Tearing Stories to Pieces

When I’m not concentrating on what I’m doing, I’m thinking about stories. Sometimes, I’m thinking of my own characters and situations. Sometimes, I’m thinking of other people’s.

The pattern is always the same: I start off really excited about these personalities and that situation. Without any effort, I’m enthralled by character dynamics and dramatics and the ways I can imagine what could happen next to resolve this arc.

If the story is one that someone else wrote, and it’s serial in nature, sometimes I don’t get past this stage. The fired-up excitement can last the week or two it takes for the second half of a Star Trek two-parter to air (no, Odo, don’t join the Dominion!!!). But if the next part of the story takes longer than a couple months–or, worse, if I’m the one who has to figure out what comes next–I move into different stages.

The plain old plausible character interactions start to get boring, so I play with them even more. What if… that character died and came back as a ghost? What if there was time travel and older versions of these characters who know what happens next came back to show their growth to the younger versions? If Character A got sent to the past, how would they convince Character B’s younger self to trust them? Character C? What if the bad dead characters whose presence would be most dramatic came back to life???

With every new wrinkle, I can feel myself stretch the original story and characters more and more, closer to the point of breaking. When I was younger, I used to hungrily seek out fanfic about the characters I cared about in new scenarios to keep feeding my imagination, but I’ve learned that doing so tends to warp my feelings about the story and leave me feeling dissatisfied with whatever next installment might appear.

When I re-read my own writing, I see how long it took me to understand that I didn’t have to write “around” what I cared about–that if I really liked messing with the Sherlock Holmes/Dr. Watson dynamic or the possibilities of a character like Snape, I could include what made those characters and situations interesting for me front-and-centre. I didn’t have to restrict myself to exploring those ideas in a minor scene with a secondary character or implying them off-the-page, and I didn’t have to write fanfiction to do it.

(Although of course, if you want to, why not? Fanfic is great! I just didn’t want to, is all. I wanted to write the versions of the dynamic that I liked best, with characters that I loved and other plots that intrigued me, and also without worrying about other writers’ and readers’ canons.)

Getting into characters in this way doesn’t necessarily mean I think the story they belong to is perfect or even very good. I mean, my preteen self was already aware that The X Files could be silly and disjointed, but I still burned my mental energy over variations on Mulder and Scully. The converse is also true: some of my very favourite shows and books don’t hook me like this. For instance, I love Steven Universe, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, and pretty much everything Diana Wynne Jones ever wrote, and I hoard the books/DVDs/streaming season passes like a possessive dragon, but I never obsessed over their characters the way I do for other stories. In fact, sometimes I think that not loving the whole thing is part of what gets me, that this fascination happens when I love one aspect of a story so very hard but feel meh or negative about the rest, sometimes because it’s a hot mess (see: the aforementioned X Files), sometimes because it’s a consummately created, beautifully developed Just Not My Thing.

If you’ve read my blog posts over the years or clicked through the tags on the sidebar, you can probably see which stories and dynamics have been my focus over particular times in my life. In some ways, that’s how I organize my memories of the past, by which story dynamic took over my brain at the time. I can definitely see it when I look at the pulse of my past writing.*

I’m lucky that getting excited about other people’s characters can give me energy and ideas for my own, but there’s a flip side. Whenever I can feel the story getting overused for me–when I have to take my made-up scenarios wilder and wilder just to get a hint of that fascination from the beginning–I start to panic. What am I supposed to think and care about when I’ve worn my feelings threadbare? I can’t predict which stories–books, TV series, my own writing ideas etc.–will kindle my interest, so how will I find this passion again? What if I never do? How will I feel then?

That’s kind of where I’m at right now. Parts of the Locked Tomb series lit that fuse for me in January, and I’m so grateful they did–but I can feel myself getting disinterested and listless again. Which, overall, is probably for the best–if I were still as ignited as I was immediately after reading the first two books, how would I ever be able to wait until Fall 2022 for the next one?–but leaves me back in that worried limbo of wondering whether anything else will catch my attention enough to hold my interest.

I think of it this way: I can remember times as a child when I was excited to go to bed because it meant I’d finally have some uninterrupted time to think about the characters and scenarios I’d been longing to explore all day but couldn’t because of, you know, school and external social obligations and so forth. When I’m happily in the midst of a character-dynamic obsession, I still feel that way. But when the shine loses its lustre, I start to run out of things to think about as I’m trying to fall asleep, and, more often, I toss and turn and can’t quite drop off.

Is that normal? Not having access to others’ minds, I can’t say. In fandom circles, I read about characters living “rent-free” in fans’ heads, and I assume they’re experiencing something similar to me–maybe not in every detail, but close enough in kind. But I’ve never seen anyone discuss what to do when the shininess wears off and there’s no way to recapture it. Humanity is varied and wonderful, so I doubt I’m the only person who struggles when that happens, but I guess most of the time people don’t express it in fandom blogs and fanart posts, so even if others out there are expressing the same problem, I’m not seeing it.

So far, the only thing that helps for me is reading and watching whatever I can. It’s not the most effective strategy for a couple reasons: I obviously can’t tell in advance which stories will hook me, so I end up getting unreasonably disappointed with otherwise fantastic stories. I’m already at low creative energy, so I generally like whatever stories I’m consuming less than I otherwise would have, and I find it more difficult to motivate myself to start new ones.

Overall, I wish there were a better way for me to find the next Big Thing my brain wants to seize on, but there isn’t. And if you have any better ideas, in all sincerity, I’d love to hear them.

* I mean, when I look at my actual writing from childhood and adolescence, as in sentence-and-paragraph level, I can often tell which authors I was really into from my stylistic choices, but that’s not what I mean here.