The Fear of Being a One-Hit Wonder
How did I do that? And will I ever do it again? Yikes.
One of the least pleasant sensations in the world, for a writer, is the feeling that you can’t remember how you did what you just managed to do. For me, it’s particularly true about coming up with story ideas. Every time, every single time, I have finished writing something, I am sure that this is my one and only time of landing on a good idea and executing it successfully and that I will never, ever repeat it.
Part of the problem is I can never quite remember how I got the idea to begin with. I suppose that’s not so surprising; after all, ideas seem to well up, presenting as a soft bubbling up, rather than landing with a thud, so pinpointing the exact moment an idea is born is nearly impossible. You see something, you hear something, you read something; it rattles around in your head for a while and starts taking form, and then it pokes at you a little and then a little more and then, wow, you have an idea. It’s like catching a cold, gradually and then all of the sudden, more than breaking your leg. The mysterious part of it is that instant when something completely unexpected clicks in a quiet way. It feels so mysterious, in fact, that it seems impossible to duplicate; how can you manufacture a sort of amazing thing like that? I’m very good at walking backwards to…
