Consistency in the face of Quiet

The voices in my head have gone quiet and that actually isn’t a good thing.  If you were suffering from psychosis, I supposed the voices going away would be helpful, but when you’re a writer and the rooms in your mind go silent you get worried.  At first you hope it’s the naughty quiet when kids are doing something they know they shouldn’t.  Then as it stretches longer you wonder if they’re all sleeping, taking a much needed rest from the previous bursts of creativity.  With an ear to the door you strain to hear the sounds of breathing, a rustle of blankets or the tossing of a fitful sleeper.  Instead you hear your breath coming quicker and quicker as the panic sets in.  Did they just up and leave?  You don’t want to open the door and confirm your worst fear, but the not knowing is gnawing at your belly.

I find myself in this situation from time to time.  Sometimes it’s from being so heavily focused on other aspects of my life that all my energies are redirected to the task at hand.  Other times I’ve been pushing myself physically and mentally into the red for so long that it all overheats and shuts down.  Then there are the moments when I’m actively trying to weave tales, build worlds or stitch together characters and that’s when the quiet is most troubling. 

Consumption sometimes helps—movies, TV, books, etc—re-igniting the fires with new kindling.  A change in environment can also do it, going from office to bedroom to somewhere else can be enough for it to sputter back to life.  Writing about another subject, or stream-of-consciousness has been known to get them chatting again.  Occasionally, none of this works and I’m left questioning how long the silence will prevail.  For someone who’s used to ideas whispering in his ears, characters swinging by to introduce themselves or flashes of a moment appearing from the ether, it can be unsettling when you’re left in an empty room with only your voice echoing off the walls.

I have a fear—I don’t know if all writers share it—that once I get my novel length idea, not the crap ones I need to hammer out before striking gold, the one that gets me published, that I’ll have nothing left to say afterward.  I’ll be a one book wonder devoid of any creative spark once my sole publish-worthy idea has been committed onto paper.  It might be an irrational fear and I’ll lead a prolific life filled with marvelous narratives rich in emotion or true tragedy could strike and I never get one word out into the world.  These nagging doubts must afflict all aspiring writers (and probably some pros as well) since this path is an uphill battle to say the least. 

I’ve heard countless platitudes, “it takes 10 years to become an overnight success” or “100,000 hours of writing before your words become publishable” or some other phrase glossing over the effort inherent in achieving any level of success in this field.  So far, the best way I’ve seen it put is the Writer’s Bathtub Analogy.  To paraphrase Brad Torgersen’s fantastic post, your career is like filling a giant old fashioned claw-foot bathtub, the fill line where you become publishable somewhere near the top.  Just turning on the water seems to be sufficient for a lot of people to label themselves a writer, but its still light years away from anything of professional quality.  As you go filling the tub, with words, stories, novels, ideas you begin to realize that the amount of output you need to reach your goal is great indeed.  Even while you’re in the midst of it, your efforts need to be consistent or else the water grows stale and eventually evaporates.  With all this work you still face the frustrations of writing’s fluid nature, your stories sometimes reaching the peak of quality and other times being absolute crap.  All you can do is persevere, dumping water into that sucker until you reach your goal, praying to god the entire time it doesn’t spring a leak or they cut off the water.

And that’s the rub, how do you keep the flow going—that constant stream of work, effort, output—when the imagination factory appears to have outsourced its labor to somewhere outside your brain?  I’m wandering the halls admiring the machinery, a mixture of cutting edge and old fashioned, but all sharing in the utter still of its emptiness.  Barring a horrific head injury that renders me vegetative, I fully expect the factory to come back to life.  Its just that in these quiet moments, when your thoughts are cannibalizing themselves, that doubt worms its way into your soul, playing worst case scenarios to a captive audience.

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Tagged as: Consumption, Fear, Process, Writing