The Problems With Using Self-Loathing For Motivation

I have “joked” in the past that self-loathing and self-directed spite had become one of the driving motivators for me when it came to creative production. It took me too long to realize that it wasn’t a laughing matter. I ended up unironically taking “I’m a failed creator” to heart. I found myself writing and drawing not because I wanted to write and draw, but because I resented not having done enough of either. I’m not sure when this line of thinking truly started, but it has almost certainly been going on for at least the last decade. It’s only fairly recently that I’ve considered just how much this sentiment actually compounded the problems I was having.

The problem with this sort of thinking is it becomes a two-pronged self-sabotaging attack on one’s mental health. They say that True Art comes from Pain, but it’s one thing to write to exorcise your demons, and it’s another to deliberately injure yourself in order to get writing. It’s one thing to give yourself a little kick in the ass to get motivated into action, but if you’re relying continuously on that kick just to maintain momentum, you’re going to end up with a raw butt and broken toes and an inability to act at all.

Firstly, there is simply the act of miring oneself in a rancid stew of negativity. I would whip myself mentally over and over with horrible feelings and deprecating lectures to try and stoke my inner fires. Over time, however, heaping on the crap only served to infect the well. I had been sub-consciously training myself to associate being creative with also being miserable and desperate. Eventually, the anxiety of that crowded out whatever else I might be trying to say or do with whatever story I was trying to work on. It made me start to tunnel vision on certain negative emotions as the only themes I felt drawn to write.

Moreover, wallowing in such depressing emotions only made it all the easier to get overwhelmed by frustration, forcing me to have to break off more frequently to numb myself with distractions to cool my anxieties. Naturally, the frequent procrastination would then compound the problem of feeling like crap for not getting anything done. Eventually, this negative feedback loop would completely cripple my gumption, so that even trying to get started on a project in the first place felt like a Sisyphean task.

Secondly, when I did finally manage to write something, the accomplishment would result in an exhausting emotional rollercoaster, an intense high followed by a horrible crash. It was always elating, to feel like I’d broken the chains holding me down, that I finally was able to make something again. A sudden burst of euphoric positivity would erupt from the aching cavity in my mind, and I would finally feel good about myself for another brief period. I would capture that energy with frantic fervor, and ride it for as long as I could make it last.

And then, the positive energy would burn out, because it’s not my natural state. It’s a bucket of gasoline on the fire, not a big stack of logs. Whether I finished my project or simply made a solid chunk of progress on it, I could look back and feel amazing in the moment. But then, when I would take a much needed break, it’s like the chair would get kicked right out from under me, and I suddenly found myself backsliding into the pit. By defying my state as the “writer who can’t write”, I’d now undermined part of the engine I was relying on to keep momentum going. The positive energy was used up, while the negative energy had been temporarily canceled out; by the time I recovered from overworking myself, my gumption was gone once more. I’d be back to square one, unable to get the fire going again, much less keep it burning steadily.

This was the trap I fell into, and I am still working to break myself out of that toxic cycle. Maybe most people reading this will have no idea what I’m talking about. Maybe this is all just part of my own depression manifesting in my creative process. Maybe this is part of some undiagnosed neuro-divergency on my part. Maybe this is actually an incredibly common and completely obvious thing that a lot of creatives inevitably go through and get over, and it’s just my turn to go through the phase.

Whatever the case, I hope this little bout of introspection might help you a bit with your own frustrations, be they artistic or otherwise. I can’t say I have any good life-coaching advice on the subject, but what I can say is sometimes it’s best to just take a step back and reassess yourself; what are your real motivations, where is your energy truly coming from, and is there perhaps a pattern to the roadblocks you keep finding yourself encountering? Humans are creatures of habit and can be prone to getting stuck in our problems. For some, we can find ourselves deep in a rut before realizing it. If you find yourself falling into bad cycles, take the time to evaluate the situation, and see what you can do to adjust your efforts, instead of burning yourself out repeating the same mistakes. It seems obvious when said, but these sorts of traps can sneak up on people.

Good luck and godspeed and take care of yourselves!

Packing It In and Moving On

Despite being the only thing I purport to care about doing with my life, I have struggled enormously with writing and story production, to a level that is frankly soul-crushing at this point. Despite brief periods of productivity that seem to hit me from truly nowhere, my inability to produce has steadily gotten worse, in multiple regards. I have whined endlessly about my many problems, to the point I am far long sick of hearing myself go on about it, so I won’t go down the list here. If you’ve had to put up with me talking about it, then you already know at least some of the deal.
 
