tadhg.com » creativity

Anaq’rest

Tadhg — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 19:56:45 +0000

At the beginning of March I kicked off a roleplaying campaign, the first I’ve run since early 1995. The setting is essentially the one I laid out last year in my fantasy world sketch, which now as the name “Q’Rith”.

Technically the first game set there was the one-shot I ran in December, but in certain ways it could have been set anywhere. The campaign is more tied into the politics and history of the game world.

I’ve been really enjoying running the campaign, and also the two times I’ve run that same one-shot. Thanks to all the people who have played or are playing!

Running the campaign is significantly more challenging than the one-shot. There’s a lot of preparation involved, and the improvisation required is trickier because player actions are more tightly connected to the setting (and plot). The one-shot is almost a wilderness adventure, while currently the players in the campaign are in a rather large city, and are dealing with a variety of people there, each interaction potentially setting off chains of events that I need to track in my head. That’s a huge part of the fun for me, trying to make the world an intricate one that reacts realistically to actions the players take while also having the world roll along without regard to player action just as the “real world” pays little heed to much of what we do in it.

I think that this setting, and this plot, are both the most detailed I’ve ever run. I put plenty of time and effort into campaigns when I was younger, but I think a lot more of that was spent on rules issues. Now I’m more focused on the less technical aspects—that, and the tools available to me for creating the world are far more advanced (as is my ability to use them). Back then I was using computers for as much of it as I could, but still spent plenty of time with pencil and paper. Now my key tools are Vim, TiddlyWiki, and Inkscape (not to mention reStructuredText, my web server, my Subversion repository, and my laptop, all of which are critical), and they really make the whole process far smoother.

For example, I’ve made maps for this campaign. That isn’t new. What is new is that these maps are simply far better than they ever were in the past (largely because I can’t draw, but can get around that limitation now). Not only are they better, however, but their digital nature makes it really easy to alter them as needed, so incremental progress is a lot easier to do. In addition, dealing with scale is far easier, and with Inkscape I get access to vector rather than bitmap graphics, and that makes adapting content far less hassle.

The city the players are in is Anaq’rest, and my map for that is quite large in its source form: 20,000 pixels high and 20,000 pixels wide. The scale is one pixel to one meter. I can go from street-level detail to district-level detail in the same file, a luxury I’m very happy to have. In the 1990s I might have conceived of a 400-square-kilometer city map, but I very much doubt I would have done anything but gotten discouraged by my attempts to make it. Now I have one I’m happy with, that I can develop incrementally, and that also serves as a street-level map when I need it.

Both creating and having a map are extremely helpful creatively when dealing with a city setting, too. I’m certain that this applies to any kind of creative endeavor, not just roleplaying. It makes it feel like a lot of things are already “there”, waiting to be discovered rather than made up, and in addition the creation of the map brought with it ideas about the city’s history and nature that simply wouldn’t have occurred to me otherwise.

The current state of the map, looking at the whole thing (20km x 20km):

The players are currently based in the district of Dockside, and this is a zoomed-in (5.5km x 5.5km) view of Dockside:

All of its streets are on the map, although I haven’t filled in all their names yet. Only specific buildings are there so far, too, as marking out every single building on the map seemed like a bit much. But eventually it might get close to that.

When it’s a little more polished/detailed, I’ll release it under a Creative Commons license, as I suspect that plenty of games might have a use for a map like this (particularly with its source files, which I would release also).

Tags: creativity, games, personal, Q’Rith, roleplaying, writing

The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good: Duke Nukem Forever

Tadhg — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 12:08:04 +0000

Duke Nukem Forever is the vaporware king of games, a game that was promised for so long that its release was a punchline even in the late 1990s. At one point it and Daikatana were frequently compared to each other; Daikatana was also extremely late and ultimately a failure—but it came out in 2000.

Wired has a long look at what happened, and it seems fair to conclude that one of the problems was a lack of limits.

“pig cop” by arboltsef

Duke Nukem Forever was a project that had almost unlimited money, and a significantly longer development period than any other game I can think of. Its project lead, George Broussard, was more concerned with quality than money or deadlines, but this appears to have led to an inability to ever call it done. More than other creative projects, computer games are yoked to technical advances. There will always be a better graphics engine than the one you built your game on.

