The phrase “get back on the horse” usually refers to someone getting “thrown” from said horse. A tragedy occurs, a heart is broken, a house burns down or a car is totaled – it’s something that throws the individual in question completely out of whack. Equilibrium is shot. The status quo’s out the window. The only way to get back on track is to get back on the horse, even if it just threw you.

However, it’s not just the earth-shattering events that cause us to leave the back of our steeds. Sometimes, things just stop for a bit. The horse needs water or caught a rock in their hoof. We swing down from the saddle, tend to the horse, and take some time for ourselves as well, to grab a bite or take in the scenery. I’m speaking metaphorically, of course, but the bottom line is we stop our progress in our journey.

One of my favorite Westerns of recent years is Hidalgo, and not just because Viggo Mortensen’s in it. Towards the end, Frank (Viggo’s character) goes through a somewhat trippy sequence. He and Hidalgo have fought tooth and nail to persevere in the punishing race across the desert, and the horse is so exhausted that Frank considers putting his companion down. However, he experiences admonitions from his Lakota ancestors to finish the journey and that he and his horse need each other. Emerging from the dream, Frank turns to see Hidalgo on his feet and waiting for the rather thick human to get back on so they can win the damn race. (If you haven’t seen this film, it’s a lot of fun and a classic adventure steeped in Western trappings, so check it out. Also, horses!)

Our desires and dreams are a bit like that horse. We might think that they’re daunting or even impossible to complete. We may exhaust ourselves trying to pursue them at the same time we struggle to make ends meet and address practical matters of living in the modern age. Bills need to be paid, clients need to be appeased, debts need to be settled and obligations need to be met. A lot of needs shove and yank us hither and yon, leaving little energy for ourselves. Sometimes we don’t want to put that energy into something that seems like it’ll go nowhere, considering there are tons of others out there already doing what we wish we could. Better to bear those ills we have, etc.

Besides, a lot of creative people including myself are a bit like magpies. We may want to get from A to B but between those two points are shiny things. New movies, favorite games, comfortable stories and old favorites. We flit to and fro in our free time, especially if we’ve spent ourselves on a creative effort that is either seems too daunting or returns little gratification. The keyboard, the controller, the popcorn bucket, the remote for the TV – they’re security blankets, things to cling to when the phone calls from collectors begin and we want to just forget about deadlines for a while.

But we get a nudge. Like an impatient horse standing behind us whose gotten their water and taken some time to rest their hooves, our desires don’t leave us alone. We can’t stay in idyllic wilderness settings forever. We’re on a journey, here. And while the journey itself is often just as interesting as the destination, if not moreso, we won’t reach our goals if we stand in the middle of the field staring at them. We have to move there. We have to make the effort. We have to get back on the horse.

It could be argued that a lot of this “writer’s block” stuff comes from us blocking ourselves. It’s an excuse to stop expending effort, burn a little less lean tissue, invite less stress into our lives. I stopped work on Acradea to finish the Blizzard contest entry, and then… played more Warcraft. Got some fresh air. Saw Scott Pilgrim. Cheered for the Union. And it was fun, refreshing and relaxing.

But my manuscript’s still here. It’s waiting for me. If it were a horse, it’d be looking at me somewhat impatiently. It wants to move forward, continue the journey, get to a place where it can be hand-fed some damn oats by a pretty farmer’s daughter. It’s not going to get there while I stand around wool-gathering.

For my part, it’s past time to get back on the horse. Have you had moments like that? Has a project, a work in progress, given you a mental nudge to remind you it’s still there? Have you ever taken a break for longer than you expected, only to find you need to pull yourself back into working on it?

Yesterday I talked about not being afraid of starting over. Today, I think it’s appropriate to discuss something one should be afraid of when it comes to writing, or performing in general. It’s the root of that thing they call ‘stage fright,’ at least in my experience.

You should be afraid of your audience.

Specifically, you should be afraid of screwing up and letting them down.

I’m not one to spread fear haplessly. I’m not a member of the Tea Party (colloquially known as a ‘teabagger’). However, it’s something I experience personally that I’m sharing as what might actually be a good thing. It takes me some time to write something, even a blog post sometimes, because I know other people are going to read it.

So I do my utmost to, as they say, bring my A game.

I do my editing and revising, for the most part, behind closed doors. I’ve experimented with sharing some of my in-progress work, and while I appreciate all of the feedback I’ve gotten and it’s helped me shape where some of my work has proceeded, I’ve also felt a touch of remorse for making people suffer through embryonic writing. It tends to be half-formed, missing things, rushed in places and laboriously long in others. In short – it sucks.

An awesome product might emerge from those early drafts, but I fear showing them to anyone. Hell, sometimes I fear showing a final draft to people, even if it strikes me as the best work I’ve ever done and composed entirely of awesome. I feel this way because, as a writer of fiction aimed at entertaining people, I don’t want to deliver a product that’s only partially good, or simply good enough to not suck.

I don’t submit works to magazines that are “warm-ups” or “experiments” that will lead to other works. I have no intention of querying with a partial manuscript or a finished one that still needs polish. Agents, editors, publishers, consumers, friends, family – they all deserve my very best. Even Blizzard won’t be getting anything less than the best Starcraft story I can offer, because on top of wanting to win, I want to demonstrate my skills, and if I send in something that isn’t my best, I’m doing a gross disservice both to myself and to their source material.

It’s not easy. You have to push yourself to do better, constantly. You have to remind yourself that lots of other people are trying to break into the same arena you are, and the only way your work will emerge above theirs is if it’s better presented, or better written in my case. Otherwise, there’s no point in putting pen to paper at all. If you want people other than yourself to write or see or experience something you’re creating, help them get their money’s worth. Write the best words possible. Don’t stop taking photos until it’s just right. Don’t be sloppy in how you assemble the elements. Do it right, and do it better than anybody else.

