2377: Creative Block

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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.

2219: Picking at the Scab of Creativity

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That’s a horrible metaphor, I know, but the more I think about it, the more that it seems to make a certain amount of sense.

I’ve been picking at said scab for the last few days, as I said I was going to. I haven’t been spending all day on it or anything, but an hour here and an hour there has meant that a story I’ve been wanting to finish since my teenage years is finally making some progress further beyond the point where it typically stalls any time I attempt to form it into some sort of… well, format.

I’m taking a different approach to what I usually do, and it feels like it’s working. Those who have read my various month-long sort of NaNoWriMo projects and other creative pieces will know that I have something of a tendency to write in a fairly spontaneous manner — in other words, I don’t really plan anything out in advance, and this usually serves me well but occasionally sees me writing myself into a bit of a dead end I’m not sure how to escape from. In contrast, then, said scab-picking has involved not just continuing on with what I’ve already written — which is a substantial number of words that I’m actually quite pleased with so far — but instead planning out a synopsis, chapter by chapter, of what’s coming next.

Doing this has helped me get over the biggest creative block I’ve had with this work — a creative block that has lasted a good 15 years or so at last count. The trouble with this story is that I know how it begins and I know roughly how it ends, but I’ve never quite figured out what happens in the middle of it or the specifics of the ending. Now I’m planning each chapter out in general terms rather than trying to write meaningful scenes as I get to them, I feel like I’m developing a much stronger sense of the work’s complete structure, and those middle bits are starting to fall into place naturally. It’s that old thing where a huge job looks daunting if you look at the whole thing, but if you take it a single task at a time it suddenly seems a lot more manageable.

So picking a scab then — why? Well, because I’ve been picking at it for the last few days, and each time I do so, I feel my creativity loosen up a bit. It’s surely — hopefully — only a matter of time before that scab comes off completely and creativity comes gushing forth from a newly reopened wound, splattering the walls and desk with… you know what? Maybe I didn’t think this metaphor through as much as I thought I had.

Anyway. Disgusting mental imagery aside, I’m pleased with my progress, even though it’s relatively minor in the grand scheme of what I need to do to finish the damn thing. It is progress, though, and while I’m still not feeling great about bumming around at home all day rather than having a proper job, it is at least helping me to feel like I’m achieving something, however miniscule that something might be. And that’s pretty important.

Let’s hope I can keep that motivation going, a bit at a time.

#oneaday Day 583: Creative Breakfast

I’ve reached a decision. Once all this moving stuff is over and done with I’m going to start writing these entries in the morning. There are many reasons for this, chief among which is the fact that by the time it gets to late evening I’m knackered and have already spent the day doing my day job which involves, yes, writing.

Part of this is sheet stubborn determination to not let tiredness and lack of creativity beat me. It would be easy to say I was fed up and tired of writing stuff every day. I’m not; it just feels a bit like it sometimes, particularly when it gets to 11pm and I haven’t written anything — and often haven’t thought of anything to write.

So the plan is thus: get up, eat breakfast, indulge in “creative breakfast” by writing blog in the morning. That way 1) it’s out of the way in the morning and 2) my mind is already in a good mindset for writing.

It also helps avoid filler entries like this one which follow 4 hour drives.

So night night! Look forward to the new regime starting soon.

#oneaday, Day 256: Writer’s Block

I’m actually surprised I’ve managed to go for 256 days without running out of things to write. Whenever I consider pitching an article idea to somebody, you know, “proper”, it concerns me greatly that my brain will just zone out and forget how to be creative. But if this blog has proven one thing, it’s that it’s possible to come up with something that is at least readable every day.

Different people take very different approaches to writing. I remember back in school and at university, being encouraged to write detailed plans for any piece of writing. Including while under exam conditions. Being someone who never had trouble sitting down with a pen and piece of paper (or indeed in front of a computer) and letting the words flow naturally, it always struck me as something of a waste of time. For me, anyway. When I write, I tend to let my brain run several steps ahead of what my hands are writing. Thus, I find myself developing organic, natural arguments in the same way I would if I was talking to someone face-to-face. Perhaps more well-considered, since face-to-face conversations don’t have the opportunity to go back and delete something stupid that you just said. Like the sentence I just deleted that you’ll now never get to read. Hah. It might have been about you. How does that make you feel?

