. And that’s fucking scary.

This isn’t work-for-hire ghostwritten commercial writing that has a clear intent and can be objectively measured for success metrics.

No.

This is art. This is work-for-nothing, writing as my raw, naked self, in an attempt to entertain while also revealing an honest truth about who we are as human beings… while also realizing my experience, my subject, and the way in which I express it may or may not “work”… because art is subjective. What speaks to, what resonates, or what “stays” with one individual may utterly flop on deaf ears to another.

And it’s expensive. Not in money, but in energy. In order to create art with raw emotional honesty… the artist has to – themselves – dig into the lower reaches of their own raw emotional honesty, strip themselves to naked vulnerability, and express themselves in front of an audience.

Maybe that’s another reason why I’m still procrastinating. Maybe Bob is right. It’s more fear and lack of courage than mechanics and logistics.

With that said…

I’ve started to fade from all the Discord servers. I’ve kept the social/support stuff to once every six weeks for Garage Fiction and once a month for the VGW meetups. Are they still driving me forward? I think so. I think the shame of being in these groups, attending them, and still not writing helps move me forward. Shame works for me. After all, I have sixteen years of Evangelical Christian upbringing to draw from. Fear, shame, guilt.

But the obligation to these two groups are minimal. The fact that I don’t have to critique, or manage, or organize much… that keeps the obligations low, unlike GFP2.0 where running that thing became another wonderful excuse for not writing. Not doing the actual thing.

The key here is to drop the education stuff AS WELL so that I have no choice but to stand naked in front of the craft.

So maybe the decision point here is to NOT watch MRK’s short story workshop and purchase any more of Richard Thomas’s Story Mechanics. Maybe I can review them later after I’ve attempted the craft, written a few stories, and they go on the backburner for now.

In a way, it’s making a stand and facing my own creative demons. Dropping the education, the marketing/business, the organizing/socializing.

With that said though.

I can’t dismiss what I learned via the Wiswell workshop on short story triangulation and Lyra’s workshop on hooks. Let’s spend this week summarizing what I learned so far and applying it to the eleven short stories from two weeks ago.

One last hit. If you will.