[I was born when they took my name]
This post is about writing.
I used to work with horses. I rode for two years or so when I was a teenager, and after the barn at which I rode and worked closed down, I got a job as a stablehand on another farm, where I was responsible for about fifteen paso finos and five or six others-- old retired quarterhorses and some rich kid's Arabian and a couple of deeply misanthropic ponies. It was pretty much my favorite job ever-- even when I rode, I was less often the one competing than the one shoveling shit out of the trailer, hosing down the champions after the show, climbing rickety ladders at seven in the morning with hay bales over my shoulder (and sometimes cats on top of the hay bales), and measuring scoops of vitamin supplements into feed buckets. I was good at it, and I liked it.
I learned very quickly that horses are not stupid animals. They are all aware that they are substantially larger and stronger than humans. Domestication of horses, in my opinion, was less a matter of training them over time to feel comfortable around humans and to respond to specific stimuli in ways that render them useful, than a centuries-long struggle to find out horses' species-specific weaknesses and use them to trick them into doing things. (This post is really, seriously about writing.)
Example: If a horse decides that it does not particularly feel like going somewhere, there is no amount of hauling on a lead rope that is going to make it move. However, brief tugs with light pressure work - the horse resists the pull, but has to relax when the rope does, and a short tug before it's entirely regained its feet leaves it no choice but to move forward. I remember watching the head stablehand at my first barn administer an ultrasound to a pregnant horse who did not want an arm in her nether regions; you have not lived until you have seen a five-foot-two sorority girl knock out an eighteen-hand horse by pinching its lip (I personally believe this evolutionary quirk to be proof that there is a God and He wants humanity to win). Moving young, untrained paso finos between pastures used to take years off my life, because chasing horses is bullshit, and cornering them stupid. Then I was taught that the best way to bring them closer was to make eye contact with them over one shoulder, hold it for a second, and then turn and walk away-- herd instinct meant that more often than not, I'd feel a nose bumping against my elbow before I made it to the gate.
The point of this three-hundred word setup for a single shitty metaphor is that my writing is a horse.
I'm not sure exactly when I quit writing. I wanted to be a writer starting from when I was about seven years old. I won writing contests and shit. I got put in an anthology when I was in the fifth grade (even at the time I knew it was a terrible anthology, but hey! It's-- almost publication! Kind of!). I'm not sure when I tapered off. Was it when I started roleplaying? Was it when I was fifteen and my mom told me that if I wasn't doing the kind of writing that made money, I wasn't doing the right kind of writing? Was it when I started getting graded for my writing, and lost the ability to write shitty things for fun? I don't know. But at some point I just kind of stopped doing it. It made me anxious and frustrated and guilty, and it was never good enough.
I got around my fear of writing for a long time by never writing anything substantial for myself. I suppose I never outright stopped. I built and scrapped a dozen worlds, alone and with other people. I wrote snippets of fanfiction and even smaller snippets of original fiction-- notebooks full-- thousands of words and no connecting plot between any of them. Never the same world filling up more than a page at a time. I made up characters and forgot about them. I wrote papers. I blogged. I never really stopped writing, but I stopped... writing, stopped sitting down in front of the computer or my notebook when I was stressed and putting words together for four hours straight, stopped outlining plot points and connecting them, stopped showing finished snippets to people not involved in my worlds, stopped... stopped creating things, I guess. I built and expanded other people's worlds. I wrote with people. It was always fun, always good, but it required no ambition whatsoever-- there were no consequences for failure, because none of it really counted as mine.
I've started writing again this year. Kind of. A little bit. I'm hesitant to say that too loudly, because my writing is a horse out to pasture, and I am beginning to try to convince it to come back to me. I don't want to corner it, and I don't want to chase it, because if it doesn't want to be caught, it won't be, and I will scare myself off it entirely before I beat it in a contest of strength. But-- maybe, I've been thinking, if I am friendly, and if I look it in the face over my shoulder and turn away-- maybe it'll follow me on its own. Maybe getting it back is just a matter of finding the exploitable weakness that will put it back under my control.
