How To Fall Back In Love With a Project (Patreon)

This topic came up in conversation with a friend and it made a lot of sense to turn into an essay, so here we are.

Being a novelty-driven creator, something being new or different is a big part of my interest in and motivation for a project. Which turns into a problem when a project becomes too familiar or when I lose that first big burst of steam and have to settle in to the discipline of keeping the course.

The last few years, that hasn't worked well. I stayed the course extremely hard for Between Two Wars and then ended up shelving over 160k words. After that, I've run out of steam at about 25k words twice and haven't been able to re-ignite my excitement for either project enough to push myself over that speedbump.

So I'm going to try to talk through the things I've done in the past, both for y'all's sake and partially to remind myself what has worked in case it might work for me again. As a note, this material will cover productivity, process, deadlines, professional self-image, money, and mental health/how brains work.

My writing process has changed a fair bit over my career, and changed at least a little bit for every major project. Not necessarily changed between episodes of Genrenauts, but definitely between changing series, changing publishers, when I move, etc. 

Process for me is tied to environment, to mood, to the tools I'm using, and what's going on in my life overall. The instability and uncertainty of the pandemic did a number on my ability to make consistent progress on fiction projects. But last year I wrote a *lot* of fiction for a campaign I'm in, and then in the fall and through the first part of this year I wrote a lot for my ttrpg consulting project. So why is original fiction different? And what things that worked for the game fiction and consulting could I try for my original fiction?

Upsides for the game fiction: it was lower-stakes because it was only ever going to be read by the dozen or so people involved in that game. They're all colleagues and writers, so it's not no-stakes. If I wrote a complete stinker, I'd still be self-conscious about it because these are my professional peers even though they're also friends. The other big advantage is that I was usually working from prompts or in reaction to other material - collaborative rp threads, character journals recapping events from a session, etc.

What can I take away from those other successes?

One option is to try to do a bit more outlining so that writing the scene isn't writing a blank page - I've got a target and some notes about the emotional arc of the scene. But I've had an uneven history with outlines - with Hexomancy a meaty outline helped me write a full first draft in just over a month. But other times, the outline takes the spark and the immediacy and the mystery out of a scene and it becomes a roadblock.

Another takeaway would be to get more feedback from readers more frequently - like having a first reader to read raw draft material and give encouraging feedback. Alternatively, a way of adapting that ping-ponging off of a prompt/other people would be to try working with a co-author on a project. I had a great experience with Born to the Blade, even though we weren't collaborating on individual episodes but rather the entire season. I've certainly thought about the option but it introduces a lot of complications - working with multiple agents, lining up your production schedules, etc. Not out of the question, but tricky.

So what about the game consulting? For that I got feedback but was largely working on my own. A big difference is that it was almost all non-fiction writing, and a fair bit of it was more technical. But honestly, I think the biggest difference was that that work was Urgent, Important, Novel, and Challenging - all key elements for someone with a brain that works the way mine works. If something is important but uninteresting, boring, and not urgent, it just won't get done without a big effort and probably support from someone else. But the game design work hit all the right buttons in my brain.

Fiction writing is already challenging - even as I get better as a writer - because my standards keep going up. It's Important because it's my job, but it's not Urgent in the same way even if my agent is expecting a manuscript by a certain time because it's all being written on spec. When I had a book deadline, I knew that money was on the line and that the book's chances at getting the best support from the publisher were also dependent on me hitting my deadlines.

Honing in specifically, here are some things I've done to try to re-ignite my excitement for a project:

1) Talk about it with people

I know some writers who say to *never* talk about a work-in-progress because of any number of reasons. Those don't apply to me. Verbal processing is really useful for me, so one way I can make headway on a project is to talk it out - with my agent, with Meg, with a writer friend, etc. I can talk through story problems, I can refine my concept, develop character motivation, etc.

2) Dig through my outline/notes

When in doubt, go back to what you've already written for yourself. Sometimes Past Mike has left Present Mike a gift in the form of an unused plot beat, a one-off idea from the ideation phase that I'd set aside but turns out to be perfect for getting un-stuck. I'll also sometimes grab some character or concept or location or other idea from a previous unpublished work and re-incorporate it in a new project. Drake Winters was a NPC in a ttrpg campaign I wrote, other elements of the Ree Reyes series were reincorporated from my first trunked novel, etc. 

Sometimes getting un-stuck involves changing my outline when I've gone off-track - usually I re-outline from where I am rather than deleting some work and going back to the place where I diverged from the outline. But maybe that's something I should try? Cut and paste the part where I went 'off-track' to a side document (never delete) and try writing that section again while keeping to my plan. I almost always diverge from my outline, but when I have *no* outline, it's really easy for me to get stuck or end up spinning my wheels.

3) Re-read

This is almost always a part of my efforts to overcome a creative speed-bump. I'll look at where I left off, compare it to my outline, and try to diagnose the problem. I'll ask myself questions like: 

• Is the next part of my outline a mis-step? 
• Do I not know how to get from where I am to that next beat? 
• Do I need to develop some part of the world to be able to write the next beat? 
• Does it need to be from another character's perspective? 
• Am I getting to down into the weeds and I should just cut to the action later on for a more load-bearing scene?

4) Re-connect with the Big Idea/Cool Thing

Often my projects start with a premise, a cool thing, a big idea. Geekomancy was "what if fandom was a superpower?" Genrenauts was "What if genre knowledge was the special skill needed for a portal fantasy lead?" (the project drifted from that start, but kept the heart). For Annihilation Aria I built myself a Wish List of tropes/scenes based on things I love in space opeara, inspired by a similar move by author Annie Bellet. When in doubt, I'd revisit that wish list and see if I could add something exciting for myself to regain momentum.

I'm in pre-production on a new project, and I've been thinking about what I can do now to set myself up for success and smooth out or shorten the speedbump/friction I basically always face about 25k words into writing a novel. Because if I lose momentum on a third novel in a row and can't get back into it, that's going to really suck.