To Over Complicate: A Writer’s Secret Or Curse
I have a tendency to over-complicate. Maybe you can relate.
I am a creator. One who once was all about perfecting the craft.
At one point, it was pencil drawing and then charcoal.
I still have a sketch of a bad-ass woman in thigh-high boots, a childhood alter-ego perhaps, with swirling black hair to her waist…
It’s stored somewhere. Probably side-by-side with the sketch of a Calvin Klein brief-clad man showing off his muscles as he gripped a large ball, flexing for all he’s worth.
Or was it a rock? Matters not.
Both were a study in detail. In drawing the complex. From leather stitching and flowing silk to the contour work of defined muscle tone with intricate shading. These sketches were... complicated.
Was I complicated? Hmmm...
Then my passion evolved into black and white photography.
Back in the day of burning and dodging, surrounded by chemicals that this current health-conscious me would have freaked over.
Yet then, I stuck my fingertips in the developer to position the photo paper just right. Then swooshed that paper around with my thongs in utter, creative glee. Watching as my artistic-mind’s eye creation came into stark contrast within the ripples of liquid.
I’d lean in and breathe the toxic fumes as I waited for just-the-right moment of light and dark, of detail to emerge before whipping the dripping page into the stop solution.
My complex use of cropping and burning made my pieces one-of-a-kind, for sure, as without some serious note-taking during the process, the steps typically weren’t recreatable.
And my work immediately won an award, so I moved on. There is something there to be said about my inability to receive, but we’ll leave that for another day, or a trip on a therapy’s couch.
Just kidding, although I do have a coach and she’s flipping awesome. More to come on her, too.
Then it was words.
Well, it was always words. Words strung together to create stories and worlds. To build characters who seemed more real to me than those actually living and breathing in my life.
And it’s funny, because recently, over dinner with a new-to-me-island-friend, I realized they — the characters — are… alive.
The people I have gone on to create with my words, my imagination, and all but breathe life into, have been brought to reality in such a fashion that they are intrinsically real for the reader.
And that is the feedback most writers would all but die to receive. It’s gold. Better than a royalty check — almost.
My friend, to say she was consumed with a character in a series she was obsessed with, would have been an understatement.
She went on and on about a man... discussing him at length as though he’d stepped into the open air restaurant with us, in all his black, silk shirt fineness…
Pure, masculine flesh and blood, oozing appeal right off the pages of a book she’d been listening to.
“Because I can listen faster than I can read and I must know more now!” Was her response to my most obvious question about why listen when you can read?
Anyone overhearing our chat, well, they would have assumed that the man, let’s call him R, was very, very real.
And she was enthralled with him. Captivated. Hooked by his mannerisms. His characteristics. How he communicated with so and so.
And no, she wasn’t tipsy that night! She hadn’t had one beer nor a single swig of wine.
I was the only one sipping my Pinot Grigio wondering about this book, this character and utterly fascinated by how involved she was in his — cough — life.
Or should I say fictional life.
To the point, she nearly cancelled our dinner night out because she wanted to keep listening to the series and discover how he’d received the news of…
And he was...is real in a series of fictional pages.
R is complex and detailed and so alive that my girlfriend was all but drooling over this dark, brooding greatness.
And it took just three details for it to finally click in my head.
For me to go from entertained to realization.
For my ears to peak up like an eager puppy...
For the hair on the back of my neck to stand on end…
For my heart to pause only to start racing in time to the music tumbling out of her lips…
See it was music.
My music.
My R.
My fictional man.
And her gossipy, fangirl praise was an unfamiliar tune to me.
I don’t tend to share my work with others.
I haven’t, until very recently, shared my words with anyone other than my agent, who kind-of became my lovingly-abusive friend.
I say lovingly-abusive because she had to hound me for my words. Literally, that was our relationship for the first year.
She’d ask nicely.
I’d dodge.
She’d demand firmly.
I’d evade.
She finally got my attention with a snapshot of my check being stuffed in her mouth and a refusal to send me anything until she had access to all my words.
