The results are in, and I won the second-annual post-Clarion-West 2008 writing contest. The top three people were:
1: Me (70 stories)
2: Maggie (45 stories)
3: Pam (42 stories)
I turned in #70 just before midnight, New Year’s Eve, and haven’t written anything since then, which has been weird, but not as weird as one might imagine considering that for almost two months straight, come hell or high water, I wrote a story. The silence over the last three days hasn’t even especially been a relief, which I suppose is good — the actions surrounding the writing of the stories had become so ingrained that writing one every day seemed the natural thing to do, which was a beautiful state to have achieved.
One might wonder, if this is true, then why did I stop? I stopped because I was tired, honestly; of writing stories, and of every damn other thing. The semester was hard, living inside my head this semester was hard, and I have few cognitive reserves left for doing much of anything. That’s part of the reason.
The other part, the more important part, is that the quality of the writing was compromised, had been compromised for at least the last three weeks, possibly longer. I think I did my best work up to maybe a week or two past what got posted here; after that, while I’m not ashamed of the work, I’m not proud of it either, the way I’m proud of a lot of the stuff that came earlier.
More simply: some things can’t be done in a day; and I’d like to do some of those things.
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It’s worth asking what was achieved in all of this.
1) The most notable thing was having become a person who could go from nothing, not even an idea, to a 2000 word story in a couple of hours, and then ship it. This won’t seem as profoundly life-changing to people who are not me, and who don’t struggle with starting things, or finishing them, so I won’t belabor it further.
2) The second most notable thing is understanding the role of obligation in accomplishment, which is large. Committing to something, having something at stake, means everything. I wish it didn’t, but it seems to; for three straight years what I’ve discovered is that I’m not worth too damn much until something is on the line, until I’m being squeezed, at which point I stop being such a shitbag.
3) The third most notable thing is that now I know what it’s like to have nothing in the tank, to want nothing less than to struggle to create something out of nothing; and TO DO IT ANYWAY. I’d experienced this a handful of times before, mostly playing basketball; but I’d never experienced it over and over, night after night, to the point where that panicked feeling got to be like your alcoholic friend stopping over on his way home from the bar. You look at your watch, wonder when he’ll arrive; you expect the knock, so you’re ready when it comes, and you learn, after a while, that after an uncomfortable ten minutes he’ll leave.
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Let’s do a thought experiment: having learned these lessons viscerally, and repeatedly, over the last three months, what do I think would be the WORST POSSIBLE SITUATION for me? The conditions for the worst possible ‘contest’, a sort of anti-CCW0809, where I was put in the best possible situation to fail?
1) No time pressure: If I needed more time to plan, or to move forward with the plan, or to take a break because I was too tired, or had other obligations, or whatever, I could just take the time I needed.
2) No measurement or comparison: I’d need whatever I was doing to be impossible to quantify; or at least, possible for me to _make_ it impossible to quantify. There must be no way someone could look at what I’ve done, and look at what somebody else did, and say: Shane, you lose. Shane, you’re getting your ass handed to you by Maggie.
3) Deferred feedback: Whatever _did_ get produced in the course of the ‘contest’ would only be seen in context after a long time. Using CC0809 as an example, if I produced a story it wouldn’t appear on the rolls until, say, fifteen years later; if Pam took a ten point lead I wouldn’t know about it until August, 2015. Etc.
4) No expectations; or counter-expectations: either people wouldn’t know I was even in the ‘contest’; or they’d know, and not expect anything in particular from me; or they’d know, and they’d expect me to do poorly.
5) No social element: whatever was going on with the ‘contest’ would be a solo affair. Nobody I knew would be doing it; there’d be nobody to talk to about whaever was happening; nobody would find contest-related events interesting or news-worthy.
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So what it mostly looks like is that the absolutely un-ideal ‘contest’ for me was the ‘contest’ of my real life for much of the last decade, where I had minimal obligations and a sort of blank check for pretty much everything. Thirty years old and accomplished fuck-all? That’s fine, I’m actually doing something else than what anyone else is doing. This living in my friends’ basements or spare bedrooms, spending all my time in cafes, inventing new languages in my journal and designing stories, this is all too complicated for you to understand. I’m taking a different road. Etc.
I think what was so murderous is how true most of those statements were. I really _was_ trying to do something different. I had some stuff to figure out. And one of the great accomplishments of this contest, which I should have indicated as point 4) above, is that I realized, all of a sudden, that vast swaths of my life had not in fact been wasted, as I’d been accustomed to thinking, or if not wasted, then utilized to only 5% of their capactiy. Those uncountable hours in cafes, scribbling in that notebook, or smoking in Buenos Aires, or convelescing in Kuala Lumpur, all of that had to have happened for those seventy stories to have happened. It’s like the apocalypse came and a bunch of the junk I’d been hoarding in the basement turned out to be necessary to survive the hard times that followed.
Still, only _some_ of the stuff in the basement proved useful. Much of the time _was_ wasted, because it was time spent living under the five thought-experimental conditions. And I have by no means been ‘absolved’ of those conditions; identifying them gives me nothing, except, hopefully, impetus to avoid them in the future.
And what is scariest is how those conditions are so much of real life, for me and for so many people that I know. Maybe I should call it the “all the rope you need to hang yourself” methodology; and the pants-pissing-scary thing to imagine, that literally keeps me from sleeping some nights, is imagining myself at fifty, being in the same place that I am now; a bright guy, with a lot of potential. A gunslinger with five rounds chambered. Somebody who could have done something, who is, assuredly, PREPARING to do something at that very minute.
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I am afraid of:
1) Heights
2) Dementia, or brain injury
3) Being too crippled to read or write
but more than those things, by a bunch, I’m afraid of being that fifty year-old gunslinger.
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So there’s the contest wrap-up. You can probably tell where my head’s at right now; and if you guessed that these thoughts have worked their way into my proto-2010 resolutions, then you win a handshake and a no-expenses-paid dinner with Shane Hoversten (contact Shane Hoversten to claim your prize.) I’ll have more to say on these and other topics in the coming posts.
But before I go: these first few days after 01/01/10 are of course days like any days, and are no more, or less, portentous, than any days. They are also, undeniably, days written on a much cleaner slate than usual, however much you argue otherwise.
So I hope you treat them right.