If you didn't want to write it, why'd you write it? Your posting history does not incline me to believe that you're the sort to be easily coerced... What is yours about?
In my experience, art isn't often a very rational activity. My lifelong passion is for painting. I'm perfectly content to paint. I get up early every morning, paint five or six hours, and sometimes end up with presentable paintings, although that's largely incidental to the endeavor. It's all about painting (verb,) not paintings (nouns.)
I used to write approximately the same way. In the late 1980s, I decided to abandon the Great American Novel in favor of shorter forms. I'd happened across novellas by Jim Harrison, tried on some European novellas for sizeit's actually a European genre, one we've largely ignoredand gave it a whirl. I actually made some progress. I found I could write
considerably smaller than I'd ever thought. I kept trying to turn novellas into novels by adding more bulk, but eventually wised up to the method.
About the time I started to make visible progress writing small, I resumed painting, which I'd been forced to abandon in boyhood. I painted and wrote for awhile. In 1995 or thereabouts, I decided to take a month of writing just to paint. I was curious to see what would happen. To my amazement and delight, I painted up a storm, and felt almost no need to return to writing. I knew at the time my painting wasn't ever going to win awards or command stellar pricesbut it was
painting. It was good. It was the real thing. It was what I was born to do.
Other than marketing and advertising stuff, I didn't even think about writing. Oh, I knew some tales I could have written, good ones, some of thembut so what? How excited about a rusty old Volkswagen are you supposed to get when you've got a Porsche to drive?
Little did I know!
The Great American Novel was lurking in wait all that time. It took its first bite out of me in the spring of 2003. I ignored it. I didn't want anything to do with it, especially since it was a tale about an evil man. I've never had any interest in evil. It's repugnant. It needs to be acknowledged, true, and resisted and fought and vanquishedbut so what? Not on
my time!
I tried to sabotage it by dashing off a few chapters in the fall of that year. It was a wretched mess. I happily erased it from my main hard drive and resumed painting with undivided attention. The @#$%^&! thing demanded to be written.
I wrote it. I rewrote it. I re-rewrote it. I re-re-rewrote it. It devoured a year and a half of my life. I set it aside between draughts 7 and 8 to write a novella about people who aren't the least bit evil, and wrote it in my own style instead of my evil narrator's style. It was a thing of beauty and grace, light and charm and hope. It's a truly delightful little taleand the novel demanded to be finished, anyway.
I finished it this past spring. I did a bit of marketing for it, only to discover agents are just as slow to send form rejection E-mails as they used to be to send form rejection post cards. I still can't stand to think about the @#$%^&! thing. It's a brilliantly conceived, very well wrought tale about not one, but two evil people: a man and a woman who wander into something like a romantic relationship. If someone else had written it and I brought it home from a book shop, I'm sure I'd find it an amazing piece of work.
I'm going to have to figure out what to do with itbut not just yet. I've since written the first draught of another novella, and again, there's nothing even remotely related to evil in it. I don't want to work on it, either. All I really want to do is paint and shoot bullseye.
I wouldn't wish creativity on my worst enemy even if I had one.
