Creative Fidelity

Or, how to stop all the philandering

[Est. reading time: 4 minutes]

Well shoot.

I started this post a few weeks ago, and got pretty far. And then I opened it up just now to find…nothing here. The title and subtitle got saved, but none of the actual content.

Hm. Substack, I love you, but what happened?

It’s probably better, to be honest. If I remember, I was taking it way too seriously, like some kind of academic paper. I’m gonna go ahead and bet you didn’t sign up for that sort of thing.

So let me try to say this in fewer and much less pretentious words.

Creative projects are like monogamous relationships. I was going to say marriage, but you hope a marriage will last for life, and very few people dedicate their entire life to one project. Still, you get it.

The thing I’ve probably been most guilty of in my life is philandering with too many creative projects. I have a sexy idea, I get to work on it right away, the honeymoon dopamine wears off, and behold, another sexy idea comes along. Rinse and repeat forty seven thousand times, and guess what you end up with? Here’s a hint: it’s not forty seven thousand finished projects.

I could and very likely will write a lot about this principle. But I’m not really in the mood to dig into it right now. (As pretentious as the last draft was, it was also pretty damn good, so you can go ahead and feel a little disappointed you didn’t get to read it.)

The whole reason I started to write about this was that it relates to my current situation. I spent almost a year and a half working on a novel, refusing to start anything new until I had finished a draft. And that was the whole point. I was attacking one of my biggest weaknesses head on: no more philandering. I made a commitment, and I was going to stick with it no matter what.

It was very hard. So many sexy new ideas and opportunities passed by. My head turned every single time, but I stayed faithful. I learned that the only way to get to the end of that first draft was to learn how to say NO to pretty much everything that wasn’t my full time job, my family, or my novel. The correlation was shocking. The closer I got to my goal, the more stuff I found myself having to turn down.

As the finish line became visible in the near distance, and I knew that I’d be done with the draft within a matter of weeks, something magical happened: I knew what would come next.

It would be this. I would begin to build an audience around my writing. I had finally proven that I could trust myself to exercise absolute creative fidelity. I could stick with something until it was done. I could say no to things that would derail my goals.

Dispatches from Inner Space is my victory lap. It was my reward for proving to myself that I could be trusted with an extraordinarily ambitious personal project. This was ultimately why I never took this on in the past. It was also, unsurprisingly, why I had waited so long to try to write the novel I worked on for the past year and a half. It’s the same reason a lot of people fear commitment. Deep down, in romance or in creativity, philanderers know their limits. If it takes a lot of consistent work over a long period of time, it’s not for them.

But I’m no longer a philanderer. I’m in this for the long haul.

That would be a pretty good closer, but there’s one more pretty juicy part of this story.

Almost a month ago today, on April 11th, I got laid off. Here’s the quick version: the company I’ve been working for over the past few years is owned and financed by a much larger company in China. China, as you may have heard, is not doing well. Our parent company decided their American project wasn’t worth the investment.

If you want to know more about that, go ahead and ask me. I’ll spare the rest of you any more boring details.

Why am I telling you this? Because that was the same week I planned to officially launch this shiny new Substack.

Naturally, I wondered if I should hold off. Finding myself suddenly unemployed seemed like a pretty good reason not to waste bandwidth on a new personal project that cannot be expected to pay any bills any time soon. Prudence seemed to suggest that a fiction-based newsletter could wait.

Of course you know the end of this story. I did not wait. And guess what, it wasn’t a hard decision. Because I had already committed.

And there will be plenty of opportunities to say no to other things.

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Quick reminder that Part 3 of “Shadowloss” drops tomorrow morning at 8am. Set your alarm. Then set another one in case you sleep through the first. And then, if you’re my dad, go ahead and set a third one.

If you need to catch up, find Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.