Windmills, albatrosses, and self-erected barriers

C’mon, you know we all have them, in writing, art, work, and life in general. Those choke points where we stall, lose our grip, and can’t seem to drag ourselves away from old or even harmful ideas that hold us back.

To be human is to exist in a fog of imperfect awareness, willful ignorance of our own faults, and a general inability to comprehend our universe. It’s probably not a coincidence that the Greek philosopher Democritus is as well-known today for his ideas about atomic theory as his cheerful good nature (dour Renaissance analysts later took his humor to mean that he laughed at mankind’s folly.)

I’d like to think that he just understood that in a universe of atoms, chemistry, and math, human are fairly hilarious and irrational beings. It’s just that in the middle of our irrational violence and hatreds, we sometimes come up with irrational beauties and rational epiphanies.

Before I wander off into Deepak Chopra-land, allow me to stress this: just because we don’t understand something, that is no excuse not to try. We have a brain, therefore we should use it. How we use it is up to us. We can build bridges across chasms, lift lamps to pierce darkness, or we can raise insurmountable walls.

Where am I going with this? (This very argument is one of my own choke points, I’m afraid.) A conversation with an old friend reminded us of all the authors we know who are imposing limits on their achievements. Some really strange limits. Here are two:

Person A wants to write a kind of novel ‘found only in X country’, and usually published only by X publishers and authors. Person A is not of X nationality or culture, and has just enough knowledge of the target genre to be dangerously certain about that hard limit. Person A has also fixated on some outward aspects of the genre, without really getting some of the underlying themes which make it unique. I’ve heard statements like ‘Americans won’t buy this stuff, and the X publishers won’t take me because I’m not X!’

That’s not Person A’s problem at all. They’re* not a good enough writer yet. They simply haven’t read enough across several other genres to see where other authors have blazed trails. Being ‘different’ and proud in that difference – is not the same as being ill-informed and afraid to admit it, because that might fracture an entire self-image. I know this because of all the other posts Person A has made on several online forums. They distill down to ‘I know what I know, I’m not going to change, now will someone please tell me the magic shortcut?’

Person B is a writer I’ve known for decades. Relatively skilled, with a breathtaking grasp of real history and secondary-world creation, yet prone to unedited and wallowing prose, this person might not be able to work with any editor in the known universe. I’ve seen the hysterical meltdowns. I can’t even beta read for Person B any more. There’s no point. Nothing gets changed.

Worse than that, Person B has an albatross. A windmill. (If you don’t understand my allusions, go read the Wiki entries for Coleridge and Cervantes.) Person B’s baggage is an obsession not with a major historical figure now either reviled or celebrated (depending on who you ask), but that person’s child. Person B has dedicated their literary life to different versions of stories ‘rescuing’ that child. Up to worrying about the afterlife, and meeting that child’s spirit, and being blamed for somehow making things worse by drawing attention.

Oi. That’s an albatross**, folks. There are some killer, incredible space operas that will probably never see the light of day, because they’re not strong enough to compete with the Martyr Child in Person B’s imagination. I’m not a psychotherapist, I can’t begin to guess at the transference happening there. But I can mourn what probably won’t happen, and what probably will.

Do I have a windmill? Sure. It took me twenty years to either demolish most of mine or turn away from them. I was proud, as many new writers are. I was naive. I believed in one writing friendship too long, and not enough in another, and regret losing both. I was an avid reader, which helped by osmosis. But I’d skated through public school English classes with enough dumb luck and cunning mimicry to disguise my unstructured writing. Creative writing in college did little for me besides ego-boost; the things I learned in technical writing save my ass to this day.

The damn Lonhra Sequence is an albatross I may never be able to ditch completely. It’s a 32-year-old worldbuilding experiment I began as a hobby, and it took over a large portion of my brain’s processing and storage power. I know I can write standalone fiction. But I always get a combined thrill/chill whenever a new story slots neatly into the Lonhra universe. Because my brain says: ‘Oh hey! I know where these people fit! Cool!’ and ‘Oh crap, it’s back into the Lonhra stuff again, which means I may not be able to do anything but self-publish this pile of rubbish…’

We keep our windmills and albatrosses because they satisfy a basic need. They’re easy, they’re safe, they belong to us alone. If we shroud them behind proud obscurity, they can never be torn down and challenged by other people who aren’t in love with them. That’s deep comfort to writers for whom the inner story is more important than any outward validation.

* I dislike impersonal pronouns, but I need to use them in these cases.

** One way to get an albatross off your chest? Humor. Instead of murdering your darlings, put them on stage at a slimy comedy club and roast the hell out of them. Parody them first before anyone else does. See them from another angle, and they might surprise you by being more resilient than you thought. I like starting out with this Monty Python skit.

The most recent time I tried the self-parody trick, I ended up with a Dark Lord nicknamed Hayfern, and a much better story.