{EDITOR’S NOTE : Been busy, no vid yet, blah blah blah. }

And by “like this”, I mean “without planning”.

I have been going through a period of artistic dissatisfaction lately. I am just not happy with what I produce. All artists go through these periods, and while they are never fun, they are a necessary part of artistic growth.

And one of the things that is bothering me lately is how rambling and directionless my output is. In both my blogging and my videos, I have a tendency to pick a starting point and then just launch off from there. I never write a script or make an outline. I just wing it, every time.

This tendency is so pervasive that I have written three entire novels without creating so much as an outline.

And my work suffers for this. If I started out a video or a blog entry with a clear idea of where I was starting, where I was going, and how I was going to get there, my output would be far more focused, self-contained, and solid.

That’s not such a big deal when I am merely diarizing, but when I am actually trying to make some sort of point, it really weakens my efforts. My works lack focus and coherence, and end up watered down as a result.

The fact that I don’t edit afterwards does not help things either.

I bring all this up because I think I have the answers as to why I write in such a slipshod way when I would be far better served learning to plan and execute, and the answer is as simple as it is blindingly obvious to me now.

I write like I do because it’s fun.

That is really the long and the short of it. I am a creator for who it is the act of creation that motivates him. I love making something new. It is the act of making something where there was once nothing that fills me with joy.

And it is this very spontaneity that planning ahead kills. If I already know what I am going to write, I lose nearly all my motivation to actually write it. Working from an outline feels more like filling out a form than what I consider the joy of the act of writing.

Now it is not quite true that I go into these things without a plan. A more accurate assessment would be that I write (or make videos) without a written plan. There is almost always a plan in my head, but it bears little to no resemblance to anything formal you could write down.

And if I did write it down…. well, it would take all the fun out of it. I can only maintain motivation when I keep all that creative potential locked away in my capacious cranium until it is time to write and release it into the world.

When you look at it that way, it is fairly amazing that my writing has any coherence at all. These internal outlines work surprisingly well. None of it is conscious, exactly, and yet I do produce work that, while maybe having a little trouble sticking to the point and almost always ending up far away from where I was planning to go at the beginning, are nevertheless readable, comprehensible, and hopefully even interesting from time to time.

So perhaps I am being too hard on myself. After all, structure isn’t everything and sometimes a random ramble can be quite fun. Sure, I dream of writing words of fire in tight, focused, devastating prose. But maybe I am just not that kind of writer. And maybe beating myself up over that fact is as futile as beating myself up for not being taller.

That makes a lot of sense, but art does not come from the seat of reason, not even for highly intellectual science fiction authors like myself. It comes from a place of dreams and visions, and therefore has demands and requirements that may not be smart or make sense, but they are ironclad nevertheless.

All artists of any worth are slaves to their muses.

And mine says that in order to progress along my artistic road, I need to get the hell over myself and make peace with either planning or editing, preferably both.

Focus is and always has been a bete noir of mine. It has always been hard for me to focus all my energies in a single direction. Long have I known that if I could simply focus my abilities into a single coherent effort, I could have a very powerful laser beam on my hands.

Instead, I have more of a diffuse glow. When I do focus, there is nearly always some external thing that prompts it. For instance, the National Novel Writing Month. Theoretically, I could write a novel any time of the year.

But no, it takes NaNoWriMo to get me to do it.

And the thing is, it’s not like I am against planning. For the most part, I vastly prefer to plan things. Planning makes things predictable and controllable. It reduces the potential for surprises. I don’t like surprises.

But somehow, my creative side is entirely different. It eschews planning and wants to just create and create all the time, with no planning and no looking back.

That means that, if I am to get better at this whole art thing, it will be via practice, not polish. I am confident that, while I am no closer to being a planner than I have ever been, at least my spontaneous prose is improving all the time.

I still want to be able to catch my lightning in a bottle. I certainly want to tame my wild talent enough to start sending my work to editors and whatnot.

But for that, I would have to have work good enough to show…. or just decide that fuck it, they get what I got.

Pretty sure I know which one I am most likely to choose.

I will take to you nice people tomorrow!