Writers: Obsession

 Looking at myself, Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante's I’m Obsessed: On the Importance of Getting Lost in Your Writing (Literary Hub) makes sense. Once started, it is hard to shake off. 

The article marks obsession as a good thing:

For writers, obsessions—personal, aesthetic, emotional, intellectual—are not something to be tamed, managed, or medicated—at least not when they aren’t dangerous or debilitating. Instead, they should be welcomed, pursued relentlessly, and mined in our work.

My obsessions have history and memory, and getting the mechanics right. The last might be more of a hindrance, from what else the article has to say:

The prime directive (we think) is obsession. To write about things you care passionately about. To exploit your obsessions as both directional compasses and material: not what you know (or don’t know) but what you can’t stop thinking about.

No matter what a student chooses, we see a direct correlation between a writer’s and their readers’ excitement and discovery and willingness to go deep. To do so, the stakes often need to be raised from mere interest or idea.

We say, follow that heat, no matter how borrowed from “real life” or invented, no matter how improbable it seems as a subject, how big and overtly political or seemingly trivial, or how potentially mortifying it might be to admit that you should care about such a thing.

Since I have begun revising "Love Stinks" for the umpteenth time, I am not sure what to do with the following:

We think this dual strategy of focusing on your obsessions, and welcoming the strange places they might take you, is a critical aspect of good creative writing.

In fact, we believe it’s so important that we give it a name in our upcoming book from W.W. Norton, The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genres.

We call such deviations from an obsessive topic nonconforming oddities.

What’s a nonconforming oddity when it’s at home? Any unexpected thread that might not seem relevant at first, but upon developing (and revising) your piece, turns out to be extraordinarily important, even essential.

A nonconforming oddity is that image or section that a traditional writing workshop tells you to “cut” as a way to adhere to static ideas of form and consistency. But we encourage you to identify those moments as possible gold among the straw—and then see if your piece, in its final draft, earns it.

With this revision, I am moving further from "Love Stinks" origin as a screenplay. The new first chapter has gotten thumbs up from two of my three readers. I have in mind putting one scene at the end. I am trying to decide what I can save - and some of those items are certainly nonconforming oddities - but there will need to be some new connections made, too.

I think there is a serious truth here. Why else would Melville have written Moby Dick?

sch 6/27