Yep, blackmail complete with red lipstick.
Like I said — abusive!
And looking back with time, a bit of maturity and distance, I can now add hysterical.
But that woman, she used to send me into panic attacks that I didn’t even recognize as a problem as they were simply so damn common.
Yet, at that moment in time with my bread and butter all but in her mouth, I was actually hungry — literally and figuratively.
She caught me in a moment when I needed that money and was a bit desperate. See, as a gift to myself, I was bumming around Europe and didn’t have any cash left.
I was writing one-off articles for travel magazines, which paid peanuts and penning a novel in all my free time between walking the streets of Paris and touring Ireland from the wrong side of the road.
That last was not a paying gig (yet) and without my new friend might never have been.
And Europe…
It was either Hollywood three months pre-graduation for an awesome job or finishing that degree and figuring it out later.
I chose figuring-it-out-later as my Hollywood encounter scared me sh*tless...but that too is a story for another time.
While in Europe, I’d forgotten about all but being present — writing — and hadn’t paid attention to the little things, like budgeting!
See, I met the woman who became my agent and later friend, through a professor, who behind my back, gave her a manuscript of my words.
And if he hadn’t done this, and she hadn’t loved them and decided I was worth the hassle (my cray-cray), I’d still be writing heaps of stories and essays and everything in between.
However, those words, they probably would still be stored in dusty, digital files — inaccessible to a single soul and never to see the light of day or line a bookshelf...even now, if I’m deadly honest.
I’d likely be working a 9-5 JOB somewhere. But Nah…! That last is so not me.
So yeah, seeing as how she’d managed to sell those first words my professor had sent her, and I’d allowed it, as she had already seen them, read them, liked them…
I was in a bind.
She took my first check, for those very first words, out of her mouth and deposited it into my US account for me on one condition.
I had to put all my words in one folder — which she labeled PAIN IN MY ASS. No joke. And she received full access to it.
Of course, I could create folders upon folders upon folders within that one space, (as I’ve already mentioned I like to complicate things), but all my words had to go into the PAIN IN THE ASS folder.
Not just my completed words. All of them. As they flowed out of me. Talk about panic.
If I hadn’t already been a soul with a tendency to complicate, I would have considered all those folders I created an evil plan to mess with her mind, time and life, yet now I know better. I didn’t leaned toward manipulative but it came from a desire, no a deep-rooted need, to hide.
Just like my characters and stories, I complicated probably all things directly out of the womb. It was my way. And hiding had become second nature very early in life.
As a born and bred New Yorker, this woman has little patience and seriously lacked an ability to deal with being played with.
But back to those files. She received full access. And not when my words, stories and work was done, finished, ready.
Hell-to-the-no.
The broad didn’t trust me. Anything I was writing at any time, from drafts to outlines to notes to thoughts...she got access to.
All but my journal went into the folder we shared. Or should I say she controlled.
We were frenemies for the first few years.
Because she knew me, better than I knew myself apparently, as she went so far as to write up a contract that now makes me laugh.
She actually inserted a clause that said…
“You are responsible for getting your ass to a photocopy joint and scanning anything that you hand write. Don’t test me. Don’t trick me. It’s not possible. There are no cop-outs nor excuses as this copying of stuff you choose to write by hand is due in the PAIN IN THE ASS by the end of each month. Consider it like taxes. The only way out is to die.”
She ended with the B-word but I’ll refrain from adding that here.
Like I said, frenemies.
But looking back, her way got me to the highway that is my life. A highway that led me to my childhood dream, an ocean view, a Fabulous Frenchman who’s part partner and completely best friend, plus a goat called Moo-Baah.
Now, I have several examples of when my complex way of thinking, or should I say writing, or just plain being, worked.
Maybe a decade back, okay more like fifteen years ago now, yikes, I was packing things up and having new furniture delivered.
A friend was helping me and subtly making sure I was okay. I’d just suffered a major loss in my life, left my job as a teacher, and my therapy had been to go to a store I loved and buy just about everything in it.
