I Write Better in a Rut
When I spent three months on sabbatical in Venice, Italy, I fulfilled a dream to live in that magical city but didn’t get nearly as much writing done as I’d expected. I thought living in such a beautiful place would inspire me, but in fact it was so beautiful that I loathed the thought of staying inside. I wanted to be outside, experiencing it, as much as possible. I wrote virtually no fiction for the entire three months I stayed there, although I absorbed a lot of impressions and information that will inevitably inform my fiction.
Thus, I knew I wouldn’t get any fiction writing done during my three-week trip to India, but I wanted to make sure I absorbed lots of imagery, sounds, and smells to enhance my future works — especially my latest work in progress, Armillary Sphere, which is set in a fantasy world loosely based on India. Now all those sensory impressions are a masala in my brain. For almost a week and a half after returning, I had strange, vaguely stressful India dreams right before awakening, which I ascribe to my brain still trying to make sense of everything I experienced and sort everything into discrete categories. But over the last few days I’ve reverted to my regular sleep schedule and dream menu, which is a distinct relief. It means I’m returning to my rut. And maybe I’ll be able to write again soon.
The thing is, an interesting life is a distracting life! A boring life, on the other hand, offers nothing to keep me from sitting down and plugging away at the keyboard for hours, lost in somebody else’s interesting life. I get lots of writing done over the summer, when my life is luxuriously dull and the days all melt into one another. But this self-observation then makes me wonder, is it better to lead an interesting life or only to write about interesting lives?
I’m trying to maintain a happy medium between the two. I decided long ago that I don’t want to die feeling like I hadn’t lived, and since death can come at any moment, I try to leap at the change to do interesting things whenever I can scrounge up the time and the money to do them. But I wouldn’t want to live the “interesting” lives that most of my fantasy characters, or any fantasy characters, live! That old curse, “may you live in interesting times,” has more truth to it than most people suspect. Lives we enjoy reading about in novels are not usually lives that would be very pleasant to live.
While I was in India, I visited many auspicious places and received many blessings. Though it seems a little pathetic to say so, perhaps the best luck I could have in 2008 would be for it to be a nice, boring, writing-rich year!
drupagliassotti @ February 3, 2008