It's been a slow writing year. The trick so far is a kind of doublethink - knowing, deep down, that this is important to me, that it makes me happy, and that I can do it, but never allowing myself to believe that I am really working at it. For the first half of the past year, I didn't put words to paper-- I just. Thought about writing. I found an old character, last touched when I was sixteen or so, sitting in my writing folder and in my mind, and I started to think about him. I made a world for him, and changed him to fit better into that world, and added people and places to that world-- I designed characters like astrophysicists locate black holes, by finding the filled-up spaces around them where they had to be and defining them based on the places they didn't occupy. I started doodling in the margins in class, five lines of notes on Middle High German phonology and then half a page of some stupid worldbuilding detail, never typed, always handwritten, because it didn't really matter. Totally didn't matter. Nope. (The minute it started mattering, something in me knew, it would be over-- the instant I started putting pressure on myself to write something good, I might as well take the entire project out behind the barn and shoot it, because there was no way it would run again on broken legs.)
The other day, though, I wrote a beginning. It won't be the beginning I end up using; it's a pretty shit beginning, clunky and boring and from the wrong person's point of view. But it's a beginning, and I have some ideas for other possible beginnings. I am going to write them, at some point. I am going to try beginnings on like swimsuits at Target until I find one that flatters my worldbuilding's curves and doesn't ride up funny in the back. I might write another one down later today, in fact, because this has begun to be where my mind goes when it's unoccupied, or too occupied with things that aren't pleasant-- to the holes I haven't filled yet, in the plot that I have yet to allow myself to believe really exists. I don't know every detail yet, but they'll come to me if I'm not chasing after them, I think. If I keep glancing away, I think a resolution will fall into place behind me soon, and chew on my hair for attention.
I'm not going to spook it with words like novel-- not yet. Maybe not ever. But I'm going to keep writing, and keep delighting in every stupid new detail that comes trotting over the daisies to greet me, and keep building rooms in my thoughts to house the new parts of this world, and soon I will even draw a map, maybe! A map not just of places but of important places, of the pieces of this world my characters will touch and change and ruin and build back up, and maybe I will even write about the things they do in those places, in order.
Maybe. Not that it matters. Of course. :D
I used to work with horses. I rode for two years or so when I was a teenager, and after the barn at which I rode and worked closed down, I got a job as a stablehand on another farm, where I was responsible for about fifteen paso finos and five or six others-- old retired quarterhorses and some rich kid's Arabian and a couple of deeply misanthropic ponies. It was pretty much my favorite job ever-- even when I rode, I was less often the one competing than the one shoveling shit out of the trailer, hosing down the champions after the show, climbing rickety ladders at seven in the morning with hay bales over my shoulder (and sometimes cats on top of the hay bales), and measuring scoops of vitamin supplements into feed buckets. I was good at it, and I liked it.
I learned very quickly that horses are not stupid animals. They are all aware that they are substantially larger and stronger than humans. Domestication of horses, in my opinion, was less a matter of training them over time to feel comfortable around humans and to respond to specific stimuli in ways that render them useful, than a centuries-long struggle to find out horses' species-specific weaknesses and use them to trick them into doing things. (This post is really, seriously about writing.)
Example: If a horse decides that it does not particularly feel like going somewhere, there is no amount of hauling on a lead rope that is going to make it move. However, brief tugs with light pressure work - the horse resists the pull, but has to relax when the rope does, and a short tug before it's entirely regained its feet leaves it no choice but to move forward. I remember watching the head stablehand at my first barn administer an ultrasound to a pregnant horse who did not want an arm in her nether regions; you have not lived until you have seen a five-foot-two sorority girl knock out an eighteen-hand horse by pinching its lip (I personally believe this evolutionary quirk to be proof that there is a God and He wants humanity to win). Moving young, untrained paso finos between pastures used to take years off my life, because chasing horses is bullshit, and cornering them stupid. Then I was taught that the best way to bring them closer was to make eye contact with them over one shoulder, hold it for a second, and then turn and walk away-- herd instinct meant that more often than not, I'd feel a nose bumping against my elbow before I made it to the gate.
The point of this three-hundred word setup for a single shitty metaphor is that my writing is a horse.
