Decisions, Decisions...

As it turns out, writing a fantasy novel (or any other type of novel, I’m sure) is a tremendous amount of work.

I’ve been a voracious reader for as long as I can remember. In the first years of grade school, my mom would pay my siblings and me a shiny loonie (a single Canadian Dollar, if you’re not familiar. It looks exactly as silly as it sounds) for every book we finished, handing over the riches after a short quiz about the book's contents.

And boy, did I stack them coinssss.

Stacked em and rolled em all the way to the local Walmart, where I made my first purchase with money I had gladly earned all on my own. I still remember the thrill of ripping off the cellophane wrapping from the box of my brand new GameBoy Pocket, along with a gleaming golden cartridge with the words “Pokemon - Special Pikachu Edition” scrawled across the top. I thought I had it made and that I would just read books for pay on my way to early retirement.

As possibly one of the youngest victims of workplace agism, at some point between Goosebumps and the Chronicles of Narnia, this lucrative contract between my mother and I was abruptly terminated. But the fire had been lit, my love for reading transcending my capitalist desires, and I’ve been doing the job pro bono ever since.

I realize now how I had taken for granted the true craftsmanship behind these stories that I would devour so quickly, hungry for the next as if they were something that grew in crops, a drop of ink planted in some farmer's field that would sprout into a fully formed novel at harvest time, and I wondered if perhaps book farming was next logical step in my career path. Reading was easy and fun; I had a gift for getting lost in a well-woven weave of richly written story-crafts. Weaving couldn’t be that much more complicated than reading, right?

Wrong.

Extremely very wrong.

But it would be a long time before I would dive face-first into this empty pool and learn this lesson for myself.

The clues were there, though, like thousands of others before and after me; I first turned to the unlimited possibilities of the world of fantasy after watching Peter Jackson's masterful rendition of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy somewhere around the 7th grade. I remember picking up the Fellowship of the Ring after the first film, determined to finish the entire Trilogy before the rest were to come out and thinking that there must have been some sort of mistake, that someone had replaced my copy with a lunatic version of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

It was just so dense. Every detail was so meticulously crafted, every scene so overwhelmingly lush and…real. It was overwhelming, to say the least, but over that summer, I managed to finish all three novels. It was a challenge, even a chore. This wasn’t the easy breezy dumbed-down prose I was used to. Some might even say it was work! It was then I first got a glimpse behind the curtain to see the vast panel of knobs and levers and buzzing machines behind every word, every scene, every spoken word of dialogue, in every story I had ever read that there was first a person in real life, in real-time, who sat down with a story held in their head and made a decision. And then another one, another one, and a hundred thousand more until the book was eventually decided to be finished.

Decisions are hard; they require energy. Having to make one a day can be one too many, sometimes.

I had always pictured writers as savant-type virtuosos, like a pianist reciting some complex piece, a smug smile on his face as his fingers danced across the keys, hardly glancing up at the notes on the pages in front of him. It was almost as if he, too, was part of the audience, simply watching as his fingers, blessed with divine musical ability, would choose the correct key every time, exactly on time, with hardly any effort at all.

In the same way, I imagined the likes of Stephen King or Nora Roberts sitting down at their desks, whimsically typing away, hardly glancing down, never giving the work more than a moment’s thought, until eventually, they would stop, an expertly crafted work of fiction complete in total, ready to ship.

Now, at age 34, several years into my writing journey, I realize how wrong I was. Just as the Pianist has to sit down, decide to practice, and pour hours bent over the piano, grimacing at sour notes beneath fumbling fingers, until the skill is so ingrained in his bones that he cannot help but play the piece correctly, so must it be for the writer.

Decision fatigue hits hard and fast. I struggled, as many new writers do, agonizing over each and every one of them, worried that a wrong decision now would cost me dearly later. I would burn out after hours spent labouring over a single paragraph.

There’s a different joy that comes with writing, one that only comes once you accept that it's not the correctness of the decision that matters; it's the simple act of making it, stacking it on top of the last one, and moving on, this is where you find the beauty. Right or wrong, you learn from each one. As the stack grows higher, the more you can mould and manipulate as a whole until the totality of the rights and the wrongs eventually take shape into something that you can be proud of.

By the way, I still have that Gameboy and, while faded, that golden yellow cartridge, too. I don't know if there’s a poignant lesson in that or not. Maybe my decision handicap stemmed from that formative moment because Pokemon Yellow didn’t give you a choice for who to choose as a starter; Pikachu was the only option.

I blame you, Pikachu!