To be clear, "creep" is the habit of a work to grow, and grow, and grow, like a mold behind the sheet rock of your mind. What starts as a simple half-novella balloons, one scene at a time, into a Jordan-esque gargantua before you even realize what's happening.
Creep is wonderful, and it is awful, and it is painful and beautiful and puzzling all at once. Those of us who write with our feet moving are by far the most susceptible, though I imagine it catches the odd whole-draft writer often enough when they're not looking. You begin to see small changes, little edits, new lines you want to give your characters the excuse to say, and you update your outline accordingly.
It's just one little wafer-thin piece. What harm could it do?
Each little vignette, each new minor addition is benign in its own right, but together they form a veritable Destructor of new content that can throw off any predictions you might have had about when the work will be complete, to say nothing of the half-dozen tweaks you'll no doubt think up in the window of your newly extended deadline.
Creep likes to attack in the wee hours, in that delicate space between sleeping and waking when fantasy reigns supreme and magic mingles with mystery inside our minds. It preys upon the unsuspecting scrap paper and moonlight scribbles of the author's bedside. It lurks in the dark corners of every serendipitous discourse that startles the stagnant embers of creativity. Creep craves the chaotic collisions of a caffeinated cranium.
Crazy, right?
Creep can be a beautiful thing. It's through creep that we are reminded of the life of a work, the life of a world. Creep exists because we are never finished. No scene is ever complete. Rather, scenes are confined by soft borders; thin cellophane screens that no more hold them back than a reed halts a summer storm.
Naturally, we have to stop somewhere. Every draft chooses the lines where the scene ends, where the experiment stops, where the worth runs out; but those lines are no more set in the immalleable memory of the collective consciousness than the borders of a Russian sub-state.
...Too soon?
Creep means that there is always more to be added, there is always something more we crave about a world, a character, a scene, a moment in fictional time that must be seen, shared and savored before we can call ourselves complete.
Limitless possibilities: wonderful to ponder, aggravating to execute.
The Order, once a 230-page poser-paperback flapping in the wind has now crept across 390 total pages, with what looks to be almost 200 pages still to come before even the core arc of the story will reach its full. The creative mold has overtaken my mind entirely at this point, branching into entirely new evolutionary strains resistant to any and all attempts to remove them safely from the brain.
Suffice it to say, creep is very close to my heart, having traveled southbound from the cerebellum. For those similarly afflicted, consider writing in stages:
- Stage one: Core scenes only. Write only what you need to survive. Record any ideas for additional scenes in brief, store for later use.
- Stage two: Pen added scenes ad hoc, individually. Modular. Insert into core plotline and note the page numbers before and after.
- Stage three: Re-read complete draft with added scenes added in. Remove any that feel awkward or out of place. Store the rejects somewhere safe, just in case. Potentially insert into future works with similar situations, characters or settings.
- Stage four: Pie. Get you some.
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