The last few years, I have been attempting to process these toxic feelings through various metafiction stories. At one point, I thought I had gotten through it, but apparently, I wasn’t done. With the writing and posting of Imaginator – The Final Story of Sharkerbob, I truly hope to be so now. To that end, I am going to do something I think has been long overdue.
 
I am announcing my “retirement” as Sharkerbob.
 
Fortunately, this is not going to be any great loss. I am a genuine nobody on the internet. Barely a handful of people have ever even looked at this blog. I have no followers. And that’s fine. I didn’t start this platform to become famous. I was, however, hoping to have done a lot more under this penname up to this point. As much as I struggled before, starting this blog was supposed to be part of the push to take my craft seriously, knuckle down on my focus, and starting making things on the regular. When I wrote Graven back in 2018, I really thought I’d done it. That I’d busted through the mountain, proven I could write a big, meaningful story, and I could finally start producing my genre fiction in earnest.
 
Turns out Graven was a complete fluke. Looking back, I have no idea how I managed to do it at all, and I know I couldn’t do it again now. Right place, right time, right motivations, right amount of energy, I guess. It was a lightning strike. It turned out it was also too little, too late. I’d already burned up so much of my creative gumption and confidence and capability in the years prior, that Graven ended up decidedly not being a new flagship to lead a new fleet from port. Instead, it was the last lifeboat escaping a long-sinking cruiser.
 
Obviously, I wrote a few other things since Graven, but the majority of it has all been related to the metafictional writing therapy. Sharkerbob has unfortunately become defined, at least to me, as a writer who can’t write. The absolutely pitiful amount of content I have published under that name doesn’t even represent 1% of the ideas I had hoped to produce works from. At some point, Sharkerbob became more driven to write, not because he wanted to write, but because he resented himself for not writing. And that is a lamentable and misplaced motivation, one highly prone to self-sabotage.
 
I’d like to not be that kind of writer anymore. To this end, I am closing the book on this chapter of my creativity. There is, however, a reason for the quotes around “retirement”. I am not giving up creating things. I want to keep writing and drawing, with the eventual goal of doing comics again, or at least some medium where I can make use of both skills.
 
However, my intention going forward is to start fresh with a new penname and a new direction, with no connections to my previous works. In part, this is to wipe the slate clean, so I can feel free to explore ideas without feeling beholden in various ways to the interconnected canons of my past works. It is also to break free from the baggage of past associations, namely my incredibly short-sighted sloppiness in referencing connections to other pennames. If you know, you know, and I wish you didn’t, but it’s too late to do anything about it now. Suffice to say, if my future endeavors are to go anywhere, I’d prefer to not have a dump truck full of literary skeletons always trailing behind me.
 
Having said that, there are still things from Sharkerbob, from the AEP Multiverse, from those other pennames, that I still think are worth salvaging. Character ideas and worldbuilding concepts I’m not completely ready to give up on yet. I’ll have to reforge them, of course, and I am aware it’s risky to indulge in the bad old habits of reworking failed ideas yet again. But this time around, I hope to do so without all the needless baggage and negativity tainting the process. Easier said than done, of course, but hey, if nothing else, it’ll force me to get more creative with what I got.
 
So, that’s pretty much all there is to say on the matter. I’m know I’m mostly speaking into a void with this post, but for me, it’s part of the ritual of moving on. Here’s to another couple of decades before the next metafictional crisis story inevitably gets written!
 
For those of you who have followed my work, I appreciate your support. So long, and take care of yourselves!

My Process

I am partly an outline-follower, partly a discovery writer, when I’m actually accomplishing anything. I’m very much a start to finish writer. I have sometimes written scenes out of order, but when I do, I usually have to re-write them from scratch when I catch up to them anyway. While I think at heart, being a discovery writer keeps me more engaged on the project, once I know I have something to work with, having some idea of what's happening in the next chapters really helps give me something to kind of guide me so I don’t feel like I’m completely flailing. I don't usually have an exact ending in mind, maybe a vague idea, but it'll come to me as I write and map ahead a bit.

So, the process might go something like this:

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SARAH STRONG #1

Sarah walked down the street, squinting in annoyance against the sunlight. She hated this time of year, with the sun lancing into her eyes from the horizon right as she got off work. Even her sunglasses didn't help. She held up her hand as she...

