beach week and the nature of creativity

Yes, so, I’m at the beach, and having deep thoughts which make me happy.

The main thought: creativity is communal. Which is so wonderful to realize as a writer, because writing can be fundamentally lonely. Writing requires withdrawing from other things for a while; not in the way where you’re just on retreat in a lovely place with no distractions [this has literally never happened to me], but that you give up some of the time of your precious life day after day, year after year, to sit in front of a computer or a notebook and just do that thing. And you have to give up more time to generating the ideas, to free-associating, to brainstorming and imagining ridiculous things that other people have no interest in, and then have some faith that it’s worthwhile to get those things down on paper, and even more faith that it’s worth trying to get those things out into the world somehow. Often with writing that part never happens, and that’s the saddest thing: because for whatever fearful or financial or other reason we haven’t been able to close the loop, and looked for and shared with those other people who would, actually, love it, or hate it, or have some reaction to it that would enrich or entertain or challenge or deepen their life.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, because my experience of enjoying Chinese webnovels as well as writing the Crane Moon Cycle novels in the past year or so has really pointed up to me how creativity and art in its best and most living sense is not about being isolated. The webnovel genre to begin with is fundamentally interactive, between readers and other readers, and readers and the author, far more than the more static style of the printed book. And the stories take on a communal creative life way beyond that printed or web page, even if it’s a community that’s largely online and globally dispersed: a fandom, so to speak, for the genre I’m enjoying so much. Thousands of people from all over the world read and love these stories, and then they translate them and have Discord servers about them and make little chibis and fanart and fanfiction and Spotify playlists and YouTube channels about them, just out of the sheer pleasure of living into a story and characters that you love so much you don’t want to leave, and in sharing your pleasure in that story with others, and it is so completely wonderful.

About eleven years ago, moving to a new city, I was a co-organizer of a meetup group open to all comers to provide critique and beta reading to writers of science fiction and fantasy. I and the original organizers for various life reasons all had to leave the group with two years, but the group has continued all this time, as I discovered when I returned actively to fiction writing. Thanks to the people who took over — people who I didn’t know — this communal resource didn’t die, but grew, with more than 600 members. It was there and ready for me when I needed to connect with other writers again.

And this month, I’ve been participating in the Clarion West Write-A-Thon, and have discovered yet again the joys of being with other writers, even remotely and with a Discord server, Zoom, and sprintbots tying us together. It’s reinforced this conviction for me yet again: creativity is communal. Even if some of it requires the lonely work, in the end, stories and their writers need a community to flourish.

So, two things to put here before I get back to work at night at the beach, trying to finish the first messy draft of the third Crane Moon novel this week: if you would like to support the Clarion West program, which provides great resources and support for diverse and queer authors working in all varieties of speculative fiction, please consider donating! My personal donation site is here.

Secondly, in my months of enjoying YouTube related to danmei, I came across what I consider one of the best descriptions of the creative process literally ever. With the permission of Ferd, the creator, please go to enjoy “How Not To Make an Animatic,” given to the universe almost exactly one year ago today.

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