I'm not sure exactly when I quit writing. I wanted to be a writer starting from when I was about seven years old. I won writing contests and shit. I got put in an anthology when I was in the fifth grade (even at the time I knew it was a terrible anthology, but hey! It's-- almost publication! Kind of!). I'm not sure when I tapered off. Was it when I started roleplaying? Was it when I was fifteen and my mom told me that if I wasn't doing the kind of writing that made money, I wasn't doing the right kind of writing? Was it when I started getting graded for my writing, and lost the ability to write shitty things for fun? I don't know. But at some point I just kind of stopped doing it. It made me anxious and frustrated and guilty, and it was never good enough.
I got around my fear of writing for a long time by never writing anything substantial for myself. I suppose I never outright stopped. I built and scrapped a dozen worlds, alone and with other people. I wrote snippets of fanfiction and even smaller snippets of original fiction-- notebooks full-- thousands of words and no connecting plot between any of them. Never the same world filling up more than a page at a time. I made up characters and forgot about them. I wrote papers. I blogged. I never really stopped writing, but I stopped... writing, stopped sitting down in front of the computer or my notebook when I was stressed and putting words together for four hours straight, stopped outlining plot points and connecting them, stopped showing finished snippets to people not involved in my worlds, stopped... stopped creating things, I guess. I built and expanded other people's worlds. I wrote with people. It was always fun, always good, but it required no ambition whatsoever-- there were no consequences for failure, because none of it really counted as mine.
I've started writing again this year. Kind of. A little bit. I'm hesitant to say that too loudly, because my writing is a horse out to pasture, and I am beginning to try to convince it to come back to me. I don't want to corner it, and I don't want to chase it, because if it doesn't want to be caught, it won't be, and I will scare myself off it entirely before I beat it in a contest of strength. But-- maybe, I've been thinking, if I am friendly, and if I look it in the face over my shoulder and turn away-- maybe it'll follow me on its own. Maybe getting it back is just a matter of finding the exploitable weakness that will put it back under my control.
It's been a slow writing year. The trick so far is a kind of doublethink - knowing, deep down, that this is important to me, that it makes me happy, and that I can do it, but never allowing myself to believe that I am really working at it. For the first half of the past year, I didn't put words to paper-- I just. Thought about writing. I found an old character, last touched when I was sixteen or so, sitting in my writing folder and in my mind, and I started to think about him. I made a world for him, and changed him to fit better into that world, and added people and places to that world-- I designed characters like astrophysicists locate black holes, by finding the filled-up spaces around them where they had to be and defining them based on the places they didn't occupy. I started doodling in the margins in class, five lines of notes on Middle High German phonology and then half a page of some stupid worldbuilding detail, never typed, always handwritten, because it didn't really matter. Totally didn't matter. Nope. (The minute it started mattering, something in me knew, it would be over-- the instant I started putting pressure on myself to write something good, I might as well take the entire project out behind the barn and shoot it, because there was no way it would run again on broken legs.)
The other day, though, I wrote a beginning. It won't be the beginning I end up using; it's a pretty shit beginning, clunky and boring and from the wrong person's point of view. But it's a beginning, and I have some ideas for other possible beginnings. I am going to write them, at some point. I am going to try beginnings on like swimsuits at Target until I find one that flatters my worldbuilding's curves and doesn't ride up funny in the back. I might write another one down later today, in fact, because this has begun to be where my mind goes when it's unoccupied, or too occupied with things that aren't pleasant-- to the holes I haven't filled yet, in the plot that I have yet to allow myself to believe really exists. I don't know every detail yet, but they'll come to me if I'm not chasing after them, I think. If I keep glancing away, I think a resolution will fall into place behind me soon, and chew on my hair for attention.
I'm not going to spook it with words like novel-- not yet. Maybe not ever. But I'm going to keep writing, and keep delighting in every stupid new detail that comes trotting over the daisies to greet me, and keep building rooms in my thoughts to house the new parts of this world, and soon I will even draw a map, maybe! A map not just of places but of important places, of the pieces of this world my characters will touch and change and ruin and build back up, and maybe I will even write about the things they do in those places, in order.
Maybe. Not that it matters. Of course. :D