The Fredösphere

I think this post needs a special tag: SelfAbsorbedInfoDump.

Not much has been written here in a long time about current projects. I'm certain millions of my fans await with bated breath word of the birth of my next art child; no doubt they worry obsessively as the silence drags on.

They (those poor millions! or at least, those poor several--Hi, Mom! Hi, Aunt Virginia!) worry with good reason. I've endured my first-ever experience with writer's block. The experience has been unnerving. However, it has ended, and I think I know why it happened, and how it may be avoided in the future.

First, there's the awkwardness of shifting some of my creative efforts to a new, unfamiliar field: short science fiction. It's not so much that I don't know what I'm doing in fiction--I certainly don't, but the newness provides its own unique motivation, in the form of heedless optimism. The problem lies in the need to manage my time less wastefully, and to avoid endless fiddling and procrastinating. Each one of two projects can act in turn as an excellent distraction from the other.

Another problem is the continuing psychological change that began in my around my 40th birthday. This change of life, which I have decided quite arbitrarily to call "puberty," has made me far more cagey about choosing projects to pursue, and more inclined to ruminate before committing to any creative decision. I find myself asking myself truly bizarre questions, like "would any person other than me appreciate this if I proceeded to write it?" and "is it possible that my first idea may not be optimal?" That creativity gets harder as one ages is not a new observation, but for me it is a new experience. (The upside is, let's hope, and increase in quality. I'm continually appalled by how little introspection I used to bring to my writing.)

The final problem is specific (let's hope it will prove to be unique) to my current music project. It came to pass that I needed to rewrite the whole thing, and my usual laziness roused itself with uncommon industrious zeal against the prospect of revisiting material I previously thought was complete. My piece, commissioned for the May 2008 concert of the Vocal Arts Ensemble of Ann Arbor, is a setting of a poem I wrote as a companion to a SF story I wrote, both called The Moon That Dreamed of Earth. Ben Cohen, the VAE director, warned me the May concert would be challenging one for his choir (it included Argento's Peter Quince at the Clavier, a wonderful setting of poems by Wallace Stevens) and I thought I had written something straightforward. After I sent the score to Ben, he gracefully suggested I would be happiest with the premiere if it were postponed until the fall. I looked again at the score, and was appalled by its difficulty. Part of the problem was readability; it had a 6-flat key signature, and began with an accidental (an F-flat ... F-flat! I was rather proud of that one, given my self-identification as a stylistic conservative--a not perfectly honest identification, I now realize) and partly it was the dense tone clusters I called for, plus the lack of instrumental accompaniment that would have given the singers a point of reference.

Yes, the piece was a monster. Rewriting it was an unappetizing prospect, and I avoided the work for a long time, playing around with ideas but never committing to a plan. Finally, I saw the need for drastic action, and I borrowed an idea from the SF author Gene Wolfe: an entertainment fast was the only solution, so at home there would be no movies, no books, no internet until I had completed the piece.

I didn't stick to the plan to the bitter end, but I stuck with it long enough to write half the piece, in only three days. (That's an unbelievably prolific burst, by my standards.) In so doing, I also adopted an approach that has worked well for me before: I wrote the piece backwards. That is, I wrote the last section first, then the middle. I recommend this approach for any writers who, like me, form a very clear idea of the ending and for whom beginnings are the challenge.

I'll be blogging more about The Moon That Dreamed of Earth in the future. Writing the text was one of the most satisfying creative experiences of my life. (I've fallen in love, love with my Roget's!) Whether any of it--poem, music, or story--is of interest to anyone but me remains to be seen. Stay tuned! Mom, Aunt Virginia: I'm talkin' to you!

Labels: Composition, Creativity