Magical Thinking and Creativity

Sometimes my friends spark ideas for blog posts, like Pat's post about magical thinking. Because I didn't want to clog his comments with my endless fonts of frustration, I skedaddled over here to talk about it.

Magical thinking is a logical fallacy: specifically a causal one, where the relationship between cause and effect becomes blurred. Common examples include the traditional belief that plants shaped like a human body part would have healing properties for that body part, thinking that speaking of the Devil invokes his presence, and thinking that writing is reliant on a muse.

Sometimes it can be difficult to write, or difficult to write well, when one is not in the right mood. I usually just work on something else - a different project, art, knitting and watching Battlestar Galactica. This is not because of some elusive muse. This is because I am cranky and, nine times out of ten, too lazy to go through thinking exercises to get into the right mood for a particular project. If you are less lazy than I, reading about Feeling Rational or How To Be Happy or The ABCs of Luminosity might give you tools to consciously take steps towards being in a mood more conducive to writing. If they don't do that, they will hopefully at least distract you: I consider rationality articles a worthwhile distraction, because they add to my knowledge base.

Another common piece of magical thinking is to trust the story. This is a mixed piece of advice. If I am sitting down with no idea in mind but an image, I can write that image, but not a story. If I start on a story, it goes nowhere and is generally awful. I have yet to encounter anyone who is able to write a story just trusting it, with no active planning on their part. On the other hand, if I have thought through what I want to happen at the end, how I want characters to interact, how things will interact, I feel like I can trust the story and just write without consulting an outline frequently (or sometimes at all). If I have thought it through, the story is my creation, and I am trusting myself to follow through on my idea.

I do not 'listen to my characters,' as I do not experience psychosis. If I am having difficulty with having a particular character do a particular thing, I sit back and take a moment to examine my characterization. Is this in line with this character's motivations? Abilities? Am I taking an unexplained and rapid shift in character? Sometimes I have misstepped in characterization, and then I go back and fix it, but it is a matter of recognizing it as a flaw in the writing, not as making imaginary people do what they don't want to do. There is frequent talk of characters and having them live in ones head, but I really don't like that, because of my next point:

Creativity and mental illness are frequently conflated. There is some science to a correlation between creativity and some mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder, but correlation does not imply causation. Feelings of alienation in general, which can sometimes stem from a feeling of other-ness caused by diagnosed mental illness, give people something to write about. Alienation is impetus to connect through art. But mental illness is not the only way to be alienated, and alienation is only one form of impetus. So people really need to shut the fuck up with "all writers are crazy" as their tittering justification for affected eccentricities. Not only does it otherize creative people it diminishes the import of a diagnosis, and also contributes to the proud declaration of mental illness from teenage writers who have nothing more diagnostically viable than Teen Angst. Teen writers loudly declaring their darkness of soul make it harder for teenagers actually sinking into a pit to be noticed. Cultural narratives of mental illness and creativity as synonymous are damaging, and we need to stop it. Eventually I will have a post entirely about cultural narratives, but today is not that day.

I've already written about Writing What You Know, which is not always magical thinking, but is still an aphorism frequently bandied about to limited good effect.

Another piece of magical thinking is that drugs or alcohol or otherwise altered states help with writing. Some of this can be blamed squarely on Jack Kerouac and the Beat artists. Altered states do not intrinsically help with writing or other creative efforts. The only thing they might help with is in lowering inhibitions. For example, I have been known as of a summers evening to sip Kahlua and hammer through a bunch of critique. The critique is snarky, but it goes quickly, because I don't second-guess myself. I try not to write like that, though, as I have to go around cleaning it up in the morning, which is boring.

Are there any frequent instances of magical thinking that I've missed? Let me know below.

Meta: Violence and Violins

I got an itch to write, but didn't want to work on any extant projects: I was too restless to refer to an outline, and couldn't think of anything in particular I wanted to write about. So, as usual, I badgered the first friend I talked to for a prompt.

He told me violence, or violins, or violence with violins.

We know each other from the Homestuck fandom on Tumblr, and then through talking on Skype. In Homestuck, the character Rose plays the violin, and the character Dave is associated with swords and is the 'Knight' class in the game they play, meaning that to me he is associated with violence. He also has time-travel powers and deejays, to explain some of the other references.

Rose is a passive class in the game they play, which is why I left her up on the tower. She is also associated with light, and with communing with things that live beyond the stars, which is how that symbolism sneaked in there.

The story itself takes place between events shown in the comic, and is meant to be one of the possibilities that could fill that gap.

The whole tone is somewhat ethereal, which was what I felt compelled to write at the time, but might not be the tone I'd use if I were to make it longer. The tone fits well with Rose, except that her writing is a lot more verbose. The exception is the metaphor about drunk surfers, which is more in Dave's voice. He's fairly verbose, too, though.

I think I caught the tone I wanted, even though it wouldn't be quite the same tone as the comic. It got the writing bug out for the evening, and my friend enjoyed it.

I probably could have done more in depth characterization, but that's one of the joys of fanfiction: Homestuck fans would already immediately recognize them.

Fic: Violence and Violins

The stars are cold overhead, and he can taste their distance, because it is measured in time.

