Sometimes the Tiger Rides You

Horseback riding is one of those things that forces life lessons on you even when you don't want them. It's like philosophy punching you down the throat. Via a half-ton animal.

I went out to the stables last night hoping for an easy ride. I've been a little worked up and tense about things in my day to day life: book release, wedding stuff, work stuff. The temperature was perfect and it was a glorious blue-sky day, so I figured I'd pull out Giraffe and do some fun, easy fieldwork.

Well, I did fieldwork, but it was neither easy nor fun.

Writing's like that too sometimes. Even when you come up with a stellar idea, you have days (or weeks) where you sit down in front of a blank page and just stare at it. Like all creative ventures, it's not enough to have all the right parts of the equation. Idea + Motivation + Skill = Good Book in theory, but in practice, there's another variable in there. You need that extra something; spark or inspiration or what have you.

It's more like this: Idea + Motivation + Skill + X = Good Book. And you spend all your time solving for X.

Last night I went out on horseback hoping for a fun ride, and instead the horse freaked out at everything. We did a bucking/rearing tour of, let's see... a tractor (MONSTER), a creek (WATER MONSTER), a bush (ALSO MONSTER), and as far as I could tell, empty air (MONSTER MONSTER MONSTER).

I've been riding for a long time, and my specialty is problem horses, so I never actually came off in the field - it happens to me, of course, just not very often. But when I dismounted and went to run up the stirrups before heading in, the horse swung his head around to nuzzle me and jammed the bone of his nose into my finger.

To clarify, the last time a horse full-on clocked me with its nose, it broke my nose.

Talk about adding insult to injury. I came out of a fairly harrowing hour of riding completely unscathed, only to have the horse mess me up by accident on the ground.

Like with writing, there is no getting around it: occasionally the things you love just aren't any fun. Occasionally all your efforts just blow up in your face. Sometimes you ride the tiger; sometimes the tiger rides you.

How well you can roll with the punches is what makes or breaks you, I guess. Nobody really wants to spend an evening debating whether or not their finger is broken, but it is what it is. You either suck it up, let it go, and move on, or you don't come back.

I keep coming back, broken bones and all.

Being a Good Loser (or, how horses and writing are kind of the same thing)

My big non-writing activity is horseback riding. Which I've probably mentioned before, but you'll have to forgive me, the Alzheimer's is kicking in super early. If I can remember what I ate for breakfast it's a good day (which I cannot, coincidentally).

Right now I'm working on training a young, green horse. He's a gigantic Warmblood with a sweet, relatively docile disposition and so much potential you could weep over it. After a couple months of working with him I'm finally making real, visible progress, and that makes me think of writing.

The fellow in question.

When you first have this idea for a story, all you can see is this glorious picture in your mind of what the end result is going to look like. You're almost tempted not to even work on it, because you don't want to mess with that beautiful picture.

But of course, if you want to get anywhere you do have to start working. So you pull up a word doc and start writing and you're like okay, this is going somewhere, it's fine.

And then you hit a snag. An idea doesn't make sense or a character falls flat or something just feels off. It's like a bad day with the horse - everything is going fine and then out of nowhere they mutiny against every command and try to shove you around in the stall. You're left miserable, wondering what the hell happened and how you can possibly fix it if you don't even know what went wrong.

So then you have a choice. You have to decide: Is it the horse(idea)? Is it me? Or is it both, and do I want to keep working anyway?

The truth is, not every idea works and not every horse is going to work with you. Sometimes there's a personality clash and it's better to switch horses. I have a bunch of old manuscripts, some complete ones, that I finished and realized they sucked. It happens.

I guess the trick here is figuring out what's a barrier you can push through and what's a brick wall. Over time, hopefully, we get better at it. But just a few weeks ago I wrote 50 pages of a project and ended throwing them out wholesale. They weren't good enough and I couldn't make them better. I had to start over from scratch.

But then I started a new story, and it did work; it worked a hundred times better than the old one.

So maybe the key isn't to figuring out when you're playing a losing game. Maybe the key is being a good loser. If you can walk away from a failure (50,000 scrapped words, a horse that you just couldn't teach) and say, "Yeah, I failed, but I'm doing something else now and it's good."

And if it isn't good, you still start all over again.