Rather unsurprisingly, running an Internet search on “how to be creative” yields practically nothing useful, just a spew of vague and general pips of advice, like, “challenge yourself,” “take risks,” and “question things.”
Thank you, Internet. You are, as per usual, a well of inspiration and knowledge.
Take a break, get a new hobby, practice, write things down, turn off distractions.
To check a few things off: this, in itself, is challenging myself. This, in itself, is a risk and a new hobby. There are also seemingly endless quotes from creative people about creativity, as if I’m supposed to be endlessly inspired by the struggles of others. For instance, Sylvia Plath said, “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” Am I original? Not entirely. I’m writing about things that are not original. I didn’t feel original when I was writing this story, but this one, for some reason, burrowed its way into my consciousness and refused to be go away.
It practically took me over. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and Grace and Ollie. The world that they lived in, much like Bea’s kitchen, is so familiar to me and yet so strange and exciting because I was building it, and finally, figuring out a way to tell their story was something I looked forward to.
I had been seeing a lot of Buzzfeed and other such articles being circulated around social media about dating in the digital age, particularly in college, and how no one could truly make a “connection” anymore because of the way we communicate and the “hook-up culture” that is so present. While I’m not totally sure I bought into all of these opinion pieces that I read, I did find them very, very interesting and thought that might be a good place to start writing.
Writing advice that I read on the internet consistently told me to have the “emotional impact” or some such in mind as I was writing, because short story (or in my case, flash fiction) writers only have a few thousand words to make their point. When I wrote it, or began writing it, what I had in mind was a sort of pervasive sense of loneliness, of being so connected with someone yet so distant just by virtue of the culture that the relationship exists in. Truly capturing this college culture proved to be very difficult for me, and I wrote and rewrote bits many, many times. It originally started off first person, and then I went back and changed all of the pronouns. It originally ended with Grace overcoming her insecurities and coming to terms with the fact that there wasn’t anything wrong with her and she hadn’t done anything wrong to make things end that way. Originally, Ollie was more blatantly cruel.
Writing “The Rules of the Game” was the first time I felt like I was really making choices. Until this point, I just needed to write. I felt like I just had to get my ideas out of my head in any way possible, just sort of throwing words at my computer screen until they fell into some kind of place. But here, I saw the value of making all of these choices that I had somehow ignored before. I was profoundly aware of these changes altering the course and tone and meaning of the story, just a bit, word by word, such as the third person perspective, Ollie’s decreased presence, and even the amount of commas in Grace’s thoughts. The more I became interested in these characters and how to represent them, I began to think, “Wait… When did this become fun?”
When reading it back over and attempting to analyze the meaning from a disconnected perspective (still, very hard), it was less about being “lonely in a crowded place” (although, that was still there), and more about being overwhelmingly scared and confused but smiling and pretending anyway. The line that I grabbed onto near the end of the story was, “What were the rules of this game? She couldn’t keep up.” Cheesy, but, important, I think. Throughout, there is an emotional disconnect between perceived expectations and actual reality in Grace’s relationship with Ollie. Grace thinks about what she is “supposed” to do and “supposed” to feel more than she looks at the actual reality of her situation. This is where “the game” comes in. The other characters in the story—mostly Ollie, but even her roommate and Miles/Michael—kind of all seem to possess some outside knowledge that Grace doesn’t have. They roll their eyes or raise their eyebrows at her like they know things she doesn’t, or in Ollie’s case, behave precisely the same no matter the circumstance, and in this way she’s constantly made to question herself and feel like she is missing out on something. Ollie is really very central to the story, but the reader received very little about him and his character. Everyone in the story, besides Grace, of course, are really just fringe characters, existing on the edges of Grace’s understanding, which increases her sense of disconnect.
I wrote Ollie, so I feel like I know him. But, I venture, to an outside reader he must seem like a total stranger, just some catalyst for Grace to react to. This seems odd after knowing how strongly Grace reacts to his treatment of her, and also knowing that they’ve been “together” for three months, which should be plenty of time to flesh out even a casual relationship. This lack of detail, while perhaps frustrating, is essential in the overall feeling of confusion and misunderstanding in a digital culture. The reader is confused about what Grace and Ollie are and just how serious their relationship is/was just as much as Grace is.