Even if I felt empty inside at least my house would feel full...or something like that.
Man, a shrink would have a field day with me, right?!
Typically, no one went into my office, but I must have been dealing with the movers or a phone call… and well, I found her in there with [gasp] one of my books in her greedy, little hand!
She didn’t know it was mine until she saw my face.
No poker face here, Lady Gaga.
And then well, she all but shoved the book into her sweatpants so I couldn’t snatch it back, and ran out of my house.
Great.Flipping.Friend.
Pissed, scared shitless of her reaction to my words, yet also numb inside from all my life had recently become, I waited.
I knew a reaction was coming, and in utter dread, I probably ate my weight in chocolate that day. Thank God I’d already shed all those extra pounds a few years before!
Let’s call her J.J. Well, J.J. kept me in radio silence all day and into the next and then called me in the dead of night — sobbing.
And I, snapped awake by her distraught gasping for air, thinking something was terribly wrong, only to be put on notice with... “How could you..?” and “Why would you..?” and “Damn you..!”
...before the click of the then receiver sounded in my ear. All in emotional angst over one of my characters. A fictional life I had dared to create and then...end.
So of course, I didn’t fall right back to sleep.
Instead, I threw myself back onto the oversized pillows of my king sized bed, thankfully alone in that moment, and wide-awake with a manic smile, had myself a Julia Roberts ‘three thousand dollars’ Pretty Woman moment.
You know that scene…
Where she flings herself up on the bed in utter glee to pound the mattress with long, flailing arms and legs as she screams “Three. Thousand. Dollars.”
Granted Richard Gere’s character could have afforded a heck-of-a-lot more, but for her, a bottom-barrel street-walker, that was huge money.
[Don’t know that movie? My forehead just met my laptop and that sh*t hurts. Please go rent it. For me.]
But back to my friend calling me, hysterical. That wake up call was priceless…
It was confirmation that my complex creations of worlds and people and situations and drama, so much drama…
Worked.
And it wasn’t something I’d ever allowed myself to receive from others.
Feedback. Acknowledgement. Connection. Bonding. Over my words.
Except from, well, my frenemy, but that didn’t count as praise in my mind as she was downright rude. And I liked it. Preferred it even.
But sobbing — during a 2 AM wake-up call — that was new. And flipping awesome!
So, my characters, are they complicated beings? Typically, yes.
So that begs the question, is that what makes them so real?
Is that what makes people demand the next chapter, installment, book in the series?
To bemoan the completion of a book...
To dread the turning of that last page and the sinking realization that the character’s story, while not a tragic end, is done as far as their ability to read on is concerned?
Is that what makes people interesting, too?
The drama.
The stories.
The complexity.
See only a select few have ever read my words. I don’t share them publicly, as me.
Well, at least until recently…
I have created a complex, intricate web of separation.
I, Jill R. Stevens, have always been a complex person dodging and weaving through life from the shadows.
Capable of stepping out and doing all the things from being on stage (not my fear), to being on camera (I’ve stepped in a time or two), to writing words that make people laugh out loud on the plane (witnessed it), to those who cry uncontrollably as though my creations are real (you heard about one such story)...
And yet, I chose to still hide. To create a maze of alter egos under which to publish.
See, I’ve hidden my light behind pseudonyms, contracts and clauses. And now, now that I am stepping out…
Now that I am sharing my words here…
It’s like I’m a newborn…stripped bare of all those complexities.
Left to wonder.
Why did I so complicate?
And maybe you can relate.
Where in your life have you made all so complex that seriously, if you simply sat for a moment, in utter silence, the truth, the answer would be so simple?
My truth. I write.
Do I really need to complicate?
Leave me a comment and share this post if any of these words hit home for you or made you smile.
My goal is to spread JOY in this world. And my best bet is doing that through my words for they are my SuperPower.
Next week I’ll bring you real talk on all those Alter Egos I created which allowed me to do so much and still hide.
Oh yeah, there’s more than one…
Get ready for a fun, bumpy ride.
Photo Credit: MILKOVÍ @milkovi