No, I can honestly say that I have never sat down and actually written down a plan of what I’m about to write. Thinking about it, though, I do go through the process. I make a plan in my head. I just don’t commit it to paper, Word document or draft post. I’ve certainly never used Outline Mode in a word processor, which made it rather hard to explain the benefits of said mode when attempting to sell copies of iWork ’09 to customers.

Once I’ve written the whole thing, depending on the “importance” of what I’m writing (i.e. whether it’s a strictly personal thing, something I want to impress people with or something that I’m doing professionally) I’ll go back and read over what I’ve written again. Sometimes I’ll come to the conclusion that I was talking complete nonsense and delete huge chunks of work that will never be seen again. Such as that other paragraph all about your sister that I just deleted. (It wasn’t really relevant to the matter at hand.) Other times I’ll rearrange paragraphs and make them flow more naturally. And sometimes, just sometimes, I’ll start all over again in the electronic equivalent of screwing up the piece of paper and flinging it in the bin. (Cmd-W, Cmd-N… yes, I’m a Mac user, deal with it.)

Eventually, I’ll end up with something like this that, as I say, is at least readable if not necessarily the most interesting thing in the world. And then I do the same again tomorrow. And again the day after. And the following day. And… You get the idea.

I’ve done this process so often now that I use it on everything, from blog posts like this to feature-length articles on websites to comments on Facebook (seriously). It’s pretty rare you’ll catch me responding to something with nothing but a simple “lol” (actually, never on that one) or a smiley.

And that, everyone, is how you keep the creative juices flowing. Like anything, practice makes perfect, and the more consistently you do it, the more naturally it’ll happen.

One A Day, Day 32: Writer’s Unblock

Look at me, blogging in the middle of the day like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

Writing’s a funny thing. If you’re a writer, you’ll know the feeling you get when it’s a “writing day”. I’m sure this is different for everyone, but for me I know it’ll be a good day to write if I find myself composing introductions to articles in my head while I’m doing other things. Because, after all, getting started is always the hardest bit, right?

So now I’ve written the article for which the introduction popped into my head while I was at the shop buying milk. No, you can’t see it. Yet. As introductions go, it wasn’t anything particularly groundbreaking or astounding, but an introduction it was nonetheless, and from that starting point I could continue on to write the rest of the article.

I don’t write like we were taught in school. I remember when we were first taught “how to write an essay”, with encouragements to plan things out beforehand – to plan your introduction, to plan your conclusion, to plan each paragraph using a “point, example, explain” structure (which one English teacher memorably referred to as PEEing all over your work) – and thinking “gosh, that sounds like a lot of unnecessary work”.

By the time I was writing essays for school, I had already been writing for my own pleasure for some years. The box of 5.25″ floppy disks which is currently sitting in my living room accompanied by the Atari 800XL with which they are used contain a couple of disks worth of my “Cyril the Dragon” stories, which were vaguely hallucinogenic tales that only a young child with an overactive imagination could come up with. If I ever get the cable to link the Atari to a PC working, I will be sure to publish some of that juvenilia on this very site for all to admire. To get to the point (maybe I should have planned this paragraph) – these stories were unplanned, written purely by sitting down, starting typing and seeing what happened next. As the product of a young child’s imagination, you can clearly see the influences on the things which took place – mostly video games, some television, some books, some comics, some things which had actually happened – but most importantly, I hadn’t actually planned it that way. It just sort of came out.

Writing in this way is actually quite a relaxing experience. Those who study this sort of thing call it “freewriting”. Technically what I’m doing right now is almost freewriting – the only thing setting it apart from true freewriting is the fact that I’m going back and correcting mistakes. True freewriting is where you sit down with a piece of paper, don’t look at it, don’t listen to anything and just write, without stopping, for a set period of time, then only look at what you’ve written once your time’s up.

Some seriously odd things can come out. For a Creative Writing module that I did as part of my degree, we had to do this every day for about a month. Some days, the beginnings of stories came out. Other days, my internal monologue came out onto the page. Other days, I wrote about how I was feeling, or who I was thinking about, or my aspirations for the future. None of them were great pieces of writing, but they were interesting insights into what was going through my head at the time. I don’t think I still have the pieces of paper on which I wrote them, which is a bit of a shame. Perhaps I’ll try it again sometime, though.

In fact, that sounds like tomorrow’s blog entry is ready to go already. Expect tomorrow’s entry to be even more gibberish than usual, in that case.