Creative Alchemy: Why We Create

🗣️ The below is a “transcript” of this episode, cleaned up for clarity and readability. I’m testing out various ways to make this podcast as accessible as I can for people, so please be patient with me as the dust settles.

안녕하세요, 친구들, and welcome to Creative Alchemy, a podcast about artistic wounds, feeling lost in translation, and the magic necessary to transform inspiration into art. I’m your host, S. Jae-Jones, but please call me JJ. I’m the New York Times bestselling author of the Wintersong duology and the forthcoming YA fantasy series, Guardians of Dawn, the first installment of which will be published August 2023.

Well. Hello, my friends. Once again, I apologize for any distracting noises in the background. The dogs are in my office while the cleaning lady works in the rest of the house. You know, the funny thing is that Castor and Pollux absolutely LOATHE our vaccuum whenever Bear or I use it, but have no problems with our cleaning lady’s vacuum. They’re only in my office because they’ll be underfoot otherwise, fascinated by all the cleaning implements and trying to “help” in their little doggy ways. Also, I am still signing and stamping things for ZHARA that I can’t talk about yet, so that’s the rustling noise you’re hearing in the mic as well.

So! Anyway, how we doing, what’s happening? I’m in the middle of zero drafting GUARDIANS 2, which is a bit of a departure from how I drafted the first book — which is to say, terribly and in agony. You know that saying that it takes 10,000 hours to become a master at something? Theoretically I should be a master at writing by now since I’ve accrued WAY more than 10,000 hours writing just ZHARA alone.

But the problem with this 10,000 hours rule is that it would really only apply if I wrote the same book over and over again. And that’s the problem with writing and creativity in general: you’re never creating the same thing twice. And to be frank, I don’t want to create the same thing twice. One of the best things my editor told me during the writing of Shadowsong was, “You don’t have to write the same book over again.”

So here I am, not writing ZHARA over again for GUARDIANS 2, even though it contains many of the same characters. But it’s not just the story that’s different; it’s the writing process itself.

There are a lot of things different between the drafting of ZHARA and this book, the first of which is I’m now medicated for both bipolar disorder and ADHD. Mentally and emotionally, I’ve noticed an enormous difference in that things are easier for me now than they used to be. I’m still manic on occasion, and my focus is...well, ADHD, but it’s not as hard to work with them anymore.

Second, I’ve essentially gone on a social media diet. That was part of my intentions for 2023, of course, but oh my god, has it helped. It’s amazing how much more time I have when social media isn’t sucking up huge portions of my day.

Third, I’m zero drafting. This is a method I’ve heard about from several other writing friends, but what it essentially comes down to is this: not caring whether or not the writing is good. Names, places, anything that you don’t know straightaway get put into brackets for later, even things like scene or dialogue transitions will also be put aside, repetitions, awkward phrasing, all of that — don’t care. The point of the zero draft is to get the story down, so all those things can be fixed later.

I both love and hate this.

I was listening to the Happy Writer Podcast with Marissa Meyer the other day, and she mentioned in an episode about productivity that the writing you do to come up with story and the writing you do when you sit down to write are two different skills, which opened something in my brain. Because while I do love coming up with story, I absolutely loathe sitting down and having to write it. Actually writing is the most tedious part of writing, and as I’ve mentioned before, the thing I fear most is tedium.

I often pre-write before I write, meaning I sit down and journal through what happens next. It’s usually the transition between me thinking aloud in my journal and then sitting down to execute it in writing that I struggle with, because I will endlessly ruminate over the way something sounds, or alliteration, or metaphor, or even just get lost in the marshes of description because I’m not a visual writer and I overthink what is necessary for visual description.

I have to ignore all that when I’m zero drafting.

And it is liberating, but also terrifying.

Which leads me to this month’s Creative Alchemy topic. (See what I did there, ooh a transition!)

Why on earth am I doing all this?

Last month, I talked about art and the definition of it, so I guess this month I want to delve a bit into the why we make art in the first place.

A question authors often get asked on panels or in interviews, What made you become a writer? And a lot of times the answer I will hear (and the answer that I, myself, have given many times) is the author’s journey to publication, not necessarily why they became a writer in the first place.

And it’s two different things, isn’t it? Because why someone chooses to get published and why they started creating art in the first place aren’t the same. Or at least, they aren’t the same in almost every artist I know.

And does the creative impulse always lead to art? That’s a question I grapple with a lot, especially as someone who was repeatedly told she was creative as a child. I was an only kid for the first ten and half years of my life, and I learned very quickly how to entertain myself. I told myself stories, I drew pictures to illustrate the stories, I dressed up my stuffed animals and played pretend. In many ways, all my creative impulses as a child were all in service of my elaborate tableaus of make-believe. Was that art?

If I’m ruthlessly honest...no. Creative impulses for the sake of creative impulses are not the same thing as art that says something. Something that asks to have a conversation with someone. Creativity that asks to be witnessed...and judged is art.

Because there’s no point in sharing art if you're not willing to be judged. That’s the terrifying part of turning any creative hobby into a professional undertaking; the judgment. The reception. A creative work can be perfect in your head and will remain so, as long as you don’t share it. Opening your art up for judgment is an act of bravery, and it’s brave because it’s vulnerable. That’s where your artistic wound comes in, I think. The subject or theme or idea that you keep returning to in your art, because you’re desperate to find someone who sees you, who understands you. Everyone’s artistic wound is different, of course. Mine is a perpetual fear of being misunderstood, and that manifests itself in different ways throughout my work in different characters. I call it the “lost in translation” fear. What I mean and how it’s received.

