Pause by the Stream

One of my favorite memories of camping is a night from our big RV trip to Tennessee, the one that got extended thanks to COVID lockdowns. From where the RV was parked in the lot of a state park campground, we could hear the kids snoring up front and the stream burbling in the background. Beautiful night air running down through the trees.

One of the biggest challenges I find in creative work (really any work that pulls me into my head and makes me feel alive while I'm doing it) is knowing when to start and when to stop.

It's part of why I do these videos. I know I can only talk for about ten to twenty minutes before I get tired of speaking extemporaneously. That time constraint of no prepared notes, just whatever I can hold in my head (and however much coffee I can slowly sip to stay warm) give me just enough creative pressure to actually say something instead of staring at a blank page for twenty minutes.

Not being able to produce something hasn't really been a huge problem for me since college. Like a lot of people who ended up as English majors, and especially those of us who went into English education, I can write about almost anything at a pretty decent C-tier quality, with very little effort and very little time. And that was before LLMs came along and made everybody able to do that.

The tools that help you read what your machines are thinking are useful when you apply them to your own work too: Have I been reiterating on the same paragraph, the same theme, the same character dressed up in different roles and names? Have I been skipping from one event to another without establishing enough connected paths of storyline connecting characters? Have I been obsessing over a single thread of narrative to the point where I can't see a fundamental shift I need to make?

I have an unfinished novel called Apocalypse Summer that I'll probably return to in some form soon. I abandoned it a while back, partly because I'd hit exactly the sort of roadblock we're talking about in these videos and partly because I'd hoped the themes had become irrelevant. They've become a lot more relevant in recent years. When I hit my creative block back then, it was in large part because I needed to take a few steps back and learn more about how large groups of people interact when they feel like a small group, which is a similar problem to what you get with a well-coordinated D&D party plowing into a town you've carefully scripted.

I'm giving myself the natural environment as a backdrop. That's not just for you, that's for me. 

I'm naturally drawn to high-energy, detailed storytelling, the kind of media where you're digging deep into a character's mind. If you keep feeding that constantly, sure, you feel like you're learning, gathering threads you might weave into your own work. Just like I need to come out here and let the farm noise settle things, to pull together the most important thoughts after hours of saturating myself with podcasts and video games and conversations. Sometimes a little distance is a good thing.

These are the points between the punctuation marks. 

The breaks of thought in a poem. 

The negative space in your photographs.

Today is Saturday. Depending on your family and your phase of life, that might mean intense activity. Sports, dinners, group outings. Or it might mean quiet, alone contemplation, time away from the demands of the week. In some traditions, the Sabbath is a time of no contact with technology or the modern world. A weekly period of absolute rest. Mediated, of course, through a series of traditions that may make the methods of rest more stressful, depending on who you are.

I do believe that giving yourself time to be alone, or if you can't be alone, time to not be absorbing, to be alone in your head, that's as important to the creative drive as learning to take feedback or observe the marketplace.

That's something I'm working on more, without shutting down to the point where I'm not producing anything. I have the privilege to be able to sit by a stream and have these thoughts. Most of my life I've had that opportunity, one way or another, as long as I gave it to myself instead of feeling like I had to coordinate or entertain or keep up with everyone else.

we'll talk later about how you do that without isolating or neglecting. That's its own can of gummy worms.

For now: What gives you that sabbatical? What creative constraints do you use, not to frustrate yourself, but to rest outside of your creative time?