I enjoyed Duke Nukem 3D when it came out, and looked forward to the sequel for a couple of years. My interests moved more towards multiplayer, to competitive Quake 3 Arena and CPMA, but Half-Life made clear that extremely compelling single-player first-person shooter games were still relevant, and I thought that perhaps Duke Nukem Forever would be in the same class.

Extremely long development cycles aren’t necessarily indicators of failure; Half-Life 2 took five years, and Team Fortress 2 was released almost ten years after it was first announced. But in that regard at least, Duke (or his reputation?) turned out to indeed be bigger and badder, an ultimately invincible final boss.

Tags: creativity, games, tech

The Ideas In My Head Are Precious, So Precious

Tadhg — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 07:55:27 +0000

I haven’t encountered ze frank for a while, but came across this via Lifehacker, and it made me think I should really have his site among my feeds.

Tags: creativity, humor, video

BoingBoing ‘Unpublication’ Brouhaha

Tadhg — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 19:06:04 +0000

BoingBoing recently revealed that they ‘unpublished’ posts concerning Violet Blue. This caused quite a lot of commentary and some outrage among those who pay attention to such things, and I think it raises a few interesting points.

I should disclose that I read BoingBoing almost every day and support a number of their editorial stances on copyright, security theater, and privacy, among others. I also know one of the BoingBoingers, but have no insight into whatever’s behind the Violet Blue thing.

Many commenters seem to think that the crux of the issue is whether or not the BBers have the “right” to remove the posts. They have that right, obviously. I think the issue is more precisely what it means for them to do something like that.

First off, it’s complicated by the fact that it’s a group blog, while the posts and the removal were both by Xeni Jardin, so the rest of the BoingBoingers are in a tricky spot—how can you tell someone else that they can’t take down articles that they’ve written?

It’s also more complicated for Xeni because it’s a group blog—much of the criticism has been aimed at BoingBoing as a whole, and not at Xeni specifically, and people have contrasted the removal of the posts with attitudes expressed by Cory and Mark. I get the impression that she was thinking only about her position vis-a-vis Violet Blue, and not about BoingBoing’s collective credibility, when she did it.

This was a private spat that has become very public, and as such touches on celebrity and privacy. Xeni isn’t a celebrity in the common sense of the term, but she’s certainly a public figure in the online world, and (as the interest in this issue demonstrates) conflicts in that world are definitely intriguing to lots of people.

The crux of the matter is probably close to what Xeni references in the LA Times piece:

[Xeni's father] paint[ed] very beautiful photorealistic portraits of nude women. Sometimes he went off into experimental territory that he was embarrassed about… sometimes he would just grab batches of the stuff that was crappy as years went on, and go to the backyard and burn it. And it wasn’t that he was censoring himself, and God knows nobody else was censoring him. It was that this was his creative work. This was art. And he felt like some of it wasn’t representative of who he was anymore and he didn’t want it to be available to the world to see.

—Los Angeles Times, BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin on unpublishing the Violet Blue posts

The question isn’t whether blog posts are art, but what the creator’s prerogatives are once something has been released into the public sphere. Personally speaking, I don’t think I’d do what Xeni’s father did, because I would perceive it as revisionism and denial—but that is definitely a personal feeling, and certainly people are entitled to keep their own works completely private. However, once they’re made public, it’s a different story. Publication means an addition to the larger culture, and just as once the reader gets ahold of a work their interpretation can carry as much weight as the creator’s, so the cultural sphere has a claim on any works released into it. Deleting works out there is cultural revisionism.

There is another point, however. It’s a blog, a website, and what if you don’t look at the posts as articles per se, as the online equivalent of magazine stories? Regarding the posts as articles more or less leads you to conclude that removing them is a kind of violation… but if you instead regard the provision of the posts as a service, the conclusion is entirely different. A service is ongoing, and must be maintained. Some energy or effort is required to continue it. What morality requires any creator to keep their services on tap? Why should Xeni, or anyone else, be bound to expending effort in order to continue serving articles they no longer deem worthy?