But the concept of an artistic wound is Future JJ perhaps articulating something that Past JJ was not intentional about, or even conscious of. If I think back to why I even had artistic endeavors in the first place, it usually just comes down to “I liked it.”

I liked to draw. I liked to tell stories. I liked to play dress-up. I liked to sing and I thought playing piano was cool. It didn’t hurt that I was fairly gifted in most of my artistic pursuits. The positive reinforcement of being told I was good at these things kept me going long after they stopped being “fun.”

I suppose writing is the only one my creative pursuits that continued being fun.

It’s funny to think of writing like that, especially considering how much agita it’s caused me. I hate writing as much as I love it, but it has never stopped giving me joy. Why is that? What is it about writing that my other artistic talents have never given me?

Back in high school, I was part of several different arts conservatories because my all-girls school was fancy like that. In fact, the conservatories were the reason I wanted to attend when I was in the midst of application season during middle school. I went to private schools from 5th grade onward, but as my school only went through 8th grade, I had to apply to the private high schools I wanted to attend.

There were a lot of conservatories to choose from in my high school, from photography to ceramics to mixed media (early digital design) to theater and theater tech. You had to audition for each one, and I chose three: vocal, visual arts, and creative writing. Of the three, I was probably the most serious about visual arts; I pursued AP Art, and worked very hard to compile my portfolio for the board..

But I learned fairly quickly that while I was a talented draftsman, I had no real genius for visual arts. I chose portraiture as my portfolio concentration for the AP board, but it was mostly because I’m good at drawing faces and it was easy for me. But being good at drawing faces and being a visual artist are two different things, and I was keenly aware of that every time I looked at my friend Carly.

Carly was an amazing artist in absolutely every sense of the word. Not only did she had a great sense of movement and composition, she had a dreamy use of color that was unique and distinct. I struggled every semester with our large projects, assignments which required me to be more, well, creative, but in Carly’s work, it was like a door into a different world. Her work invited you to look and have a conversation about it. Mine were, well, labored is probably the kindest way to describe them. I usually tried to Say Something™ with my art, often about feminism or beauty standards or capitalism — before I understood that capitalism was what I was trying to make Statements about (I was a burgeoning Marxist before I had even read Marx) — and consequently they were all dull, unmemorable, and forgettable, even if the skill was good. My best work tended to be when I was being my most trollish, when I wasn’t taking it very seriously at all. I once painted a six foot portrait of David Duchovny and then added real shoes which came out at the viewer. During the gallery showing, I put him right around the corner as you descended the stairs. There were screams of shock all night.

I knew by the time I graduated high school that I was not a visual artist, not like Carly, at any rate. I drew my little cartoons and manga-inspired artwork in the margins of my notebooks, trying my best to bring characters that existed in my head to life. And that was fine. By then, I knew that visual arts was just another tool I had in my elaborate tableau of make-believe, tableaus I was still creating as I went off to college. I was still playing pretend, and all my artistic pursuits were in service of that.

All except writing.

Growing up, my friends often referred to me as The Writer. This was in the heyday of Sex and the City (before it became terrible), and I was frequently called the Carrie of my friend groups. (Unfortunately, she is, objectively, the absolute worst.) I didn’t write seriously for a very long time; I wrote a lot of fanfiction in middle school and high school, but my teenage years was the first time I started to create for someone else. For my friends. I wrote punny joke songs full of inside jokes about our teachers, I wrote my friends into the fanfics I wrote, I wrote little plays and scripts involving our favorite characters and sometimes people we knew in real life. I didn’t think of this as art, not yet, because it was nothing like the canon of literature we were forced to read for school. I was reading a lot of manga, so I created my own original manga, I started getting into Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics. I was creating for my friends to witness, and I was waiting for their judgment because it was their judgment that brought me joy. Their critiques, their laughter, and even their tears were exactly the validation I sought.

During a therapy session while I was unloading upon my lovely therapist all the frustrations I have about being published, she asked, “Why do you stay published?” And I’ll admit the question absolutely floored me, because I’m always interrogating why I got published, not why I stay published.

Because ultimately the answer to why I got published is trivial. I got published because I could. I knew I could do it, so I did. I wish the reason were more noble or even more personal than that, but it’s not.

As for why I stay published...

In third grade, we had a journal writing assignment for English (which I think we called Language Arts or something like that). Every week we were to write a page or so according to the prompt Miss Patch gave us, and the next day, we were invited to read it aloud, if we wished. Most of the time, we did not take her up on it. Then one week, the prompt Miss Patch wrote on the board was this:

If you woke up tomorrow and you were the opposite gender, what would happen?

That afternoon, I walked home and wrote eight pages.

The next day, when Miss Patch asked if there were any volunteers to read from their journal entry, I raised my hand for the first time. I got up from my desk and sat in the little chair at the head of the rug we all sat on for story time and announcements. The rest of the class gathered at my feet.

And I started reading my story.

I don’t remember much about it, only that I had gender-swapped absolutely everyone, which had the entire class in stitches. I talked about Miss Patch — now Mr. Patch — with a moustache, red like his hair. I described my deskmates, Scott and Geoff, one in a white silk dress and the other with pink hair ribbons tied into a bow. The hair bow detail got the biggest laugh, and Geoff even jumped up from the floor in delight.

It’s Geoff’s little jump of delight I remember every time I question why I stay published. It was like magic, seeing the effect my words had on someone.

And it’s that magic I keep chasing.

That’s all for this episode of Creative Alchemy. And as I always tell myself, Take your art seriously, but don’t take yourself seriously. Until next time, 친구들.