Ashley Stinnett | Beyond the draft

Just Monking Around | I finally got over myself and pushed out a (finished) piece

By Ashley Stinnett 09/12/16 12:02am

I call myself a writer, but I haven’t published anything in the three years I’ve been at this university. I take a lot of writing-intensive courses, sure, but I’ve never produced something that’s left the classroom.

How do you begin to produce something? First, wait until panic is induced. Second, inundate yourself with so much information that you can barely begin to digest it all. Third, cherry-pick bits that agree with what you already thought. And finally, word-vomit with the intention of shaping the piece into something intelligible later. Except that last part never actually happens.

Miraculously, this has served me quite well, but the personal effects suck. The behavior has been reinforced to the point where I can hardly do any task at all until it looms over me insurmountable, deadline so near that it instills a fear in me. Hallmark perfectionism — waiting for the proper conditions before commencing work. And apparently my proper conditions are day-of-the-deadline, sleep-deprived adrenaline rush Ben & Jerry’s in a fetal position on my living room floor.

Frenzied, I’ll type, making strange associations to my professors’ delight. My stomach churns when I finally submit, but the feeling of fullness once I know it’s done can’t be beat!

Maybe this is why my personal projects never quite take off — because with them, there is no done. There is self-loathing, really. So they normally don’t progress past the point of idea, and the idea gets killed. Because there’s not a hard deadline, there’s no one guaranteed to tell me in earnest, “Good job!” or “This sucks” — in a word, there’s no guaranteed audience. I have only the prospect of transmitting something to no receiver but myself. There’s nothing insurmountable looming over me except ... me.

And I think everything I do sucks, pretty much, until someone tells me otherwise. I think that’s the irony of being a “creative person” — you try as much as you possibly can to resist pandering to others, but it’s only when someone else has a reaction that you can feel at all okay about what you’ve done. Maybe this has to do with the economization of everything in this era. Don’t you dare have any zero days!

There’s no one waiting on you when you pursue your own project. This should be freeing, but for me, the lack of pressure simply renders me paralyzed. The lack of any production at all brings on the self-loathing. My feelings of fullness can only come from the outside, really.

I call myself a creative. Others look at the messes I make of my room, my utter lack of planning, my academic and professional “successes” despite all of this and deem me creative. But really, I just feel perpetually stuck — creative really doesn’t mean much when you’re not creating anything at all. There’s always this feeling of needing to be somewhere else, to be doing something else, that time is ticking and you’re never putting those hours into where they should be going.

It feels so horribly self-aggrandizing to call oneself a creative, to believe that you have some sort of sanctified purpose, a God in your own right, the conduit of “newness” or “originality.” Above the money, above the pleasing of others, above the selfishness and narcissism — I really think this personal designation is probably the most narcissistic thing of all: to believe that you can make something that others should spend their time absorbing and thinking about. To believe that your thoughts are so important that they ought to be written down and distributed.

And we can count the reasons why this all is the case for many with this loathsome “creative” designation. We’ve all read those disparaging articles (which always seem to shit on millennials): You were praised too much as a kid, not for your hard work, but your smartness; we’re all too addicted to instant gratification and clickbait and therefore, art is dead. In short — we care too much what others think. Maybe that was always the case, except there’s no muse singing into your ear now. There’s only the almighty like, which probably won’t even translate to the almighty dollar, but you hope your damnedest it will.

There’s a certain momentum that spurs creation. I worked on a couple of friends’ projects this year, grilling many about their creative processes. The most important thing, they said, is just to never stop putting your stuff out there. A freelancer one-night stand told me that he knows not all of his reviews are the best — but it’s important that you get those bylines and start the next piece. A screenwriter friend knows his hackneyed romance plot isn’t the best thing he’s come up with, but it’s important that he get something into production so he can finally complete a full movie. Just keep making stuff. Get beyond the draft.

So I’m ignoring the whining, the self-absorption — the horrible self-pity — that I can’t seem to scrub from this. I’m ignoring the inherent privilege of even being able to have this as an operative concern in my life, and I’m ignoring any of the vapidness I am so worried about being associated with. And hence you have this piece.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.