Trust Your Obsessions (031)

(FYI: I recorded this back in January, and it was originally supposed to be the 7th episode, which is what I say in the opening, but nope! It's really truly the 10th episode of season 2!)

Inspired by part of a graduation ceremony speech Neil Gaiman gave wayyyyy back in 1997, this episodes starts from there and spirals out into talking about the value of your obsessions to you as a writer, not just as "things that you can talk about in a story" but as things that inspire you on a daily basis to practice your creativity.

“Go where your obsessions take you. Write the things you must. Draw the things you must. Your obsessions may not always take you to commercial places, or apparently commercial places. But trust them.” ~ N.G.

Along the way I mention a couple of books I was reading, which you can find out more about here:

Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey of Quantum Gravity

The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe
(Bonus! Co-author David M. Perry's twitter account)

NOTE: This are affiliate links, so buying from Bookshop.org helps not only independent booksellers but also me! And we could all use the help, yeah?

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TRANSCRIPT

The Author Alchemist Podcast
Episode 10, Season 2
Title: Trust Your Obsessions

Intro:
I'm KimBoo, the host of The Author, alchemist podcast, I'm bringing my years of experience as both a fan fiction writer and a professionally published author to the problem, we all love to hate the act of writing. You can't improve on something that doesn't exist. Which means the most important thing you could do is simply write anything. Just write something. I'm here to help you do that. Good morning. 