The BoingBoingers themselves seem to be taking another tack, considering posts to be both articles and services building that most commonplace of Internet buzzwords, community. That’s much more nebulous, of course, and the demands of a community may or may not respect creative control, or the effort required to maintain services.

Tags: blogging, creativity, power, writing

Jonathan Hickman’s 10 Steps to Being a Professional

Tadhg — Fri, 16 May 2008 01:28:20 +0000

I recently read the graphic novel The Nightly News (thanks Dave!), and while there’s plenty of interest in it, what I feel like posting about comes from the author’s comments at the end, about how he succeeded as a comics creator.

He refers to Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, which I read last year and liked a lot (but have yet to really put into practice—clearly I should read it again), in reference to getting past his own resistance to creating, but he also has a list of ten things under the heading “Be a Professional” (very slightly altered for grammar here):

1. Work every day.
2. Exercise every day.
3. Make a realistic budget.
4. Understand what budget actually means.
5. Stick to said budget.
6. Turn in your work in a timely fashion.
7. Have good hygiene.
8. Have good manners.
9. Don’t be a computer/internet/messageboard zombie.
10. Have actual relationships.

The first question that springs to mind is: are you still a professional if you take weekends off? I’m not sure what Hickman would say, but I’d say yes. The point is a very steady schedule, and I think that five days a week is fine for that.

Same goes for exercise, and I think he’s really got a point with this one.

I’ve never really budgeted myself on creative projects, mainly because they’ve primarily revolved around writing, and I haven’t had to. It does seem like a good exercise, however. Better budgeting in terms of time, too, would make sense.

Turning work in punctually makes sense, and here Hickman is clearly referring to situations where you’re dealing with other people—although it could be applied to self-imposed deadlines too. I suspect that it’s the discipline of punctuality that he’s really getting at.

Seven through ten seem to simply make sense in terms of good mental health—which is important. I think it’s especially true for people involved in creative projects, since there is this stereotype of artists being flaky, disorganized, unable to handle their daily affairs, etc., and Hickman’s probably right in explicitly calling those out, effectively saying “fine, you can be an artist without those, but to be a professional, you have to have your shit together and produce work”.

I think they’re a fair set of criteria. I should work on some of them myself, and try budgeting. I should also probably think the whole thing over a little (what does “professional” mean? what problem am I trying to solve?) and come up with my own list.

Tags: consciousness, creativity, personal, psychology

Plagiarism Seems Silly

Tadhg — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 07:56:38 +0000

When I read this morning that a Bush aide, Timothy Goeglin, plagiarized part of a column for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, I was perplexed. Is it that hard to write your own opinion on something?

It almost seems like more work to find someone else’s opinion and then to pass it off as your own. I further thought, and was going to write about, how stupid it seemed to even attempt plagiarism of that kind in the Internet Age. All it takes is someone’s Google search finding a similarity, and the cat’s out of the bag.

But then I read this and realized that while my earlier supposition on discovery was correct, it also took a while before people noticed, because apparently he’s plagiarized things before.

He’s since resigned, in certain ways surprising—the Bush administration playbook calls for more denial, including denial of the obvious, followed by claims of lacking recollection, followed by claims that other factors are being ignored and that the accuasations represent a double standard, wrapping up with a fervently-expressed devotion to “looking into” the matter. After which it’s forgotten about.

Anyway, it’s just hard for me to quite get it. I’ve always had a thing about attribution, so perhaps that’s part of it: not giving credit where it’s due seems so obviously wrong to me that I have trouble seeing why others wouldn’t react that way also, which is clearly not a rational expectation. But when you add to that the fact that it just doesn’t seem to save all that much effort or time, plagiarizing instead of creating, and the fact that getting caught and exposed is so (it seems to me) likely, it’s really difficult to see why people would do it. Is it some gateway thing? First you start looking at other writers for stylistic tips or at other sources for ideas, then you start tweaking phrases you like, then you start taking sentences, and eventually you’re snarfing entire paragraphs or even columns while changing a minimal amount and somehow still believing (or pretending to believe) that the ‘core’ is yours and that you’re still a creative agent?

