Creating in a World That Doesn't Want You to Create

 If you're anything like me, you might be finding it difficult to create because *gestures widely* have you seen the state of the world? The quality of existential dread is definitely *chef's kiss*. 

I used to read and write dystopian novels. Dystopian was my absolute jam. "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood and "How High We Go in the Dark" by Sequoia Nagamatsu absolutely altered me as a writer and a person. 

But now that I'm living in one? Not so much. The last piece of dystopian fiction I worked on was called 'Magical Bodies' and I really really really had hope for that one. The story was flowing and coming together, but then reality took that sharp turn (which, in retrospect, was not so sharp), and I sat with this novel in front of me, with ideas and characters ready to go and I just...couldn't. That was in 2022.

So I sat and tried to make it work, but I couldn't, and then I got depressed and what happened after that I will address in another post because it's all linked together. I just couldn't write. And it was not good. I was lost without the ability to write dystopian fiction.

I finally broke through also in 2022 with another novel, one that is still in progress, 'In Pieces'. It felt strange because 'In Pieces' took me back to the original genre I wrote in, but felt silly as a 49 year old writing in: romance. But this one had a twist, because (thankfully) I have evolved past that 13 year old who was writing in the style of V.C. Andrews and Harlequin romances: a romance about mental illness. And it was going along. Still not feeling quite correct, but at least I was writing. 'In Pieces' went on the back burner in November 2024, when I started working on 'Summer of '89'.

Then I found I was writing a Youngish Adult novel about going to summer camp in 1989, and is based in part on events that happened to me growing up in the evangelical church I grew up in and spent time going to summer camp with. I'm happy with how it's going, but I have been working on it nonstop for six months and it might be time to let it breathe a bit. Ironically, I was able to better capture this work during the winter.

So that was a long way to get back to creating in a world that doesn't want you to create.

That's what this blog is about, among other things, but I chiefly would like to have this be a place where you as someone who is actively creative or on the back burner creative, or thought you couldn't be creative because you've never done it, or you tried, and it didn't work well, but something keeps bringing you back to creating.

And for those who are still in progress, because we honestly all are still in progress. I am learning to do this thing no matter what also. 

So maybe all of us artists, whether active, on pause or wondering if they should make the creative leap, can be together and maybe work our way through this world on fire.

And you might notice that this blog has a fun, peculiar name: Autotelic. That will be my next post, but what I will say about it now is that this is what I am going to live by now. An autotelic life is what I need, and maybe, it's what you need too.