The 99% Paradox

Inspiration is a fickle thing; light as a butterfly or heavy as a boulder, but rarely does it land on either extreme when you need it most. In the weeks preceding the completion of the first draft of my first novel, "The As-Yet-To-Be-Officially-Named Adventures-Of-Captain-Briggs-And-Some-Unpleasant-Insect-Monsters-From-Beyond-The-Stars", I was so filled with good ideas that I thought I might burst. Whole hosts of abandoned and forgotten side projects suddenly sprung to life, each bubbling forth with more ideas than my sleep-deprived mind was capable of handling. It was like stepping up to a partially completed jigsaw that you'd struggled with for hours before and, without thinking, rotating and matching that one completed piece so that it fits perfectly and the barn/bridge/country house with the children/dogs/ducks in front of it suddenly has a place in it's multi-faceted puzzle world.

Each new idea suddenly made sense... provided that it was directly associated to some project other than the novel-at-hand. Those ideas, like rare variant action figures, seemed to be packed one per case of 25 and were usually gone before I got to the store. Eventually, I had to start carrying a notebook and a audio recorder with me wherever I went in hopes that, if I couldn't remember, I might be able to at least record my better ideas.

Now, compare and contrast that with immediately after finishing Draft-of-book-1. Suddenly, I am filled with a great emptiness, as if I have launched my only firework and now have nothing to do but watch the others explode into the night sky. I know my work is not done - I'm starting to get some sneaking suspicions that I may have done myself a terrible wrong in writing this first book that it'll take me years to untangle (more on this later). But there's no heart in me; least not now.

It reminds me of a problem once faced by a laptop owned by my soon to be wife. In order to conserve power and make the laptop function longer, they rigged it so that the fans would only kick on at full power once the processor reached 100% of it's load capacity. Not a bad idea in and of itself. The problem was that some other branch of their R&D department had engineered the processor so that it was only capable of running at full capacity if it sensed that the fans were running at their highest speed. Also, as a stand-alone, not a bad idea.

The result? The processor only got up to 99% utilization and stopped, waiting for fans that would never kick on... because the fans were waiting for the processor to cross that line first. Both sides danced back and forth along the 99% threshhold, neither able to cross without the other, both slowly pushing themselves towards destruction.

I was the same in highschool. The closer the deadline -> The better the ideas -> The less time to enact them in. Why, I remember getting a perfect 100% grade on a report I wrote (poorly) in the class before it was due. It's not that I couldn't have done well if I'd taken the whole 3 weeks to 2 months assigned... it's just that deadlines make the brain work faster.

Necessity is the mother of invention, but capacity is the baby's mama of creativity.