Gone Fishing

Only with words, which is a good thing, because I'm pretty bad at the other kind of fishing

In the space between one project and the next I’ve turned to fishing, with the page as a river.

I suppose you could call it brainstorming. To me that word suggests mind maps and charts, throwing-ideas-against-the-wall-to-see-what-sticks, no-idea-is-a-bad-idea, notecards on a pin board, the smell of dry-erase marker ink. It’s log lines and high concept pitches, it’s this-meets-that, it’s and-what-happens-at-the-midpoint-of-act-ii, it’s ‘MASQUERADE’ circled with three exclamation points.

All that’s fine, as far as it goes. But after a certain point, ideas melt together. The more confidence you have when it comes to storytelling in general, the harder it becomes to tell the difference between I could write that and I want to write that and something within me, which I can barely name, needs to write that, when you’re staring at a log line and a mind map and a few story beats. And while there’s no harm in writing a project because you can, or because you want to, there comes a time in any serious drafting process, and more to the point in any career, where desire and confidence falter, and what carries you through is some combination of momentum and need.

That’s where fishing comes in.

Now, fishing can mean a lot of things. My childhood experiences of fishing were limited to the usual four a.m. wakeups to put on sunscreen and silly boots and sit by the river with a friend of my dad’s, loving the water and the light, queasy at the thought of the hook, and all that to catch nothing or a sunfish. In China some of our friends and fellow teachers were weekend fishermen, which meant, for them, going out to a lake, casting manually from a long reel-less pole they’d then anchor on the shore, and sitting around for hours to talk and watch for the occasional bite. My teaching partner, Wyatt, was a trout fisherman of the disappear-into-the-mountains-for-a-weekend type. For him fishing meant fly-tying, walking, casting, reading the water. But for me, inexpert, all these experiences share an awareness of light, of silence, space, flickering surface, and then, sometimes, the surprise of truth.

The process is simple: sit down and write. Bring as few expectations to the page as possible, particularly instrumental expectations of selling, of business, of contract. If you have a drive to finish, allow yourself not to. Guide your expedition, if you wish, as a fisherman chooses a spot, judging depth and current and light—genre, mood, vague silhouettes of character, or even the desire to write about someone or some place without any sense of the particularities of person or place. Don’t make this time for anything. Invest in uselessness. Let cities rise and drift away, heroes form out of clouds and fade. If nothing presents itself, change fishing spots, adjust bait. Do not seek connections—connections will form themselves. And when you get a bite, don’t try to haul it to the shore at once. Maintain tension, interest. Eagerness breaks the line, or lets a promising fish escape.

This all might feel wobbly and indulgent, particularly if you have a genre workshop background, or spend a lot of time in how-to-write spaces or reading Save the Cat books and have read the great old 20th century “clock in, clock out” genre writers. And: it feels wobbly and indulgent to me, too! But I’m starting to feel that wobbly indulgence is important, for a healthy and lasting career. Learning the various storytelling crafts to a high level of skill can leave a postulant in a tricky place, in which almost anything can be done—with skill and chops ample to any pitch or log line—but without much room having been made for what brings the postulant to the page in the first place. There’s danger in that, as much to the postulant as to the work.

For the writer, raw technical fluency may permit continued operation deep into burnout or despair. Technical fluency may also interfere with or even forbid the regenerative aspects of work: preventing the author from honoring her own depth and truth in composition, because of a conviction that ‘this sort of story doesn’t work that way.’

For the work, the main danger is that needs will out. We could also call this the Pagliacci problem. If the writer has some compelling and unacknowledged need in direct conflict with his project—let’s say the project has a thematic warp of ‘love conquers all’ but the writer finds himself in a moment of heartbreak or despair—a lot of things can happen. Some of them are artistically and spiritually glorious: the writer writes his way into the light. Some are transformative: Hannah Gadsby’s Nannette, I’m told, took its life as a sort of ‘farewell to standup comedy, this isn’t working for me, so long, I’m done’ project. But sometimes the result is work that rings false in a way that’s quite challenging to revise around or through—or a complete block.

So, rather than march forward: wake up early, put on sunscreen and silly boots, bring a cold drink and a long pole, sit in the shade, catch nothing. Invest in uselessness, invest in dream. The fish will come—or they won’t, and at the end of the day your soul will at least have had the salve of silence and running water, which it needs, in all likelihood, more than you need a concept for your next book.

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I meant for that to be a few light grafs before talking about other things, but I think I’ll call it here! Recent hits from around the internet:

Tor.com recently published my essay Five Books About Homecomings, highlighting a handful of old and new favorites about homecoming in science fiction and fantasy.

Also on Tor.com, Ruthanna Emrys and Anne M. Pillsworth are hosting a chapter-by-chapter re-read of Last Exit. I’m sure they’d appreciate company on the way.

One final housekeeping note, on social media: I haven’t been particularly active on The-Artist-Formerly-Known-As-Twitter recently, and as the site teeters I don’t expect to spend more time there. I’ve been somewhat more active on Instagram and on Blue Sky and I have a Mastodon account on the Wandering Shop server, but I’m also taking the opportunity of the impending collapse of the old microblogging regime to Marie Kondo my own cognitive architecture w/r/t social media and so forth. This newsletter, however, marches on, as does maxgladstone.com.

Take care of yourselves, friends. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings.