passive obsession

meditations on fantasy school and creativity

Xinyi Cheng, Red Kayak, 2020

I could drive up and down the California coast for the rest of my life and be happy. In Bodega Bay N and I eat Miyagi oysters and corn soup and listen to the sounds of the ocean. The air is cold at night and smells fishy. I have been editing intensely all month, and felt unpleasantly dislocated upon putting away my Google doc this weekend. Finishing a period of focused work always feels like a bad drug comedown.

I have a new idea for a book. I was going to say I'm not sure where it came from, but I know exactly where it comes from: for the past several years, I’ve been reading science fiction and fantasy (heavier on fantasy) books almost every night to put myself to sleep. For some reason, I rarely want to read literary fiction or nonfiction right before bed, but I also feel bad going on social media. I find fantasy propulsive but relaxing at the same time.

Checking my Kindle history: in August I discovered Robert Jackson Bennett’s Ana and Din fantasy mystery books through Netgalley, and just finished the second one; then I read his entire Founders trilogy in a week, and am currently halfway through the first book in his Divine City series. I read Deborah Harkness’ All Souls trilogy at the end of July (great take on a vampire and witch romance!). Also read The Knight and Moth in July, as well as Silver Elite by Dani Francis (a BookTok favorite, apparently). In June, S turned me onto The Lies of Locke Lamora. I also read The Incandescent by Emily Tesh, and The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hudson.

I also really enjoy fantasy anime. I just finished all thirteen episodes of Kowloon Generic Romance, which got me through my last week of editing. I would literally edit for a bit, put an episode on, and then edit some more. Right now S and I are watching Season 2 of Kaiju No. 8 as well as To Be Hero X (honestly, amazing), and this weird Victorian-inspired show called Lord of Mysteries (undecided about whether it’s good).

Anyway, turns out that if you spend a lot of your time passively but fervently consuming a particular genre, it seeps into your consciousness and shapes what you think about, whether or not you spend any active time theorizing about it. For instance, my most millennial quality is that I love any kind of School book: magic school like The Incandescent or The Will of the Many or Fourth Wing or of course Harry Potter, coming of age prep school literary fiction novels like Prep or Idlewild, and of course the multitude of animes that begin with a Mysterious Transfer Student appearing. My all-time favorite anime is a tossup between Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury or Little Witch Academia (my dog is named after the main character, Akko!). For better or worse, Ava Dreams of School.

I love disappearing into other people’s immersive worlds, and I also love creating them. To me, that’s the point of writing: you can make something from nothing, simply summon it with your mind. You can do it in your living room, on the train, in a cafe, from a hotel room in Japan. And the world you spin up is uniquely yours. It’s therapeutic, because you can work through what you’ve felt and experienced, where you’ve been and where you’re going. It’s imaginative, because you’re making things up as you go along. It’s a way to exercise authority and charisma, to experiment with being direct and being oblique. And it’s a way to use everything you’ve read, learned, thought about. It’s fun.

All of my friends are creative. The things they are make can be very different from the things I make. Some of them have made sprawling organizations; some of them create evocative physical spaces; many write, but write about totally different things than I do. But there’s something about that ability to spin up a private world that is the synthesis of what you consciously desire and subconsciously obsess over that I find so compelling.

Creativity is not something you can force. That’s why the term “passive obsession” feels fitting to me: my ideas tend to bubble up from fixations that I bat away more than I encourage. I’ve never been someone who enjoys brainstorming on command or making top-down decisions about what to work on. I prefer letting my attention wander, believing that it’ll lead me to the right place if I just watch and wait.

Just like relationships, obsessions don’t have to make sense in the moment; I often only understand the full shape of a fixation years in. In the past few years, I’ve started almost completely deferring to my intuition. I no longer even try to analyze most of my decisions; I generally figure that my subconscious knows better, and listen to it the best I can. It works so much better that way. I’m convinced that waiting for your instincts to make sense to your conscious mind just takes too long.

Of course, learning how to listen to your intuition is a skill you have to develop. (Inb4 all the people who are like “But my intuition keeps leading me into bad relationships!”) I visualize it as The Princess and the Pea—my intuition often takes the form of the pea at the bottom of the mattress, the thing that keeps nagging at me no matter how much I try to dismiss it. My overt anxieties can often be the opposite of intuition, and I often have to wait until they clear up before I can feel the truth. There’s a specific feel to my intuition—a flavor—that I only can recognize from previous times I’ve listened to it.

In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert talks about “ideas going away”—she believes that good ideas occasionally visit you, but if you don’t allow yourself to become a vessel for them they go to the next person. She writes, “If inspiration is allowed to unexpectedly enter you, it is also allowed to unexpectedly exit you.” There’s this great anecdote about how she and Ann Patchett had the same extremely specific idea for a novel that later became State of Wonder that’s worth reading. I’ve always resonated with that: intuition knocks, but it’s up to you to open up.

Another way to put it: your attention is smarter than you are. Of course, we live in a world where Bad Things are constantly competing for our attention, but if you can develop a healthy relationship with what you pay attention to you can figure out What You Should Do. Have you noticed that if you really love someone, you always find them interesting, if you love parts of someone, you sometimes find them interesting, and if you don’t love someone you don’t find them interesting at all? And I don’t mean interesting in the sense of, They have so many great fun anecdotes and facts. Have you noticed that forcing yourself to pay attention to someone feels distinctly different from instinctively wanting to pay attention to them? Obsession is beyond coercion, and that’s what makes it powerful.