That, or you just don’t care but need to produce a certain amount at a certain standard to ensure you get paid, and you figure the risks are really low in comparison to that payday, and that everyone around you is doing so many things that are so much worse that it just won’t matter if you do get caught.

Tags: creativity, politcs, writing

The Power of Focus

Tadhg — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 06:23:03 +0000

Focus can achieve some rather amazing things. I was reminded of this recently when a friend of mine mentioned a linguist in Berkeley who knows (apparently to a relatively high standard) over ninety languages. Part of the key to this rather amazing feat was the fact that he spent several years in Korea doing nothing but eating, sleeping, exercising, teaching occasional classes, and being what he termed a “language monk”—that is, spending the rest of the time on language learning. Since his teaching was in linguistics, it didn’t distract him from his main focus, and he hence learned at a prodigious rate.

I was also reminded of this by the discovery of this Star Wars fan-produced lightsaber duel. With obsessive focus, people can create rather impressive creations.

There are more impressive examples of focus, of course, like many works of “great art”, but there’s something about the ability of amateurs to achieve this level that I find inspirational. Even outside day jobs, concentration on a single project can come up with excellent results, especially when more than one person is involved. (I don’t have to look too far for examples.)

The sharp drop in the cost of entry for music and video (and photography) production has made it possible for far more people to enter this arena, and I think the effects of this will continue to alter the cultural landscape significantly. Particularly since these modes of creativity are amenable to the kind of frenzied concentration that has long been present in letters (and other media, but to a lesser extent)—unknown lone writers have long scribbled into the night on these obsessive projects. Now the majority of animators and video editors can do the same thing, and they are.

I think it’s also easier for people to collaborate now, and the technology helps that also. I’m not sure where the numbers diffuse the focus instead of amplifying it, but small groups can certainly work well together to make amazing things (in fact, Burning Man is probably a shining example of just this, and there are plenty of others).

Personally, focus is tough for me. I know I can sustain it for a while, and produce quite a lot, but over the long term it seems tough. Tough to actually bring things to completion, anyway. Starting is hard, finishing is hard, and the bit in the middle is only easier if you’re in that focused groove… but with perseverance, you might end up with a kick-ass lightsaber duel, a new language or two, 19 hours of cult television, or a statistics-tracking website. Or a novel.

Tags: consciousness, creativity, culture, personal, video

Loop!Station and Cheap Computing Power

Tadhg — Mon, 07 May 2007 06:36:22 +0000

I went to 330 Ritch Street last night to see Loop!Station at the Digital Bliss release party. They were great, and I came away with a bunch of CDs. I also came away impressed once again by the impact that cheap computing power is having on culture.

Loop!Station are a vocalist and a cellist who feed their sound into devices that record and then immediately make available for (looped!) playback samples of the input. In other words, they can play a line, or sing a line, and have that repeat as they go on from there, layering other sound on top of it.

This makes for a rather interesting sound, and I like that sound and their style. But they’re clearly dependent on the technology—no “loop stations”, no Loop!Station. Then again, you could say the same about the cello… but my thoughts were about the fact that this is a new style, a new niche that’s expressly made possible by this technology.

The act before Loop!Station, Divasonic, was also heavily technology-dependent. The eponymous singer set her entire “backing band” up on her laptop and sang along to that. Also sang through it, since the laptop (plus the sound engineer) produced a number of effects, including a heavy reverb for her voice, all processed live. Again, something that wouldn’t have been possible more than a decade ago.

(Divasonic had a strong voice, and I liked some of the music, but I couldn’t stand the lyrics.)

In addition, for both acts, there was video projected onto screens around the stage. This video was also produced by a laptop, and wasn’t just pre-rendered but rather also included live shots of the musicians, composited live.

These aren’t necessarily revolutionary uses of technology. In fact, the point is that they’re becoming ubiquitous, and that they’re allowing more people access to more modes of expression than was previously possible. The beginnings of this was apparent in the late 90s, has grown ever more so. Hand-in-hand with the exploding ability to produce creative projects has been the unprecedented rise of a medium for spreading that content, the Internet. In 2002 it was already possible to both make and spread the parodic genius of Fantasy Bedtime Hour using relatively inexpensive equipment. Five years later, the equipment is better and cheaper, and the channels for distribution more numerous. (YouTube much?)

