I love that MEM is my debut. I tell people all the time that it is the best introduction to me as an artist. Every single thing I’ve released has been a necessity for me, but like you, I contain multitudes, and every facet isn’t necessarily of equal magnitude in my self-identification.
It feels similar to the reason/the way I struggle with designating a film/tv show/song/album/artist my “favorite.” Even tiers don’t solve it, because the reason Dreamgirls is a favorite film isn’t necessarily of equivalent value as the reason The Soloist is a favorite film. Neither of which approximate what makes The Signal (2014) a favorite film. I couldn’t make a list without all three, but if I had to introduce myself to someone, my interior self and interests and fascinations, or maybe moreso if I had to choose something that activates my interior, that I personally couldn’t live without whether I shared it with other people or not—that’s truer of The Signal than Dreamgirls.
And now that I’ve written that down, it’s a perfectly serviceable rubric for determining what favorite means to me…and the problem is actually the social interaction of expressing it. Someone asks a question, concise and narrow, and you’ve got like fifteen seconds allotted to the answer, that’s the problem. No time to define “favorite” for yourself, or explain the weighting system particular to your list.
What were we talking about?
Writing speculative literary novellas, natch. (Keep up.)
And so, anyway, speculative+literary+novella constitutes my most natural creative release. Its shape, voice, concept, resultant character (you’ll know what I mean if you’ve heard one of my more recent speaking engagements). If there were such a thing as useful automatic writing, that’s what I’d keep ending up with. It’s my true north, artistically speaking. Which isn’t to say it’s the only thing worth doing—and in some ways is to say other things are therefore more worthwhile for craft development. Just that it’s home.
I get asked about abandoned works quite a bit. When you’re speaking to folks about writing and your process, etc, often they want to know about projects that haven’t panned out. How far you got into them before hitting a brick wall—or whatever barrier or blockade halts your personal process. As far as I can remember (a clause I am obligated to employ due to the impact of pandemic fatigue and the ongoing traumatic stress of gun violence, racism, and bigotry on my memory), there’s only one such project. Not a project that I discarded during the assessment process*, but one that was underway and I came to a blocking point.
*The assessment process itself might be a litmus test for artistic development. I mean, that’s my hope. Because in the past, a project, or at that stage, a concept was discarded due to the way it either unraveled or overcomplicated upon meditation. But perhaps a more mature outlook would’ve been determining what the story would entail, regardless of the questions that could derail worldbuilding. If done poorly, of course, you’ll seem to have handed a half-baked or flimsily crafted world to a reader for inspection. If done properly, you craft a story that skirts non-essential considerations by providing a robust character and world in which they are simply irrelevant. Which means that, yes, what was once subject to discarding might at a different point in your life as a creator pass assessment.
The project that I actually abandoned was not just overcomplicated, but without entertaining the tangent (in this case, a fictional economic structure), it felt undercooked. But the inclusion of the economic structure was overwhelming, and simply not of interest to me, and I stormed out. I ended it. I was tired of her demands, her ultimatums, so I proved that I could, in fact, live without her.
I’m gonna be honest. I’ve been writing this throughout the morning, and I’ve lost the plot. (That’s what she said. She being that novella I ghosted.) Lemme try and figure out how to salvage this.
As of two days ago, I have a concept in mind. Yes, they appear in my head as a full sentence elevator pitch. The issue The worry I’ve nursed ever since that failed relationship novella is that I’ll attempt to tease it out (in my excel document, as I do) and it’ll change. It’ll become less attractive because of all the things it’ll demand. This is less a concern, if one at all, when it comes to novels because of their breadth and shape. They’re more forgiving, because they’re less precise. And therefore less beautiful, debate your mama.
I’m trying to repeatedly (like, mantra style) give myself permission not to write every possible story available/inherent in the concept. Things might occur to me, and I can discard them without discarding the concept.
It may be too flashy for a novella. The appeal might be more in the concept than the story, so while my natural instinct is to tease it out through an intensely interior story of one character…are we allowed to say that to present a concept, in very rare cases it’s permissible/possible to rein in story so that it doesn’t overwhelm it? When the concept itself is a commentary. What’s the writer delegation’s position on that. Somebody get back to me.
But as a reminder, Bethany and anyone else who needs it:
You’re right, Hugo House Bethany. It’s not my responsibility to tell every possible story in any given world.
(And I realize that’s the shortest excerpt ever, and yes, I privacy’d my slideshow because I love y’all but I’m not currently being paid for this here substack.)
There are shorter formats, with shapes and possibilities of their own. It’s occurred to me that this concept might be a novelette. In which case, I have to let myself allow it to be, but that can be hard when novellas feel so right so much of the time. I don’t want to fall out of love with it just because it isn’t that.
So I guess I should get back to that excel now, huh.