JeffKirvin.net

Harlan Ellison is famous for a bit of performance art (among other things). He sits in a bookstore and writes a short story, store employees taping each page up in the window as he writes them. He has no chance to revise, and the audience gets to see the story as it happens, so to speak.

I can understand how he does this, as I once did the same. When I was about 6 or 7, teachers used to take me out of class and upstairs to the fifth and sixth grade classrooms. There I would stand in front of a group of kids 3 or 4 years older than me and ad lib fairy tales, complete with morals. I couldn’t do that today, but I’ve had an instinct for storytelling all my life.

That said, a short story or fairy tale is different than a novel or screenplay, my chosen media as an adult. Stephen King cautions against writing the first draft of a novel “with the door open”, and I’m starting to see why. Having some looking over your shoulder has a chilling effect on the creative process, even if that someone is deliberately invited.

One of my goals with JeffKirvin.net was to give my readers insight into the process of a working writer. The unexpected consequence is that I’ve stopped working. Part of it is probably unjustified paranoia. While I realize that story ideas are a dime a dozen, I’m still hesitant to post too much about what I’m actually working on. Part of me thinks a faster writer will beat me to the punch, and even if my story about a small igneous rock named Bob, troubled by a gambling addiction and a handful of illegitimate pebbles, is different and better than another igneous rock story, it would be harder to publish because there are already “too many” igneous rock novels. Logically, I know the book market works in exactly the opposite way, as demonstrated by the flood of “ancient conspiracy” books in the wake of Dan Brown. But still, it makes me twitchy.

But the bigger issue is that dissecting the process while I’m still in it freezes me creatively. I become the centipede that can’t remember which leg to move first, and wind up doing nothing. Or I avoid writing at all because I don’t feel like working on the project everyone expects me to be working on. And in trying to avoid driving my readers buggo, I avoid writing entirely.

So it thus occurs to me that keeping the door open and blogging about what I’m writing rather than about out writing itself wasn’t one of my better ideas. I will keep writing (I’m gearing up for this year’s NaNoWriMo, as a matter of fact) and I’ll keep blogging, but I don’t think I’m going to blog very much or at all about the projects themselves until I’m deeper into the process. First drafts I’m going to keep out of the window.