It took me a long time to consider myself an artist. It has only happened in the last five years. And that was such a hard process I didn’t want to to do anything else. It’s a herculean task to convince yourself that you have to break open reality and add something new to it, to justify all of that, to say this is different, this is important, this has to exist. Even now I’ll start working on a game and still end up asking “Is this worth it, even for me? Do I care enough?”. Especially when my health is so often making things harder.
Convincing myself is hard. Convincing anyone else? Sometimes too hard to even conceive of. So I invented the idea of the “art bucket”. I would, against all odds, create a thing all the way to the end and then simply drop it in a bucket. It has a sense of satisfaction: I have done something and proved it can be done. And maybe if people want to, they can come along and look in the bucket. This strategy is not without its merits: what matters most about art, a lot of the time, is getting it done for you. You need to break the universe and stick a flag in reality and pour your pain out into something and then stop and walk away and say “I did that”. Asking it to do anything else is a side issue. Hang the painting on your wall, share the book with your friends, tuck the prototype into your game bag. We should call that enough definitely! Even if you argue that art needs an audience to work – to be an act of communication – an audience of one counts as an audience.
That then however leads to the next battle: given that I have made things and made them good, I now have to convince myself if it is worth doing the rest. The “everything else” that allows me to find an audience and even make money. Every artist who has any kind of audience has to do some of the rest. Mentors have told me that the key is just juggling that ratio, and I agree. Some have suggested that their ratio is about 10% Art/90% Rest – 90% of their time spend on their art is not making art at all, but finding ways to make that make money. Or doing things that are adjacent to the art to get access or funding for the art, although to be clear, the 90% doesn’t include the day job/funding stuff usually. The 90% is just “finding ways so that the art gets to people or doesn’t drive you broke”. But it is worth remembering that even in profitable industries, even when having an audience and constantly “working” in their industry, very very few artists have ever been able to not have day jobs. Most Hollywood directors have day jobs. Pretty much all published authors have day jobs. And then the 90% is on top of all that.
Statistically speaking, the average writer/game designer doesn’t spend the majority of their time working at the keyboard. I wanted to be Steven J Cannell as a kid, because I wanted to be that guy at the typewriter. How dare you lie to me, Steve!
I started in my role of “getting RPGs to people” by posting stuff on forums and blogs. Then I got work as a freelancer, which I did really enjoy, but it is conditional on being really into the RPGs in question, and also being able to get the work itself, which I used to do through contacts online and is becoming harder and harder to stay connected to those folks. I also have an auDHD thing where I bounce around from passions (and my skills tend to rubber-band a lot – being super super strong and then shrinking, or appearing too, after the focus drops off). I’ve spent the last eight years or so with a new approach which has been finding my own voice and publishing lots of my own games. And now I’m wondering – what’s next? Do I keep doing that? Do I alter it, or scrap it?
I have a sense that incrementally, I may be able to do more as a publisher, spending more money – risking more money – to get more of an audience and playing to a popular audience since The Score seems to be popular. But I also know that doing that means more of The Rest and less of The Art. On the other hand, having achieved everything I set myself to do in RPGs, I am feeling uninspired in that area and in non-RPG tabletop I’ve done tons of designs and could use a little break. Two arguments for doing more The Rest. But doing that reduces my % of The Art and deep down that’s what I live for. I DO need an audience. I DO want an audience. But I need to work the typewriter a lot. And another autism thing is we tend to feel things very strongly so when things suck we just do not want to do them at all, because that “this isn’t fun” burns like acid.
But at the same time, if I go back to just the art bucket, I find myself frustrated because I do want that audience. Last year I wrote like a million games (because my brain was doing that hyperfocus, hyperskill thing) and one of them is really good and I’d really like it to be published widely, not just made to look like a nice Word document and put out on my website to hope anybody cares about. That means trying to figure out how much of The Rest I can stand though.
I am trying to get used to never knowing what to do or how to do it, and never knowing what I want, and never really being content. It seems to be the way I am, and I am trying to enjoy constantly being in flux rather than waiting for anything to settle. I certainly don’t expect to have a good answer today. And I think sometimes it’s really hard to tell. Sometimes you have to try things to know, but sometimes, even then, you just can’t tell. Especially when so much of my ability to tell if I like anything has been twisted or muted with mental health issues. Maybe the only thing I can do is talk about it, in the hope that anyone else coming after can at least get that this stuff is hard to work out. Not only is it a puzzle to solve HOW to do it, a puzzle which constantly changes as you change and the industry changes and the art form changes, but it’s also a puzzle to solve the WHY and WHAT DO I WANT and DO I LIKE THIS parts too.
Sometimes, all you can do is just put words down and hope it does something, anything, in the act of coming out. And maybe tomorrow, or the next day, it will make sense again, if only for a moment.
D-Constructions 