Yesterday Alexander Wales published “Non-renewable Blogging” a post on the idea that an author can run out of material, or that certain areas of a blogger’s life can be “mined” for material. A generous reading of this post is that it was about a particular form of creative anxiety, or a part of the creative process, or a pattern of creative decline in various writers.

I’m sympathetic to this argument, but Wales, come on, my guy.

On his tumblr, Wales has a series called “Pitchposting” where he writes up an idea and how he would approach it as a longform piece of prose. This is a practice begun because he felt he didn’t want ideas swirling around his head if they were in competition with ongoing projects. An idea that gets a public treatment, entirely exposed, is creatively excised. At the end of “Pitchposting: A Wayward Mother’s litRPG” he says:

I have more ideas than I have time to write novels.

In his post “Epistolary Novels in the Modern Age” he says:

Of course I want to write an epistolary novel, and secondarily, a modern epistolary novel that's about email and discords and tumblr and whatever. I want to write All the Novels.

On his organizational methods:

WIPs are organized into different folders. Every 'long' project gets a folder, there are a bunch of shorter things that are clumped in a 'short things' folder... For historical reasons, the 'Upcoming Works' folder has ~12 projects contained within it, and does not get cleared out regularly as it should. It would probably take an hour to do a full reorg on it, but ideally I would split it into 'Ideas' for things that have not gotten past a draft/planning/chap1 stage, 'Shelved' for things with more than 20K words and no activity in the past year, and 'Active' for things which are currently in motion.

That is not a small number of things!

But of course, “Non-renewable Blogging” isn’t just about ideas, or their expression, but a certain feeling that an author’s worldview can be used up, their personality, voice, or essence.

So even if the list of stories to tell and ideas to put into them keep growing, Wales has this anxiety that he’ll keep returning to the same well in a way that wears thin.

Repetition Pressure

Wales writes webfiction, which is known for its voluminous texts that often tread water. He’s explained in the past that readers won’t follow an author from work to work with any reliability, creating audience drop-off between those works, which inevitably incentivizes authors to keep making more of the thing that people like. He speaks about this in “Serial Writing, An FAQ”:

Longer is better, so long as you have story to tell. The most successful web serials tend to be long runners, in part because if they’re above a certain retention/attraction rate, they just continue to gather more and more readers. That translates into more fans, more money, more fame, and more of pretty much anything else you’d want. Fans will recommend your story, which gets you more fans, and there are significant network effects. At a certain point, the length of a story might become daunting, and if you’re selling e-books, a complete series will sell better than an incomplete one, but under current market conditions, I think there’s little doubt that you should run for as long as you possibly can. Consistency might be king, but it’s a coregency with length.

This incentive toward repetition is not unique to webfic, though is perhaps most obvious in that space. We’ve all seen bands that keep playing the hits, television shows that should have ended three seasons ago, and of course the endless waves of remakes, sequels, prequels, and so forth. If you write one good thing, people will surround you and say, “more good thing please!”

It is, perhaps, this pressure that led Wales to post “Non-renewable Blogging”. There are occasions when an author finishes a story and the audience says “I wish this were twice as long”. Sometimes the author gives in, but often the author knows that to keep going would only be an indulgence, less good than what came before, tangled in its own canon.

But I think Wales would agree that when looking at authors and bloggers who have “run out of ideas” or seem to have been wrung dry, it’s not a case of the author squeezing out every last drop from themselves, but the audience demanding the author stay in their lane. This is monetary, but it’s also a matter of attention economy, eyeballs on the page, kudos and praise. There are cautionary tales of authors who have tried to branch out after a first big hit and found themselves deflated with poor reviews and a threadbare audience.

It’s unclear how much this drives what creative types pursue, though many will freely admit that they create what sells, rather than what their innermost hearts desire.

Personal Problems and Skill Issues

Wales himself switches gears often, though he also follows patterns.

He followed Worth the Candle, a personal, introspective metafictional litRPG, with This Used to be About Dungeons, a fantasy slice-of-life serial. He’s said on multiple occasions that this wasn’t a smart thing to do from a financial perspective, nor for maintaining an audience. But it’s clear in “Non-renewable Blogging” that one of Wales’ preoccupations is being wrung out, the anxiety of repetition, the pressure of the infinite. Though he didn’t mention it there, this is a topic he’s been drawn to many times in his fiction; it’s one of the thematic throughlines of Worth the Candle, there termed “degenerate cycles”, a narrative that goes on forever and refuses to end. In his recent short fiction ForeverHaven he comes back to this topic again. For him, this seems to be an abyss he stares into, and if he’s tired of sharing it with his readers, or worries that it’s worn thin, it doesn’t stop him from returning to this well of the infinite.

There are multiple ways that the concept of infinity is expressed in Worth the Candle, from the Infinite Library to degenerate cycles to the Boundless Pit, and the boundless expanses of time and activity in the epilogues. In This Used to be About Dungeons there’s a God of Infinity, and infinite dungeons. His third serial, Thresholder, often brings up the idea of what it might mean to fight forever, for Perry to continue his journey indefinitely. In his most recent serial, AGARES, the eternal is repeatedly stated as an explicit theme of the work within a work. It apparently shows up in a number of unreleased works, like Pub Crawl and The Lot.1

There’s a sense in which an author falling into a rut is that author’s own problem. We are not moths; we can decide not to return to the flame and get our wings singed in the process. If you’ve used up pieces of your life, you can simply live more life, have other pursuits, read deeply, reflect often, write down ideas and work them into shape.

The creative anxiety here seems to be rooted in an anxiety of crystallization and calcification, stagnation and death.

The counterpoint to “Non-renewable Blogging” is, obviously, “Renewable Blogging”, a post suggested largely in the negative space of the original post. But the anxiety, for Wales, clearly extends beyond the memoir-style blog, which he engages in only infrequently, and toward other styles of writing. You can mine your life for memoirs, Wales argues, but you can also grow redundant in your fiction, perhaps as a result of your personal psychology, your attractors, your typical states of mind. And this is something that can be escaped through mindfulness, living in the world, responding to the lives of those around you. Wales would surely not deny that thoughts and ideas are often triggered by external sources, so is it merely an anxiety that his reactions to the external will, in the end, become predictable?

Ouroboros

I think it’s reasonable to worry about retreading old ground and getting boring in the process. Make the same joke too many times, and people will get tired of your schtick. I recently watched a documentary on Chevy Chase, and they had a sequence showing more than a dozen of his pratfalls back-to-back. I found my smile fading as they went by, and by the end I was sick of it. Wales somewhat conflates running out of material with running out of freshness, but I think the point stands.

There’s a popular model of the artist as a creature that eats itself, that spills blood onto the page, that calls up every ounce of personal trauma in pursuit of evocation. It’s how some people relate to art, and it seems like this is a model that Wales sometimes follows, especially given some of his more autobiographical stories. But it’s not the only way to create, and not the only way that Wales creates. He claims to have a million projects on the go, more ideas than he can ever write, and also worries that they won’t be distinct enough, fresh enough, novel enough to the reader’s eyes. If anything, it’s this creative anxiety that helps keep things fresh.

But if creation feels like eating your own tail, it’s on you to stop doing that and go find better prey.