Writing is sort of bipolar

I don't know what it's like for everyone, but for me, with a long project like a novel, things go in waves.  First you have some idea or some character in mind or something so you write it for a while, and things are going great, and the characters exist inside your head and you have to make sure not to think too hard about how you're starting from nothing and you're building a world from scratch and holy eff there's nothing there.  This goes on a while, and then eventually things start to take shape and come together and you can start to blend the disparate pieces into each other and smooth around the edges; things start to take on a cohesive form and there's a logic and a chronology.  Then you put it all together, and hey!  A draft.

It's a really nice thing to be in that kind of upward swing where you're starting to pull things together and it feels like everything makes sense.  Then you start revising.  Then it's hell.  Then you start tweaking here and there, and oh if you change this then you need to also change that, and suddenly you see how nothing works and whatever you've written is at once the most boring and the most maddening string of words anyone's ever slung together, and you have to change everything and then eff it you start from scratch and try to salvage bits and pieces here and there eventually your story about a man dying of ALS is a story about a teenage violinist.  (Not that that happened to me, or anything.)

And then, again, there's a part where things start to come together and the phoenix comes from the ashes or blah blah blah whatever yay for process yay for perseverance and suddenly life is good and things make sense and there's a MEANING and you aren't just scrabbling around blindly in the dark.  In a fishtank full of piranhas.  Novel-hating piranhas who want to bite off your fingers so you can't type so they will save the world from the awfulness that is your 'story.'

And you have a draft!  A story!  With a beginning and a middle and an end!  And it's amazing and the best thing ever and the world is so lucky, so effing lucky, that you're about to give it THIS.  You are welcome, world.  You are welcome for my art.

Then you go back to revise and you realize you have to blow the whole thing apart again and 'thing' is a generous description for this steaming pile of crap you've somehow produced and dear God, how the heck did you ever write this kind of garbage and so you start to tinker and then realize there's no way all these half-sentences you've been typing in a zillion different document are ever going to come together and yes I will eat three handfuls of gummy bears instead of typing and it was so much nicer when everything used to work together and this is never going anywhere ever and MOAR GUMMY BEARS GUMMY BEARS 4EVR and is it that the characters have betrayed you? is that possible? are you insane? have they been lying to you all this time? and let's just stress-eat a little bit more and really there's no point in writing because it will never go anywhere ever and life is futile in the end and look at that, a blank page and the cursor is BLINKING AT YOU BLINKINGBLINKINGBLINKING.

Blinking.

Guess which stage I'm in right now.

I am never not grateful that I get to do this, believe me.  I know how lucky I am.  (And I am also extremely lucky to have a flexible day job, and moreover one that is based on very quantifiable things so I can measure my self-worth in hard numbers when it gets too depressing to do it via writing.)  Too bad I'm wasting the chance on drivel.

Things will get better in a few days.  Then I will be euphoric again.  This is good for mental health, correct?

In slightly less crazed news, things I've learned about God from the writing process:

1.  I can't create a world that's basically an exact copy of the real one when you give me all the time and space in the world plus opposable thumbs so I can type a zillion words about it.  Creation is amazing.  The mechanics of creation are amazing.  The world and the human experience are really stunning, mindblowing things.  I am not God.

2.  You hear a lot about how God is supposed to be outside of the constraints of time they way we view them.  This makes sense to me when I think of my characters, because they exist in my mind in all stages of their lives simultaneously, in all the different versions of themselves and before and after various changes to their beings; in my mind, time is entirely fluid.  I wonder if it's something like that with us and God.

And things non-God-related I've learned:

1. Stress-eating is fantastic because not only does it not fix anything, it makes you feel worse afterwards too.

2.  And yet somehow logic does not prevail.

3.  Actually, that is sort of about God.  Or at least me + God.  Somehow knowing better doesn't prevent cycles of regret.