Podcast: 
It is Saturday, and I'm recording the podcast like a dutiful podcaster. on schedule. Will this get posted on Monday? That's an entirely different story. And I'll keep you posted. For sure. You know that I am absolutely devoted to y'all because I had to turn off the heater to record this podcast because my mic was picking up the noise of the heater running in the background. So I had to turn it off. And it's very cold, I think it's just under 40 degrees, despite the fact that it's 10:30am. And for me, as a Floridian that's pretty much Arctic temperature. So heater is off, but I am wearing a hoodie. I've, of course fully dressed, got a blanket wrapped around my legs to keep my feet warm. I have socks on. So I'm about as bundled up as I can be and actually not have my teeth chattering while I tried to record this. So moving on, this is episode seven, of the author, alchemist. And today we're talking about trusting your obsessions. This podcast idea was inspired by actually the confluence of two different things. One was an old tumblr post that I had saved, that was quoting an old, even older speech by Neil Gaiman. What is it 1997 or so about trusting obsessions in the value of going down research rabbit holes. And I'll get to that in a sec. But the other part of the inspiration of this was me on Twitter. Of course I I'm Mutual's or follow a lot of writers who talk about writing, that's what we do. And there always seems to be a theme, when writers talk about writing, of how we're not writing, how we are not actually doing the thing, how we are doing something else, how we're tweeting, instead of writing, how we're writing a book, instead of writing, how we are learning some new obscure trade or skill, and we're learning how to cobble shoes, instead of writing. Alright, that's all fair. We do need to write at some point. But I think sometimes we tend to get away from the fact that writing is energy intensive, brain intensive, and we can't do it 24 hours a day, as much as honestly, I would love to. We can't, brains just don't work that way. Even writers with incredibly high output on a daily basis, two to 10,000 words a day -- And it's possible to do -- to need breaks scheduled into their life, whether it's a day off, or they write long and hard for three months, and then take another full month off. Breaks need to happen. Distractions need to happen. And we spend all this time and energy focusing on things we're doing instead of writing. And it just made me think of this pullout from Neil Gaiman speech because he was saying that even though you don't always use your obsessions, sometimes they can become really valuable, and turn into something that is useful, usable, enriching, for your writing. So that's why I wanted to talk about this. The quote that really grabbed me from his speech is this part of it: "Go where your obsessions take, you write the things, you must draw the things you must. Your obsessions may not always take you to commercial places, or apparently commercial places, but trust them." If you are doing something that is not writing, please allow yourself the grace and the freedom to do that thing. Not long ago, I was seem to a book that I was really enjoying. And as I was walking the dog, I listen to audiobooks as I walk the dog, just because it's a way to keep myself from being incredibly bored, while Keeley stops to smell yet another bush along the way. So listen to audiobooks. And interestingly, I only listen to nonfiction audiobooks. I've tried to listen to fiction, audio books, I really just can't get into it. I have listened to some podcasts, not audio books that are produced stories that can be really good. And I've enjoyed those because those are really harking back to the old radio shows, right or even further back, you know, to storytelling around the fire in the the early stages of humanity. When all stories were oral traditions, though, in that sense, I do enjoy listening to fictional stories, but for some reason, audio books, fiction, audio books, I've never been able to grab onto that is something I enjoy. Nonfiction though, gosh, I've read a lot of nonfiction and a broad spectrum. It's not like I just listened to memoirs, or I just listened to science textbooks or biology books or reviews of archaeology or something like that kind of all over the place. I'll grab whatever interests me, something that sounds really good, has a good narrator. You know, I've read about Occupy, I've read about Noah, several books about the actual historical analysis of what Noah's Flood might have been. One of my favorite ones was about quantum gravity, beautiful, beautiful book by an Italian scientist. And I will actually leave the link to that one in the show notes. Because it's just a mesmerizing story I know about quantum gravity, which I can't even claim to be able to explain what quantum gravity is, even after listening to this book, but it's worth a read. And I was thinking, you know, I listen to all these nonfiction, I should listen to some books about writing. You know, there's some books out there that should be really useful to me, as a writer about craft, or as, you know, self publisher, which I primarily am at this point, marketing, branding, even the tradesy part of it, like formatting books and, and distribution channels, things like that. And so of course, I did that. And I was so bored. I was so bored, y'all, I was just like, you know, even if this is useful information, I am not ingesting it, I'm not enjoying it. I'm like listening in to five minute increments, and then getting impatient and switching back to one of my nonfiction books. And if you're curious, my most recent nonfiction book is the bright ages. A new history of medieval Europe by David Perry  and Matthew Gabriel. I follow David and Perry on Twitter and have for a long time, really great guy to follow. Very interesting book like this isn't a deep scholarly, you know, PhD thesis book. It is written for a mass audience mass consumption, and some of it I already knew, but it's really just very enjoyable to, like, pull the covers back and really look at the real history of medieval Europe, as opposed to a lot of the lies and mythology and ridiculousness that's built up around it over the years. So anyway, I'm gonna plug that one a little bit. Back to my point, though, then in trying to push myself to do something productive. I was actually making things worse, because I was inhibiting my creativity. One of the things that I've realized as I read this little post, and I'll link to it in the show notes, from the excerpt from Neil Gaiman speech, and thinking about my obsessions, and the things that I love to explore, is that I was feeling guilty because I couldn't figure out how it applied to my work my job, both as a writer and as somebody who's writing or