2377: Creative Block

I don’t tend to suffer from creative block in the traditional sense: there’s never any shortage of interesting ideas rattling around inside my head (particularly while I adjust to my new anti-anxiety medication and consequently am wandering around in a perpetually stoned haze) — it’s just actually pushing forward and making them tangible in some form that I sometimes struggle with.

I’ll explain using RPG Maker as an example, but this applies to all manner of creative pursuits: music composition, writing, drawing and anything else I feel I might be able to turn my hand to on a particular day.

I’ll sit down to spend some time with RPG Maker, with something in mind that I want to achieve. In the case of my current project, I’ve even gone so far as to hand-draw some grid-based maps for the worlds in the game — pretty much essential for the structure I have in mind for at least two of the worlds players will be exploring, due to their open-ish nature. In other words, I have a clearly defined long-term goal to achieve: presently, it’s assembling all the necessary screen-size maps and ensuring all transitions are in place for the world of “Lucidia”, which is one of the four locales players will be exploring in the course of my game. I decided to assemble all the exterior maps before I even start thinking about putting obstacles, game structure, dungeons and events in place. Sensible, I think.

Anyway. When I sit down to do some mapping, I might put together a complete, nice looking map, then stare at it for a good ten minutes or so while I think about what the next screen will look like. Then I might playtest my game, even though I’ve already playtested it lots of times already, just to get the satisfaction of wandering back and forth between the new screen and existing screens. Then I’ll probably stare at it for a good few minutes, and only when I can break through this barrier of daydreaming what comes next will I actually produce the next map.

Having an awareness of this is somewhat infuriating, because it means it takes several times longer to achieve the things I want to do than it really “should” if I focus and knuckle down to it. That said, since becoming particularly aware of this trait over the last few days — I’ve always had a vague awareness of it, but over the last few days I’ve been noticing it particularly keenly for some reason — I’ve noticed my overall productivity on the project has increased quite a bit. I’ve so far assembled nearly a third of the overall map for Lucidia — a total of 53 separate screens so far, including the linear “prologue” chapter — and am feeling a lot more confident than I normally do with a creative project of this type that I might actually finish it, or at least the part I’m currently working on, at some point.

To put it another way, my own personal type of creative block is not for a want of inspiration; rather, it’s a matter of being overloaded with too much inspiration at once, and wanting to do everything all at the same time, eventually ending up doing nothing at all other than staring into space thinking “well, this should probably go like this…”

In this sense, this blog has proven to be an invaluable tool to help train myself in that I can normally churn out a whole post in one go without stopping or getting distracted in the middle. Normally. There may be a brief period of apparent brain-death while I decide on a particular topic for the day’s post, but generally speaking once I get going on a post, it flows pretty freely until I reach the end of it.

And here’s the end of it right now. I’m going to go and make some maps now. Honest.