stillborn writing
the four houses: cached, live, dead, alive
when i was 18 i tried to write a harry potter fanfiction. the concept was simple and obvious but also something i didnt see often or fleshed out: what if voldemort had successfully killed harry as a baby? sure, harry wasn’t a character in this fic, but there are many many fics that dont include harry. it was unclear to me why someone hadnt done this yet. me and tess spent many long walks at night discussing the intricacies of the plot and worldbuilding. i wanted everything to plausibly fall out of this one change. a lot could have been very different! the war could have gone differently, different people could have died, the government structure could be different. by the time you got to where my story began (where hermione and ron and neville are hogwarts-starting age) its almost a new world.
I wanted lots of reflections, where things that happened in canon happened similarly, but different in my story. like in my story hermione’s parents lose their memory of her, which happens in canon in the last book, but in my story it happened at the very beginning. and i wanted things that were casually mentioned early on in my story to be very meaningful later. i wanted the plot to be intricate and self referential and contain many secret stories hidden in the surface story. i wanted it to completely lack plot holes. diving into every decision and its consequences and motivations with tess was extremely fun, and i kept detailed notes. it got to the point where i functionally had an entire book plotted out, every scene, every conversation, every thing everyone was going to say and do and why and what the consequences of that would be later.
the next step was to sit down and actually write it. the prose, the dialogue, the actual scenes i had been imagining. and it was nearly impossible to do. i forced myself through 6 chapters. only 4 of them did i edit enough to feel comfortable posting them on ao3. i kept thinking i would get back to the project later but never did. when i started i was actually kind of embarrassed that the first long form non school related writing i was doing was harry potter fanfiction, but i was so excited and inspired that i couldnt help but think and talk about it all the time, and it became something really special. by the time i was proud of it, it was such a slog it was almost painful. and the writing was bad too. not just in an amateurish way, but in a boring way.
evelyn mentioned something recently to me, about cached ideas versus living ideas in the context of conversation. cached ideas are things youve thought before, or said before. they are organized. and often they are fun to say out loud because they are practiced and you’ve been waiting for an opportunity to bring them up. live ideas are something you’re discovering right then, with that person, in the conversation. they are shaky and experimental, and they can feel really good or really embarrassing or scary or painful. this idea immediately resonated strongly. i definitely had noticed (from the inside) the difference between these two things. cached ideas werent boring, necessarily. often they were your best ideas and memories, and thats why you held on to them. the best storytellers, you’ll find, often tell their stories over and over again, and if you have the privilege of hearing the different versions, you’ll hear it get more polished and adventurous every time. but in my personal experience, the live ideas get a lot more attention. i’ll be excited to share my cached thought, its interesting, its practiced, its clean. i have a whole plan for what i will say. but i find people pay the most attention to me when my thoughts and feelings and ideas are spilling out of me and i feel like an idiot.
the other day, i was talking about the ego. i’m not going to get into it here but i do have some Theories about the ego and my ego and other peoples ego and whatnot. evelyn thought they were interesting and helpful to her, and told me i should write an essay about it. when i sat down to write about it, i just couldnt. i told her i was going to go on a walk and record myself talking about it instead. so i did that, i told the story about what happened to me to inspire my ego Theories to the microphone, but i kept getting distracted by the trees and the spiderwebs and my wet shoes, and i would talk about that instead. i noticed that i couldnt really force myself to talk about the abstract idea. i was trying to force the ideas out of me but in the process of doing that they warped and turned into something boring and obvious. i talked to the microphone about this experience as it was happening, and as soon as i let myself do that the words flowed much easier. the problem with that walk is that my thoughts on the ego were dead.
when i talk to claude it will sometimes tell me that my writing feels “dead” here. or “alive” there. and its almost like it can read my mind. how did it know that i didnt want to write that paragraph and was only adding it because i thought it tied things together? it must just be obvious to everyone reading it, but i didnt notice it while i was writing it because i was so focused on how much i didnt want to do this. something about me not wanting to write something kills the words before they come out of me. the writing is stillborn.
i think cached ideas are different from “dead” thoughts though. Like i said, cached is fun. It can feel alive and fun to talk about, but they’re reruns. so really, there’s four things. there’s cached ideas, dead ideas, live as in the opposite of cached, and alive as in the opposite of dead. In the ground is breathing up towards us, all the little vignettes were very clearly, to me at least, cached. it was about my aunt and uncles house that was sold when i was a child, and it was looking at it through the lens of plants. for some reason both of these topics have been very interesting to me and ive thought and talked about them a lot. that being said, it didnt feel like i had to force that essay out. i wrote that essay because when i sat down at the computer and let myself type words, that story is what came out.
anyway, just in the process of writing this essay ive found the dead/alive concept to be extremely useful. i’ll think “maybe i should write about x, that seems like it would be cool” and then i ask myself “do i actually want to write about x, or do i just think that a well executed paragraph about it would be good?” and then i might realize that its actually not alive at all, and then i save myself a bunch of time and energy staring at the screen trying to force it out of myself.
i saw a meme somewhere that was like “creativity isnt about doing, its about receiving signals from the universe and allowing them to pass through you”. i think there’s something good here, that thinking of creativity as “doing” doesnt work for me. I get turned into this tight ball of tangled up resistance, because i’m fighting myself. getting signals from the universe is not exactly whats happening for me though, i dont need to become more attuned to the universe, i have to become more attuned to myself.
This is really good.
Also, there is a way to keep ideas from becoming cached, and possibly to return an idea from cached to a fresh state. But I don’t wanna say it here so we’ll talk about it somewhere else.