Henry Rollins summed it up in his usual inimitable way:

“Either have your phasers set on kill, or motherfucker, don’t show up.“

As more buzz, news and rumors emerge regarding Cataclysm (including some very interesting coverage by The Escapist), a thought has occurred to me. It was only reinforced by the experience I had over the weekend into last night that will become public some time in the next 24-48 hours, to say nothing of writing “The Haunting of Pridewater” twice.

A storyteller should never be afraid of starting over.

The developers at Blizzard aren’t technically starting over. They’re revising and updating most of the original world, partially for in-game lore reasons and partially to take advantage of the advances in graphics and phasing. However, to experience this new content as something other than a max-level fully armored hero astride a flying mount, one needs to start over with a new character. This really isn’t a big deal, speaking as someone who suffers from a condition known as ‘alt-itis’, but for some it’s pretty daunting. I for one will be starting at least two new characters, and possibly one on the Alliance side of things. We’ll see.

In terms of both writing and the other thing, which I will not mention for reasons I can’t explain but involve the preservation of my sphincter, there are times when a creative endeavor doesn’t go quite as smoothly as one would like. Sometimes you know it right away, and sometimes it needs to be pointed out to you. But either way, the only responsible thing is to start over. Unless you’re writing strictly for your own pleasure, you need to write in such a way that other will be interested in your work enough to see it through to the end, and if you want to be successful, you need to transcend the interest of morbid curiosity. In other words, you want someone to check out you work for a reason other than, “Let’s see just how bad this can suck before it ends.”

Even when you have a deadline, you can always find time to start over, at least in part. Provided you’re not coming out of the gate for the first time at the last minute, there’s opportunity to review your work, pick out what works, scrap what doesn’t and begin again. It can seem like a chore, and sometimes it’s a daunting task, either due to the work’s overall length or the approaching deadline, but working through those obstacles and emerging with a product you know for a fact is better by a great factor than your previous attempt is very nearly its own reward. It’s thrilling to have that sense of completion twice, especially if you can compare what came before with what you have now.

How often have you had to start over? Have you had to do it multiple times on the same project? How much better was the end product due to the stops and starts?

When you seriously undertake an endeavor, finding success is never immediate. It’s a long hard climb to the top, and sometimes you can lose sight of the ultimate goal. That’s why you set milestones for yourself.

It could be finishing a chapter. Knocking out a round of edits. Sending out a given number of queries. Every milestone you reach is bringing you one step closer to the realization of that dream. That’s cause for celebration, in my opinion, because how many people never actually take that first step, let alone one that got you to that milestone?

Now, by ‘celebrating’ I don’t mean throwing a massive party for each little milestone reached. But you should still reward yourself. Go out and have a drink. See a movie you haven’t seen yet in the cinema. Break the tedium in some way that lets off some steam, gets you experiencing something new, drives home the fact that you’ve completed something significant, even if it’s just for you.

I’d love to take my own advice, here. I recently finished taking the pen to the manuscript of Citizen and trimming some of the fat. When I sit down to plow through the changes electronically, I suspect even more will be trimmed. And then I have one more round beyond that, a series examination by critical friends. Not to mention finally letting my wife read it and having her give me notes on everything I should change, or why I should change everything.

I don’t have any big plans to celebrate, though. Unless you count going up north for Musikfest again. I never did get to try out the pulled pork they have up there this year. Or the crab cake sliders. (Great, now I’m getting hungry again)

My point is, take a break. Relax. Celebrate.

Then get right back to it.

Remember, that masterpiece isn’t going to write itself.

This week’s Escapist is talking about constructive criticism. Yahtzee himself chimed in on criticism on one point:

Criticism is a powerful force for good. Nothing ever improves without coming to terms with its flaws. Without critics telling us what’s stupid and what isn’t, we’d all be wearing boulders for hats and drinking down hot ebola soup for tea. – Zero Punctuation: Overlord 2

I could make all sort of analogies for criticism. There’s the bonsai tree example, the fat on a steak visual, the sanding of a bat to remove its splinters for a nice clean hit; I could go on. But suffice it to say that the best criticism is one that sees what a work is going for and points out the flaws so that the crux of the work can be improved while things that don’t work can be discarded.

Declaring something to be absolute crap is a great way to appear critical and level up on the Internet, so that’s what some critics will go for. This should not, however, deter the creative mind from letting criticism getting in the way of creating something. Even if said criticism is coming from that selfsame mind.

Even if you’re not looking at your art as a means of income, and it’s just something you do for fun, critics shouldn’t deter you from trying to create something if you’ve the mind to try it. However, some criticism is meant to be constructive, while other criticism becomes destructive very quickly. There’s a world of difference between “This sketch needs work,” and “Your art is horrible and will never improve.”

It comes down to a difference in mentality. Some people want to cultivate dreams in this world, to help bring a new vision to life. This requires a lot of effort, though, more than some people are willing to put into a creative endeavor, and it can be a scary thing. Like the man said, there will always be mediocrity out there, people who can’t deal with the extra percentage of effort some put into what makes them passionate. That, I feel, is where a lot of destructive criticism comes from. But I could be wrong.

Anyway, you can’t be afraid to put your work out there. Good criticism will help your work get better, and bad criticism can pretty much be ignored. Just like there is such a thing as good & bad writing or good & bad film-making, there’s good & bad criticism.

Test everything, and hold on to the good.