creating online courses for writers. I feel guilty about something that brings me joy. And you know, that is no way to live. That is no way to live as writers. I'm certainly not opposed to doing research and study of craft. I think it's very important, obviously. But I think we do have a tendency to get swamped by our experts. that that's what we need to be doing all the time. I need to be writing all the time, I need to be studying about writing all the time, I need to read books about writing, I need to listen to podcasts about writing, I need to only talk about writing. And it's just antithetical to the creative impulse to try to corral it 24/7. And to try to only focus on this one thing that you feel is a requirement for you to be a better writer. You know, if you listen to my podcast, at least, I hope you know. But now that my focus is on getting you to write. There are a lot of other resources out there for helping you to write better. And I certainly do want you to write better, because I want to read what you're writing. And, you know, you need to be at a point where you feel comfortable putting it out into the world, either as a blog post, or, you know, an archive of our own. If it's fanfiction, or self publishing, or sending it to an agent, writing better is crucial to all of those goals. But the first thing you need to do in order to write better is to write ironically, sometimes, when we get into these obsessions, they can also serve as a distraction from writing. And I admit that too, sometimes I would rather listen to an audio book all day, then sit down and write sort of a different issue than what I'm focusing on in this podcast. But I think it's important to realize that maybe that instinct to procrastinate that instinct to, you know, not right might be born out of trying to corral yourself too hard trying to whip yourself into shape, so to speak, to the point where you're exhausted and you just can't do it. Trust your obsessions, follow your obsessions, but also understand why they're there. They're there as part of your creative urge. And it can be anything I include knitting, and crochet and the fabric arts, woodworking, anything doing with your hands cooking, if you want to explore a lot of different recipes, baking anything where you're using different parts of your brain, different parts of your experience, and engaging with something that is giving you that kind of learning Hi, oh, my gosh, you know, I'm doing this thing and I'm, and I'm succeeding at it, maybe I'm not where I want to be. But well, this cake looks great. Or, you know, this knitted cap is really neat, I can't wait to give it to my significant other or one of my family members or my friend. All of that is energy, all of that is juice for your creative impulse. And going back to what Neil Gaiman's pointed out, it can also be something that you pull into the creative work that you're doing. It might be a character who loves to cook. And so you love to cook. And you're like, Well, you know, I don't, I don't want to make this character into a self insert type of well, you don't, you don't have to, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about creating richness and depth to your characters. Somebody who learns knitting as a way to perhaps understand math, you know, to me, knitting is math made large, real, you know, concrete, three dimensional. And so I don't understand it at all. But I could see where somebody who does knit a lot, or sews or something like that can pull their understanding of that craft, into a story into the idea of knitting a story or character who's knitting their life together. I mean, they could go on there. There's a lot of shallow metaphors that we can pull into this discussion from there. And I'm trying to be a little deeper than that. But my point is, trust your obsessions. allow them time to breathe. Focus on what is giving you joy, and inspire you creatively. Because you can't write all the time. And you can't study writing all the time. Because if you try to do that, it's actually going to be counterproductive to writing the stories you want to write. Am I encouraging you to procrastinate on writing? Maybe a little bit like sometimes you do need a break as I was saying earlier. What I'm really encouraging you to do, though is to trust yourself. You can't put words on the page until you trust yourself to be able to put the words on the page. Vicious Circle, but a breakable one. That's what I want you to think about. Next time you sit down to do a puzzle, or read a romance novel, or bake a cake, or garden Outback is not necessarily think about, well, how can I use this in a story, but think about how this is creating much more complex tapestry in your life, that can be fuel for your creativity, which of course means fuel for writing. I hope I gave you a little bit of insight today into trusting yourself trusting your obsessions, the joys of writing, the importance of actually getting words written. That's, that's always the goal, right? So if so, thank you for listening. Please subscribe if you haven't. If you can give me some nice votes up on the different platforms of Spotify, you can give a thumbs up or something to nowadays, and of course, Apple, you can leave a review. So we'd really love it. If you could do something like that. I am trying to make this business a success. And keep having time to write my own stories. Anyway, coming up soon out from fanfiction might even be live by the time this podcast gets posted. And then after that when I'm working on whip into shape secrets of an alpha reader, that's about halfway done. And so that'll probably go up in February. And then after that I thought of a new course I'm really excited about it, the percolator method, which is going to be advice for Pantsers on how to organize their writing life in their writing goals. A lot of times we get told as pantser. So if you get stuck, just create an outline and like, you know, that's the whole, that's the whole reason I'm a pantser is because I don't want to create an outline. So I'm going to be working on that I'm not really solid on how that course is going to go. Might be really short one, but I'm excited about it. So stay with me, subscribe and all that sort of good stuff. And I will talk to you next week. Thanks for stopping by now. Go get you some writing done. 

Outro:
Thanks for listening to me ramble on about writing here on their author Alchemist Podcast. I'm KimBoo York and I hope this episode has helped clear away the cobwebs from your inspiration. For more podcasts and other tools including self paced online courses, please visit my website at w w w dot author alchemist.com no dashes or email me at KimBoo KIMB o at other alchemist.com I'd love to read your questions and feedback. Now it's time to get some writing done.