Nine Topics I’m Obsessed With Right Now: September 2016 Edition

Towards the end of 2015 I sat down and wrote up a list of my current obsessions, which tend to inform my creative work and the types of things I end up blogging about here. By their very nature, obsessions are a short-term thing: they may stem from long-term interests, but I tend to follow them down the rabbit hole while answering a particular kind of issue or momentary curiosity, and then they get replaced by what comes next.

It’s been a while since that post was done, and a hell of a lot has changed in my life, so I figured it was worth revisiting. Here is a list of the current obsessions that are dominating my reading and thinking, and will inevitably lead into the blogging.

ONE: THE WORK HABITS OF ARTISTS AND CREATIVES

This is one of those recurring obsessions that comes up every week or so, and it’s been stoked by a weekend in Melbourne where I got to sit down and talk to a bunch of different people about what they’ve been up to. But I’m in one of those phases where my life is in transition, and I’m able to throw a lot more focus on creative work than I have in recent years, and so I find myself diving into artist biographies and posts about daily habits and productivity/time management books that have a particularly creative bent.

TWO: THE PERSONAL ESSAY

I have a weakness for a good essay. Not the dry, academic type they get you to write in university, but the living, breathing form where people really sit down and attempt to assay, in the original meaning of the work, testing and appraising a thought or idea. I’ve read a bunch of great essay collections in the last few months, and it’s stoked my desire to sit down and figure out how to write them for myself.

THREE: CINEMA

I don’t know how it happened, exactly, but I’ve gone back to being someone who goes out and watches movies in the cinema. I’ve really been enjoying the ritual of it, along with the chance to catch up with friends, but there is something terrific about the focus of sitting down in front of a screen without the distraction of home or mobile phone.

Naturally, an increase in the time spent going to the movies is resulting in a whole bunch of time spent thinking about film and how it’s constructed.

FOUR: LONG TERM COLONISATION OF SPACE

I’m not a hard SF guy. In fact, I am the furthest thing from a hard SF guy as you’re going to get, perfectly willing to handwave things like “how are we colonizing space?” whenever space-based narratives appear. But I got it into my head to start looking at the impact long-term space habitation has on the human body a few months back, and it was interesting enough that I kept digging around at things to look at the practicalities of living in space so I can at least hand-wave the interesting bits when I write about it.

FIVE: THE IMPACT WRITING IN A SERIES HAS ON NARRATIVE STRUCTURE

This came up a few months ago, when I was providing feedback about a friend’s second novel, and gradually turned into a thing I was obsessed about to the point where I pitched it as a PhD topic. There is something inherently curious about series narrative these days, given that it’s much harder to sell the audience on an iconic protagonist who doesn’t have a narrative arc, and it’s getting increasingly bizarre to think about now that Netflix is doing some really interesting stuff in the television narrative space.

Expect blogs about this, going into 2016. Lots and lots of blogs.

SIX: DEPRESSION AND ART

I thought I’d learned a bunch of stuff about depression and mental illness, over the last decade. Turns out, not so much, and certainly not the stuff that’s interesting after someone sits you down and points out that you’re exhibiting a bunch of depression warning signs and it’s probably time to do something about that.

I was never particularly paranoid about antidepressants affecting my writing practice, but I was sufficiently interested in the kinds of changes they wrought to start looking into other people’s experiences.

SEVEN: WRITING, ART, AND BUSINESS

This one’s a constant, if you look back at November’s post.

Hell, it’s a constant if you go back to the earliest days of this blog.

That said, it’s a little more focused now that I no longer work at QWC. I spend a lot less time trying to understand this in a general sense, and a lot more time specifically looking at the things I want to apply in my own practice.

EIGHT: BLOGGING

I haven’t really thought about the blog as its own product in the last couple of years, largely because it wasn’t particularly central to what I was doing in the old day job. But the moment the new one started to demand a more focused approach to producing content, complete with schedules and deadlines and long-term plans, I started refreshing my memory on a bunch of old-and-rusty skills and gradually found myself applying them here on Man vs. Bear as well. I spend a lot more time thinking about how I blog, and why, than I did twelve months back, and while I always put some thought into it, it’s basically been upgraded to a low-key obsessions right now.

NINE: NARRATIVE MICROSTRUCTURE

I’ve spent the last few years indulging some hardcore obsessions with the big, over-arching structures of narrative. Recently, I’ve started spending a lot more time studying the micro-structure – refining my idea of how scenes work, or how to develop narrative beats within a scene, and started pulling apart works that do this particularly well. There’s a level of control that some writers have over their work that I really envy, and it’s often when they’re doing this sort of thing exceptionally well, so it’s something I really want to get better at.

Well, that’s me. How about you? What are the current obsessions guiding your practice? What curiosities are you indulging in your spare time? Come and geek out with me in the comments.