House was so fucking brilliant tonight. Brilliant even by House standards. I’m just so consistently blown away by both the writing and the acting on that show. It’s rare that I watch a scripted show these days and think to myself, “Wow, I couldn’t write anything even close to this good.” House does that to me every week. Actually, all the scripted shows I watch do that. It’s probably why they’re the only scripted shows I watch. I love being totally blown away by a writer’s talent, just kind of sitting there in awe, like, “Woah. That was crazy smart.”
Today was all kinds of stress. I don’t know why. I know why, and I don’t know why. It’s the choices I’ve made, it’s the risks I have taken, it’s the gambles and the pressures and the ego. I do nothing half-assed. It’s not the way I operate; it’s never been. I make large, sweeping decisions on little more than instinct and then I set about the details of executing them. Strangely, this usually goes well. It does. And it’s a pattern I’ve come to rely upon. Sasha has an idea. Sasha sits with the idea for a week, a month, maybe more. Sasha does a tiny amount of research and talks to a few people whose opinions she maybe values or at least finds amusing. Most ideas have been aborted by the end of this short gestation period. The ones that survive are then live-birthed, ripped from their umbilical cord and sent marching into the world sans instructions or body armor.
And believe it or not: It usually works. Usually.
It’s something I’ve always believed to be true of good creative writing: Your characters will find themselves. They will find their own way. You set them up and you believe in their story and their value and you put them here and then you let them go. They will create a world for themselves. They will navigate and they will befriend and they will arc. They will do things far more interesting than you’d ever imagined had you been micro-managing their path through your story. They will surprise you, and they should. Your characters will find themselves.
I stayed true to that when I wrote short fiction, part from laziness and cockiness, and part because it always worked out so well. I would create a world and a scenario and lives which I believed carried value and then I would watch those lives find their way. They communicated with me, I felt, through their dialogue, and I would use that to build the text that surrounded them. I was more an instrument of their lives than they ever were of mine.
I realize only now that I have taken a very similar approach to running a business, to making business decisions. I create a world instinctively. I introduce characters on a whim into roles that I think might compliment others. And then I let them go, let them find a way. I trust that they will do just that. That the story will arc and collapse and wind and soar and create dialogue that will speak to me and I will use it as a guide to carry them forward.
Is this any way to run a business?
I feel like I’m in over my head on a lot of things here. I am moving into unmastered territory, and I feel fallible. I am fallible. It has to feel like this, I just realized. This is growth. This stress is me learning. There’s a story I heard, somewhere, someplace, about a woman who was tending to her garden, pruning her plants so that they could grow taller and stronger and broader. And she realized that God worked the same way in her life. “Prune me, Lord,” she asked, “So that I may grow.” That line has stuck with me since I first heard it, years ago. This is how we grow. We find ourselves in situations in which we are uncertain, under-informed, stuck, and without our usual cadre of tricks. We are pruned. It hurts and it’s scary. But we can’t stay stuck forever, and so we grow, taller and stronger and broader, until this terrain is familiar and we know where it’s bumpy and we know where it’s steep and we can walk around here at night wearing sunglasses and we will find our way.
Is this any way to run a business?
Jury’s still out, I suppose.