She plays a dirge for the moon, and he records it to later make a battle hymn. As she plays, the strains of violin ghost through the city, and the Dersites look up. Identical smug tics drag up the corners of their mouths before their faces smooth to default. The crypts won’t be well-guarded for long.

The light of the constellations fluctuates with her tempo, their infinitesimal flickers declaring ‘soon’ for a value of soon whose picoseconds are engraved on his bones.

He jumps easily from the signal tower to the main portion of the roof. It’s only twenty feet. It won’t do any good if they’re allowed to interrupt her. There’s only one door that opens onto the roof, and only one fire escape that leads this far up. They are spaced such that he can keep an eye on both, and he does. He needn’t do more than that, not yet, so he stands with his hands in his back pockets and his shades firmly in place.

There will be no flashstepping tonight. He is here to defend and protect, and it’s not the drop to the street that he’s protecting. The first Dersite bursts through the door like the door did her a personal injury, then slows as she sees Rose up on the signal tower. She walks forward entranced, weapon in hand. She walks forward almost into Dave’s arms, but encounters Caledscratch instead.

They come in waves, lured by a melody they can’t escape. They fall like drunk surfers, unwilling or unable to pay attention to the steel and stars cutting them off from their goal.

He is sweaty and covered in blood not his own, and her melody has changed, no longer hitting high notes. The waves have slowed. They will not be ambushed on their way to their goal.

She floats down to join him, and blood leaks down her face where a string has snapped and recoiled.

He takes her hand and they take their tumor to the crypts.

Misogyny

I never wanted to write this post.

I am from the West Coast and from Madison, Wisconsin. I am from liberal places that pride themselves on being liberal and forward-thinking. I went to high school in the city that hosts the world's leading feminist science fiction convention, WisCon.

I also abhor ad misericordiam (I am sad so I am right) arguments or anything that sounds like them at all. Logical fallacies and fuzzy thinking are more objectionable to me than a great deal of sexism.

I'm just going to copy and paste part of a conversation here, because all of this is part of a broad conversation about society and what we think of it and how we are working on the parts we don't like.

• Mason: You interested in two articles on Sexual harassment in hacker and literary conventions?
• Me: yes, definitely
• Mason: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/08/12/220224/is-sexual-harassment-part-of-hacker-culture
• Me: unless it's about readercon
• Mason: Lolz
• Mason: Then ignore the readercon link
• Mason: And go with the Defcon one
• Me: lolk
• Mason: It'll pop into a few articles about various hacker cons
• Me: yeah
• Me: it's interesting
• Me: I am glad I am tall
• Me: I get very little physical harassment

I shared a story about work, which made him say 'bleh.'

• Me: and it's better here than it was in the midwest
• Mason: Really?
• Me: it's been over a month since anyone called me 'sweetie,' and no one has called me 'doll' here even once
• Me: I get maybe a customer a day who drifts to talk to a male coworker at some point
• Me: I get an average of a customer a week who will ask me and a male coworker the same questions and only believe his answers
• Me: this is -better- than Madison
• Mason: I was just going to ask if sweetie was that bad, but I can't imagine it being said in any capacity that doesn't convey condescension

He ended up linking me to the Red/Yellow Card Project, which is really neat, especially in that it does not require me to continue to be verbal. That's important, as I tend to shut down when people are behaving inappropriately. If someone is making inappropriate comments or staring at my chest, no matter how much I object to it in principle and wish the behaviour would stop, I can rarely find the words, or am not brave enough to say them because it'll make the whole group awkward, and so I smile vacantly and don't associate with the group again if I can at all help it. This is not good. I am letting myself be cut off from social interactions, and they are not being told that what they are doing is not okay.

Those awkward moments that come from someone being called on behaviour are important. One of my coworkers didn't learn until his late 30s that 'gypped' referred to being cheated, as by gypsies, and has now wiped it completely from his vocabulary. If someone had pointed it out earlier, even if it had caused some momentary awkwardness and tension, if would have stopped him saying such things in front of people who might have been hurt by it.

White Knighting is a related but opposed concept. If you are in a group, and someone is saying something sexist to a woman present, and you are a man, before you step in to call the person on it (which is going to be your first automatic reaction, because you are a decent human being), consider: how is the woman reacting? 

• Does she look like she's gearing up to tell him off?
•  If so, cutting her off is part of denying her agency, and is also a problem. 
• Does she look really uncomfortable and unsure how to respond? 
• Then your calling the other person out is probably appropriate. Refer to Seebs' guide on calling people out for generally good principles and ideas on how to communicate that you want him to stop the behaviour without inducing defensive behaviour.
• Is she ripping him a new one? 
• Reactionary vitriol is not constructive: shout at everyone.
• Don't do this.

I never wanted to write this post, but I realized I had to when Mason asked my about my experience of sexism and misogyny and I responded that it wasn't that bad. I should not be minimizing and making excuses. I want to be the kind of person who can call people on their nonsense no matter the context. Part of that is admitting that the problem exists, and it is a problem.

It's the kind of problem that escalates into the ReaderCon fiasco, the kind of problem that means that I hadn't heard of WisCon until after I moved away, the kind of problem that means that pay disparity still exists. Just because it's not much of a problem for me personally doesn't mean I'm allowed to ignore it, which is why I had to write this post.