(Whether I start with an outline or not, I keep the outline beneath the actual text of the story, so I can quickly check on where I'm going.)

SAMPLE OUTLINE

1) Sarah is walking home from work. She cuts through a park. As she does, she sees a group of kids playing baseball. Then, a big thug dude is harassing them. Sarah goes over to stop him, is startled to notice his bestial features, which the kids don't seem to notice. However, once Sarah starts interjecting, other adults come to investigate, and the thug dude runs off.

2) That night, Sarah dreams of seeing a strange wizard-like figure who explains that she is one of those rare humans "sensitive to mystic forces". This enables her to see monsters hidden in the world. The wizard gives her a magic talisman, saying it will give her power. She wakes up and the talisman is there.

3) The next day, walking home again, Sarah is holding the talisman in her pocket. She sees the thug dude again, this time with a small posse. He's harassing the baseball kids again. Sarah goes over to intervene, and she feels the talisman charge her with power. She fights the group, and though the thug dude is strong (he's some kind of ogre-werewolf thing, figure it out later), she is able to punch him clear across the baseball field. The kids help her chase off the posse with their bats.

...

End Issue) Sarah talks to wizard and accepts role as defender of the city. Maybe set up for issue #2?

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So, from there, I start to write. As I write, I might start deviating from what I put in the outline. Maybe I get to the part where she sees the baseball kids. Maybe I decide I really don’t want to bother making named characters out of the kids, and instead, I change her walking through the park to walking through an alley, where she encounters the thug dude almost trying to mug her, only to be interrupted by Sarah ducking back onto the side walk to take the long way home. If that sticks, then I proceed with the outline. I know I want part two to happen pretty much as is, so that stays. Part three, will then end up back in the alley as she tries to re-encounter the monster with her newfound powers. She fights the monster, has a second dream where she affirms her devoting to protecting the city. And that’s pretty much Issue #1 finished, probably too early, but it’s a start.

Alternatively, I stay with Sarah going into the park, and in the process, I name a few of the kid characters and they start having dialogue I find entertaining. Before I know it, I suddenly have a three or four supporting cast that I’m warming up to, so the park seen goes a little long. Part two happens as I wrote. Part three sees more interaction with the kids, and the possibility that there is more going on; after all, why would the werewolf-ogre be after them? Maybe one of the kids is also a mystic-sensitive person, or has a magic device the ogre wants. So I add a few more parts to the outline to figure out where it’s going and keep me on the track. So, Sarah helps the kids beat the monsters, and then the final part happens, Issue #1 wrapped up.

Or I just keep writing and see where it takes me. Maybe as I’m writing the reveal of the werewolf-ogre’s motivation, I hit upon the idea that he’s actually trying to get back something the kid stole, so now the roles are in reverse. Now, suddenly, Sarah has to stop the thief kid before he does something dangerous, the werewolf-ogre is revealed to be a monster hero himself. Maybe the kid gets away, or maybe he doesn’t. From here, the rest of the kids may think of her as an enemy and she has to work to gain their trust, or they think she was in the right, and they become part of her supporting cast, or they have served their purpose and are never seen again. Either way, Werewolf-Ogre is now another supporting character who can become her crime-fighting partner, or just a character who returns on occasion to do something interesting.

Either way, Issue #1 now wraps up here, and further plots to be explored in Issue #2

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So, that’s about how my process works. I used to outline the whole issue (referring to this in terms of comic book issues), and change as I went, now I tend to outline three to five chapters, and as the work proceeds, I kind of just let the writing process lead me to discovery. Once I get a few chapters in, I outline a few more chapters, adjusting for new discoveries, and so on, until it’s finished. And, that’s pretty much it!

Elemental Keys, Series Overview

The Elemental Keys was one of the first major post-Old Multiverse series I did, the concept starting back when I first got into college. Along with series ideas like the Intrepid, the Dream Wars, and Galea, this was one of many attempts to “start fresh”, and build up series set in self-contained worlds, independent of what had come before. Ironically, this was also one of the earlier examples of the cascade effect of characters and concepts from previous stories being brought in and retooled. Initially, I had the idea for the E-Keys as just the artifacts, but lacking series to use them in, I combined some characters and concepts from earlier works to flesh the concept out as a series unto itself.