Sometimes disengaging is the best way to engage.
—Rick Rubin
Lately I’ve been thinking of the idea of surrender—surrender as a way to tap into deeper layers of creativity, to invite curiosity, to find new ways of writing and exploring.
Perhaps it’s because I’m in that strange no-man’s-land between projects. I could try to resuscitate one of my half-finished novels, and I know I could make it good enough, interesting enough, but I feel like I’d be willing the story into life, grinding it forward. If I’m honest with myself, none of my old novels are truly calling me. They are friends who moved to different cities and now have a new group of friends. I’m not even sure if I have the right contact information for some of them.
I want to be called by a story. I want to fall in love with it. I want to be so overwhelmed by it that I’ll follow it anywhere.
I’ve recently spoken to several authors on my Write-minded podcast who have inspired me by what I call their “purposeless” writing—a version of surrendering. Paolo Bacigalupi, Lan Samantha Chang, and Rachel Khong all followed a process of writing just to write, writing aimlessly, and in that process of free and casual writing, the gravity of a story began to pull each of them forward in different ways, and soon they found that they’d essentially discovered their next novel . . . as if by accident.
Or perhaps their next novel discovered them. It accumulated randomly. Without being willed. They simply surrendered to the mysterious forces of their imaginations, and surrender delivered them.
Paolo Bacigalupi’s Breakdown
Most writers have a failed or abandoned book project—or two, or three, or four—over the course of their lifetimes. The more you write, the more crisis moments you face. It can be hard to come back from those moments, and Paolo Bacigalupi didn’t think he would come back from his worst of these. He was at the edge of despair and had lost all motivation to write, despite the critical and commercial success of his novels. He wrote climate fiction, and he lived climate truth every day, so all the anxieties of his fantasy world and his real world created what he called a “synergistic toxicity.” That toxicity caused him to have a nervous breakdown and literally shut down creatively.