What looks like overwhelm, feels like overwhelm...
...and turns out to be a really good idea in a really good disguise?
Vending machines don’t usually come up much in my life. I work from home, am mildly allergic to a lot of things they contain, and fundamentally don’t trust them not to eat my money. This changed last week when Chris, Emily and I were recording the episode of the Writers’ Gym podcast that airs tomorrow, and I found out I was one.
Emily Inkpen described her writing mind as a vending machine. We writers need to get the ideas at the front out, so that new ones come forward. This made absolute sense to me (more on that in a moment) and, as will surprise absolutely no one, led us down a long and pleasant path of vending-machine-and-writer metaphors including Chris’s excellent example, of how the more one wants the cheese and onion crisps – i.e. a favourite idea – the more likely one feels it is to get jammed (Do bring your own metaphors to the comments on the episode tomorrow!).
It can be quite overwhelming, knowing your cheese-and-onion crisps are still inside the non-literal vending machine. It’s the reason I’ve given myself time off from pitching articles for this year. After two short story collections, I’ve returned to the novel I was writing when two of my stories were accepted for Black Shuck Books anthologies, I was offered a collection, thought something that wasn’t but might as well have been “Oooh, shiny” and ran off to do that. I learnt a huge amount about myself as a writer, and about writing. I’m so glad and enormously proud of Twisted Branches, and that my prior Black Shuck Shadows title Beyond Glass sits alongside so many writers I admire. But the least expected good thing? Unlike when I was first writing the novel I’ve come back to now, and as a less experienced writer with more to prove to myself (or the world, as when we first begin we tend to think is where the proof needs to go). I know it’s not about getting every great idea I’ve ever had in one book. That even if that were a) a good idea or b) possible, it’s not a great long-term writing strategy.
Doing what I love, the best I can, means creating time for it. It means picking time that suits me, holding those boundaries myself (rather than expecting the world to), investing my trust in relevant, trustworthy beta readers, and spotting the overwhelm when it comes – and knowing it’s a good sign. Because what it truly means is I care about this book. Yes, that feels obvious to say, as that’s why it’s the one I’m writing. But that lack of deadline or external necessity to finish can result in not beginning. Stepping away from other submissions and the short-term reassurance and the confidence- and CV-building (literal and emotional) they provide is a bet in itself. But underneath the overwhelm is the opposite: knowledge that the thing I love is happening. And whatever happens to it when it arrives, there is more in the vending machine, stacked behind it, ready and waiting.
May you, too, prioritise your metaphorical cheese-and-onion crisps. And may you always know there’s more to come behind them.