Tag Archives: creativity

The Art and The Rest

Posted on by dconstructions
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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!

Just kidding. Steve is awesome.

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.

Emotional Environmentalism, or The Care And Feeding of Your Creative Urge

Posted on by dconstructions
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Pollution is something we talk about a lot these days, but sometimes we forget what it means. If an oil tanker crashes on the road, and the oil leaks out, that’s not pollution, because it can be contained. But if the oil catches fire and the smoke goes everywhere, that is pollution. The difference is containability. What makes it pollution, in other words, is that it is all-pervasive. Inescapable. It is part of our environment, where we live, eat, drink, breathe, and so becomes part of us. And we know, now, that these things can make us very sick indeed, even kill us, even if they are invisible, because we live with them. Eat enough fish and you can die of mercury poisoning even though the doses themselves will be tiny.

So we’re learning – slowly – to control our environment. To ensure that our air and our water are clean, because we take them in so often we can’t afford anything less.

But what we also need to think about is emotional environments, and the pollution that gets into that.

Emotional health and physical health have much in common. Particularly in that they have levels of resistance, and that that resistance can be overcome both with single strong attacks and by long-term small ones. And when that resistance runs down, we cease being able to function properly, and need to hole up somewhere safe until either the threats die down or the resistance builds up again.

We’re familiar with the big, strong attacks to our resilience. Some of them are massive, crippling attacks, like the loss of a loved one, or a sudden change in our lifestyle. They’re the getting hit by a bus attacks. Then there’s the thumbtack in the foot attacks like negative feedback or breaking your favourite thing. There’s the slow cancer of not liking what you see in the mirror. We know these ones.

But there’s others. Some we can’t avoid. There’s missing the bus even when you ran for it. There’s the elevator being broken and there’s vomit all over the stairs. There’s not having a shirt without a hole in it to wear. There’s the screaming kids in the restaurant, the rude person at the traffic lights. The cold look from a stranger who decides to disapprove of you. Coming home to a messy kitchen, where the doorknob’s still broken and the stove smells funny all the time. All the little things that fill us with weltschmertz as the Germans call it: the sense that things are not necessarily bad, but not what they could be. Bad enough to notice.

This is emotional pollution, and like the mercury in fish, it can build up and up, and it can – it absolutely can – kill.

One thing I’ve learnt in the last few years with my excellent psychologist is there are two ways to attack mental health. One is building up your inner resistance – making your self image, self resilience and self esteem strong so it can repel attacks. The other is reducing the attacks coming in. Avoiding or lessening the attacks. And where possible, purifying the toxins from your environment.

Some toxins will always get in. No matter how much you plan, there’s always going to be a bus you miss; eventually there will be a soup splash on your favourite shirt. But some of these things can be fixed, but we often don’t think to, or we think they’re too small to bother with, or that they’re just part of life. And then they build up, and then they kill you.

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that dealing with a lot of these things takes emotional strength in the first place, so sometimes we’re so worn down we can’t solve these problems, or can only tap away slowly at the tiniest levels. It’s also really important to note that most of these things require money to solve, and if you’ve ever been poor you’ll know what I mean. All the little things that money could solve, like catching a taxi when you miss that train. Buying a new shirt when the old one tears. Having insurance so you don’t have to worry so much about running for the bus on a slippery road. Being able to afford the gym so you don’t have to go running in the cold, freezing rain. If you’ve been poor, you know. How they break you down and kill you by inches, and how just trying to stop them wearing you through to bone uses up every resource you might have used to fix them.

Being depressed is a lot like that, too. It is a poverty of emotional strength, an impotence to change anything at all about your environment. Depression’s friend, anxiety, is more like having massive immunodeficiencies: everything is an attack, or a potential one. Together they make your environment so poisonous you can barely breathe, and give you no strength to do anything about it. Little wonder we depressives retreat to the comfort of bed – like the boy in the bubble, it is the only way to survive.

But for those of us who are doing better, all of this is still useful, still important. If you’re struggling with something, if you’re going beyond yourself, if you’re pursuing something creative or ambitious, you are running your emotional reserves ragged. Whether it’s a marathon or a sprint, you need your reserves strong. And while we often do a few things to pep us up (like taking some vitamins for the soul) we often forget to control our environment.

It can be simple, tiny things. If you are trying to write something, and you can see the dirty washing pile, your mind may turn to something else you “should” be doing. It can be big, life-planning things, like having a day job or savings so not every word is life and death. I’ve done that kind of writing – where if it cannot be sold that week you will literally starve – and it kills creativity and enthusiasm pretty fast. The environment is too toxic, there’s too much terror of survival, eating away at your emotional reserves. But it doesn’t have to be that critical; it could also be that you’re not going to write your best with your current computer because the keyboard sticks a lot or the screen flickers; it could be your novel isn’t going to come until you’re in just a generally nicer house or better neighbourhood or can afford some new shirts, because right now, your goal to live in a nice place or better clothes is eating those reserves and you can’t eat into them further.

It can be adding the positive, by hanging up motivational posters or making plans for the future or visualising goals. It could be giving yourself restoratives, like buying yourself lunch on the day you do your big writes, so you don’t have to lose that tiny bit (or not so tiny bit) of your reserves making your lunch. It could reducing the chances of attacks, like taking a taxi on writing days so there’s no chance you can miss a bus. It could be as simple as walking home a different way so you don’t see the cold strangers or hear the screaming kids. They are tiny things so they might seem frivolous, if you even think of them at all. But again, it’s about pollution: if you eat the tiny thing every day, it might not kill you but it will make you weaker.

A lot of writing is learning to be a resilient writer: to write every day no matter what, no matter how sick you are, or tired, or whether you have no ideas or no motivation. That’s the resilience part. But you can’t learn resilience when you’re being attacked all the time. Yes, I’m sure the fire makes the steel, but the human body doesn’t work like that. If the wound isn’t cleared, the blood can’t clot and the scabs can’t form. You have to wrap it up in gauze and keep it clean and dry. Writing – designing, creating, changing, striving – is much the same.

A better metaphor might be keeping a plant. You need one with strong roots, but you also need a good pot, good soil, potting mix, water, sunlight, and to protect it from all the things that could hurt it. You know how to spray the aphids, yes, but sometimes we leave them in too hot a sun, or above the exhaust fan. These are the little deaths, the slow, invisible killers. Yours are out there too. Some of them you might have to be a millionaire to fix, or at least well off. Others you might need to think really hard or wait a long time for them to get better. But if you’re aware of them, you might be able to do the tiniest thing.

There are spiders in my backyard. Every day I go out that way, they take away a bit of my strength. It’s a tiny thing. But it matters. And all I have to do is remember to go out the front door instead, and I stop that bit being chipped away. And I grow stronger, bit by bit. Day by day.