(Originally posted on Live Journal – Feb. 9th, 2009 at 9:29 AM) Or would it be creative archeology? 
The last couple of weeks I’ve been transferring information from two notebooks into a program on my computer. Now, that might sound rather innocuous at the start, but it is, in fact, nit-picking and time-consuming. You see, back in the dark ages, when I was in high school, I got inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien. I had been doing some writing prior to reading Tolkien, but his works delivered that extra “umph” that really got me going in writing. I began a fantasy novel — which I did eventually finish after I had graduated! I even submitted it over the transom to Ballantine Books.
Thank God, it was rejected. I believe it is buried somewhere in one of my boxes of papers that have never been unpacked since I moved to California (Update 9/18/2016 – it is. All stowed away in storage for the present.). But I did finish it.
After I finished it, I lavished a lot of creativity and time building the world for it. Trying to write stories in that world. But they never really satisfied me. During this period, I was at college at the University of Houston, studying literature and training myself to be an even better writer. But I didn’t feel that my little created world (I had a huge world map I made, even!) was really gelling. So I stopped. Not writing entirely, but just working on my fantasy world.
Off I went to graduate school, which brought on additional considerations about my own creative process. Delving into Tolkien’s Silmarillion also made me look again at how I had been creating my fantasy world. I had started out with my initial novel, and had then tried to create the background for it, the mythology to fit the story I had. And that just had not worked. So I restarted while in graduate school.
I decided that I would just let it form organically. I would keep a notebook for ideas and write them down as they came to me. And – most important to me, it seemed – I would not impose names on characters and places until I was sure I had the right name. So, the early versions of some story ideas begin with things like “the daughter of the man who founded that city on that peninsula” — because nothing had a name yet. But it worked. The mythology started building itself, and it felt much more organic and (more importantly) mine.
Instead of feeling that I was borrowing or copying from Tolkien or John Milton (the two principle inspirations), I felt that I was just creating in their tradition – because I shared their outlook or impulse. The material grew from inside me, rather than pasted in from outside. The problem was – and is – that it did not come in any linear or orderly fashion.
I’ve come to believe that creativity does not want to be “orderly.” One day, I might be working on a mythological matters and the next scribbling down the idea for a story that would (in the created world’s history) occur a couple of thousand years into its history. With no names. Eventually names would come along and attach themselves to things and people.
Slowly, over the course of seven years, the key elements assembled themselves. (I can say seven years, because I dated all the entries in the notebooks – there are two of them). But now that I am working my way toward the end of The Ring of Adonel, and looking forward to actually starting writing out the other stories of Arveniem (the created world), I realized I needed to organize all that material. Thank heavens for Writer’s Blocks (the program I’m using). It helps me shuffle things around and add to sections easily. But even so, there’s a lot of opening and closing files going on, since I have topical files within the main Arveniem folder.
I started by working backwards through the notebooks, because I figure the later entries would have the most final version of stories and ideas. That way, as I come across the earlier, discarded versions, I don’t have to type them and then delete them. I am finding it interesting how some details have changed from their original concepts. But of all the changes, the one that most amuses me is one of terminology.
When I began, so deeply influenced by Tolkien, I called the race of immortals who were born in the world (as being distinct from the immortal angelic entities who came from outside the world) “elves”. When I’d written a few chapters of The Ring of Adonel, the invaluable sartorias recommended that I not use that terminology – so as not to be so much a copy of Tolkien. I eventually “found” the term “Fynlaren”, which became completely organic to the material. So now, as I read through the notebooks, when I read the word “elves” or “elf”, my brain automatically translates it to “Fynlaren” or “Fynlar”.
I was doing some work on it yesterday, and I actually laughed at myself when I realized at one point that the translation activity had become so complete that I looked at the word “elves” and didn’t even SEE the letters e-l-v-e-s. I “saw” F-y-n-l-a-r-e-n. Heh.
Part of my mind regards all this work as “make-do procrastination”, because I’m not generating new sentences and getting either the novels, the scripts or the short-stories closer to their completion. But the other part of my mind says that this is work I do need to do, for the benefit of future work. But boy, it IS work.