Honestly, I wrote the ending and had no idea what it meant; I just liked the sound and syntax of it. Trying to make sense of it now, I see it as the lingering effects of lack of closure, and also a sign that Ollie isn’t as robotic as he seems. What we gather from this final, distant encounter is that Miles/Michael’s unnamed friend (assumably, Ollie’s friend, too) knows about Grace, but she doesn’t know who he is. The conclusion is that they had talked about her, giving the sense that Ollie must have some opinion even though he gives exactly zero indication of caring, and also amplifying Grace’s feeling of being outside of some universal understanding. We, like Grace, can’t possibly know what they’re laughing about, though. The final line – “She was glad she had straightened her hair that day” – plays off of this, by showing that she still cares what they think of her regardless of her “play it cool” façade (that is blatantly transparent anyway). At the end, then we get the subtle sense that both Ollie and Grace still have “whatever they were” on their mind to some degree, but neither will ever acknowledge it.
The point of view, while third person, is so inside Grace’s head it practically feels like first person. This is probably due to the fact that at least half of it was written in first person, and then I simply changed the pronouns, so while it is third person the reader gets virtually zero insight into anyone’s thoughts besides Grace’s. Likewise, the plot is propelled forward primarily on Grace’s inner monologue and how she is feeling and reacting to things as they happen to her. The language and sentence structure align with her mental states: sentences are short and clipped when she is upset and in something like shock (“Her bag hit her hip when she walked. She accidently walked out in front of a car. It honked. She kept going.”); sentences are longer and less choppy when she is panicked or confused (“She didn’t know, she didn’t know the halls, or the stairs, or the people walking around the halls and stairs, and they would stare at her in last night’s clothes with mascara on her face, and it was just a damn house why is the thought of finding the damn kitchen so damn scary?”).
With language and characters like this, it becomes rather easy to see Grace as over analytical, overreacting, and even a bit crazy, but the visibility of the characters to the reader is important to the story’s overall themes. The amount of output from Grace versus the amount of output from Ollie that the reader receives is vastly different. The amount she thinks, and the great depth that she thinks, contrasts sharply with any actual, verbal communication present in the story. All of the dialogue is vague and noncommittal—basically completely empty. Most of how Grace and Ollie communicate is through body language—Grace extracts, and attempts to convey herself, a lot of meaning through eyes and smiles, but nothing through words.
Rather unlike me, who is learning how important the words are. It’s not all about the idea.
When I began this process, I gave little to no thought to the way the sentence was actually constructed and how that could help me to, theoretically, convey certain meanings and feelings. By this point, it was definitely something I was considering while writing. The degree to which it was successful I cannot be sure, but I feel like it is some kind of progress to be actually writing with some kind of intention, versus when I began and was just writing. I also feel like I know the characters better. The amount of time I spent just thinking about Grace and Ollie was probably more time than I spent writing about Bea and Aunt Mary. In my notebook, I have more scenes involving the two of them, I know their whole back-story, and I’ve thought of tons of other ways their story could go. I have a whole story for “he who must not be named,” too, even though he’s nothing but a quick mention in the story. In the end, I chose when went in and what went out, and how it was all conveyed.
This is all just a product of an endless stream of judgments and edits that could never end; I could keep changing things, easily. But there is a point where you have to say, “There, that’s it. It’s finished,”—and this is it.
I tried to write every day. Very unsurprisingly, every day was a bit ambitious, and days that I was able to take my pen to notebook paper usually resulted in a few paragraphs of drabble that left me feeling mostly uninspired. But it was practice. Every poorly conceived character and line of description may not have been going anywhere but they helped me to lose my fear of a blank mind. Something will always come. Maybe not something you want, or something that will turn into a masterpiece, but something. Creating something is nearly 100% about casting off fear of mediocrity. As a beginner, 98% of what I make will be mediocre, generously.
But I’m learning something. I don’t think it is creativity, per se, I don’t think that I “learned to be creative,” but I do think I learned a little something about what creativity isn’t.
