Nonetheless, it was fun. Again, derivative… but still fun. Then when I was out of college, I wrote a short story — about thirty pages is that a novella? Then I gave that story to my girlfriend who became my wife.
Then, adulthood happened. And I became a semi-successful author and online entrepreneur. But I longed for the thrill of trying something new, of becoming a student again. And in this place, creativity dies. Life is lived best in the place of risk and trust.
But I want to try. But with that vulnerability comes an openness and honesty that almost always leads to better work. This is a bigger deal than you may think. Put another way, we thrive as human beings when we do hard things. The creative life is filled with risk and reward, but sometimes we just need to do something new for the sake of its newness. And when we answer that call to begin again, we must remember that community is essential.
Yet, through house moves, job changes, and illnesses, the women kept writing, because it was fun—exhilarating, really—to create something together. It was the only place they submitted it, and they were stunned by the response: I read your book, could not put it down. Next thing, they were picking out a pen name for their soon-to-be-published novel.
They settled on Alice Campion—their publisher had recommended a surname starting with a letter that would be stacked at eye level in bookstores, and a first name with an Australian flavor cf. Alice Springs. To celebrate, the Alices, as they now call themselves, got matching bracelets made from antique typewriter keys, and immediately began working on a sequel.
Around the same time, in Cape Town, South Africa, three women—Sarah Lotz, Helen Moffett, Paige Nick—decided over a champagne-fuelled lunch to write a series of choose-your-own-adventure erotic novels. They thought it would be fun to invent an experienced heroine who puts her sexual partners through their paces. They were all workaholics. Another member of the group, an insomniac, took up the baton. The third called her agent and pitched the premise to him.
They had just over a year to write three books in the series. For their pseudonym, they chose the compound Helena S. Though novels written by three or more people are rare, the Helenas knew that co-writing duos are not uncommon, and that other forms of artful entertainment TV shows, movies, plays, songs are usually the product of collaboration.
They started relay writing, and soon hit some obstacles. One of the writers found that she froze every time the heroine was about to have sex. Another was suffering from temporary partial retrograde amnesia after being hit on the head during a home invasion. Happily, they discovered that they had complementary skills: plot mistress, workhorse, ruthless editor. It was gruelling, and insanely fun. It was a project that none of them would ever have dreamed of doing alone. The notion that novelists should be solitary creators has long been deeply ingrained.
More than twenty years ago, a group of Italian men set out to debunk that idea. The L. At a meeting of about fifty L. For inspiration, they looked to past art coalitions in Italy, such as surrealism. The men were all from working-class backgrounds, and had put themselves through their university studies of philosophy or history by doing precarious jobs, from working in the kiwi plantations near Bologna to being mailmen or night couriers.
None of them had previously written a novel, but they were used to collective effort as a means of resisting authoritarian and capitalist power structures. It felt natural to them to write fiction together, too.
This is because in any living system, highs are simply not meant to be sustained, and always looking for them means we will come up empty again and again. Worse, we will miss out on that sweet, profound middle ground in which most of life flourishes. Not giving up when the going is ho-hum and uneventful for days or months or years is one of the sweetest joys alive, not because of the tantalizing reward that waits forever in the distance, but because of the complexity and intimacy that develops when kindness, humor, and good intentions are invested in a craft or purpose or person that constantly requires the best of you.
About 80 percent of the writing I do looks nothing like writing. It looks like reading, or daydreaming, or driving, or drawing, or listening to music, or lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling.
Books do not respond to timelines, spreadsheets, or graphs. These are useful inventions, and can be quite supportive at time. But they do not run the show. If they make the story look better or seem more believable or get its author back to writing, then use them. Imagine you are a wildlife photographer standing alone in a field and you hear hoof beats in the distance. Figuring out how to trust yourself might be the most essential skill you can develop.
The key is to know that your intuition and inner compass will lead you toward behaviors that are traditionally shunned among the good little worker bee crowd, the sort of crowd that thrives in office buildings and school rooms and other enclosed spaces that rely primarily on established paradigms.
Logically, this makes a whole lot of sense. But it can be threatening in practice, because creativity often thrives as a result of the very behaviors that others label as lazy or self-indulgent or some other horrid judgment that might be appropriate were you a cog in a wheel that cannot turn without your constant and unimaginative presence.
Creative work, on the other hand, demands that you stop hovering, allow your fields to go fallow occasionally. It demands that you procrastinate. The key is to learn to know and appreciate both the quality of valuable attention and the quality of valuable inattention.
And the only way to know this is by allowing for humor and a willingness to fall flat on your face, to forgive yourself when you misstep, to finally step into the stream of your own guidance.
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