It is November, which means novel-writing month for many, even though the NaNoWriMo organization has fallen apart and seems to have no desire to put itself together again. I can sympathize with that. I am, as of today, close to 20,000 words behind the goal, with most of my words going to various projects, not a single narrative. This does not bother me, as I have often used the month to finish short stories, or start a bunch of new ones.
But it has been a hard November, and a hard year in some ways. I have been considering giving up on writing fiction entirely. It all feels so meaningless to me lately. I have nothing to say, or at least I have nothing to say in fiction. I am doing a series of writing tips on Reddit for the novel writing month and those are well-received, but I am not able to follow most of my own advice. As I cannot finish a story, I don’t know why I bother starting them.
Other than the fact that I like starting things. My Minecraft worlds are littered with starts without any real goal behind each world. I get to a point where the game isn’t fun, I spend my time running around a village tending to things, and can’t automate anything useful, or find a real purpose for what I do manage to automate.
I take a similar approach to my writing. I love plotting, I love figuring out how to tell a story, but in the end I don’t think I can do it any longer. I think I can teach and give good feedback on stories, but in the end I think I qualify for the “those who can’t do, teach” bucket, and in my experience, those who can’t (or don’t) write don’t teach it very well either. This leads me to doubt my own ability to even teach the craft.
My intellectual efforts seem more geared toward philosophy and theology and history these days, and again I have to wonder if I have anything worthwhile to say. I used to think I was going to be one of the great creative forces of my age. I had ideas, I connected dots, I collected quotes. I wanted to be the Isaac Asimov of Generation X.
Instead I am a fat old man who only leaves the house a few times a week and talks to no one but my wife and a few select friends. I contribute nothing to the world around me. It occurs to me that I am depressed but I doubt a therapist would go that far. I know I have always had a depressive and pessimistic outlook on life. I don’t want to be this way, but this is the way it is.
I recently took four-weeks off from my writing group for a church activity, which I enjoyed and may have to dedicate more time to. I am supposed to return this week, and there is a part of me that wonders if they are better off without me. Maybe I shouldn’t go back. Maybe I don’t contribute anything there, either.
Now, the turn.
Part of my philosophical research this past week as been to sort out the daimon and genius found in the Stoic texts. These are technical words that don’t quite line up to any easy English language counterpart. To be fair, most of Stoicism falls into this category. These terms are sometimes translated as the inner spirit, the part of each of us that connects us metaphysically to every other living being on the planet. For a Christian it could be the breath of God we all carry in us, or part of us where the Holy Spirit can enter in and give us a nudge. For others it is the soul. For some atheists, it is a sign of delusion and sociopathy.
I’m still researching it and sorting it out in my head. Sometimes the words refer to things that are intermediaries between us and the gods, and sometimes they refer to a part of human beings that sets us apart from the animals.
In a desperate attempt to get words down, I broke out a couple of Story Engine decks and built a new prompt and world and found a plot. I didn’t have a story, but I had a plot. I continue to study John Truby and The Anatomy of Genre where he states fiction teaches us how to live, and many English teachers will say that reading novels teaches us how to be human and more importantly that we are not alone. Nothing we feel in our day to day lives is unique to us, but it feels like it is. Especially in America where we don’t talk about down times and bad moods and sadness. We are so afraid of fear that we renamed it “stress” and medicate the symptoms away instead of dealing with the real cause. The problem of sorting out how the daimon works in life can be solved with fiction, so this last attempt at to create a story with my plot is to use this daimon/genius concept.
Hopefully I’ll figure it out.
Hopefully I’ll finish a story.
Hopefully I’ll submit something before I die.