In considering challenges to the cultural control exerted by “big producers”, I’ve usually concentrated only on the distribution side. But the other factor, the increasing technological sophistication available to anyone who wants to create (in the privileged parts of the world, granted, but this is still an amazing development covering hundreds of millions of people), is also having a powerful impact on culture.

(Aside: the big producers (think MPAA and RIAA) love to slam the new technologies for “pirating” “their” “product” (egregious use of quotation marks sadly warranted), but isn’t the alternative scarier to them? If everyone is watching Jon Stewart, South Park, Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, and The Simpsons on YouTube or off torrents, they can cite “loss of revenue” from what they would have gotten if those viewers had paid… but what if they hadn’t? What if the viewers were watching FBH, Chad Vader, Ask A Ninja, Home Star Runner, or Red vs. Blue instead? That would be worse for them, even if they don’t get why right away. No, we’re not yet at the point where “amateur” production quality matches the professionals, and may never get there, but this is still a major cultural shift we’re in the middle of, and if the big producers actually get their wish and somehow yank all of their content that isn’t paid for, they might push a lot of people into the arms of competition they don’t even take seriously yet.)

I liked 330 Ritch, and intend to try it as a hangout spot at some point. It seemed like it would be fairly mellow without a gig happening, and I’d like to see if that’s in fact the case.

Also, if you’re out late in San Francisco, you could do a lot worse than trying out the veggie nachos at the Bagdad Café in the Castro. They were really damn good.

Tags: creativity, music, san-francisco, tech

Creativity Steps Overview

Tadhg — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 01:40:06 +0000

Last week I posted about some steps for getting into a creative frame of mind, and decided to try them out on my posts for the week. Overall I think that using the steps was rather effective.

The posts were (~~I’m back up properly these will link to the posts… for now, all the posts in question are on the same page as this one~~ Back up now, with linkification):

* Typing
* The Ruler Con
* ‘A Tree on the Path’
* Escape Velocity
* Winter Holidays
* ‘A Short Reprieve’
* Embarrassment Comedy

For each post, I tried to have no preconceptions regarding what it was going to be about. I also didn’t use any of the lists of ideas for posts that I have—I just sat down cold, followed the steps, and went with whatever came up.

Some of them were unremarkable, in that they’re things that I’d thought about in the past that came up when I went through the steps. Typing and Embarrassment Comedy were like that, but as they weren’t on my list of things to write about, I’m glad the steps brought them out.

Winter Holidays was clearly influenced by being written on Christmas day, but it also benefitted considerably from the steps.

Escape Velocity and The Ruler Con were not things I had planned to write about, although The Ruler Con is obviously linked to a lot of issues I’m very interested in. Both were interesting things to explore for me, but suffered from having a thirty-minute limit on them. That’s my limit for posts this month, and while I stretch it a little, I couldn’t spend as much time as I would have liked on either of these.

The same goes for ‘A Short Reprieve’, which feels to me like the start of something rather than a finished whole.

Those aren’t complaints about the process, though. I still essentially got ideas from nowhere, which sounds close to the definition of ‘inspiration’. And I also got ‘A Tree on the Path’, which is by far my favorite post from the week, from doing it. Everything in that story is new, I hadn’t had any of the ideas before, I didn’t know where it was going to go even when I was about halfway through it, and I’m really happy with it.

I don’t think I’m going to keep using those steps every day, at least not in the short term, but I will definitely return to doing so at some point, and I will also use them for my other writing, because they clearly helped a lot. If you’re interested in trying to get inspiration yourself, I recommend them. You might want to change the Yeats to something else, or of course make all kinds of other alterations, but trying them is likely to be worth it.

Tags: consciousness, creativity, personal, psychology, writing

Change Your Mind

Tadhg — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 18:27:26 +0000

I’ve had this item on my to-do list for a while: come up with list of instructions to self for getting into/out of certain emotional states. This mainly applies to creativity, motivation, and productivity (all of which are related).

The first one, creativity, I touched on in my post about inspiration. I think it should be possible to deliberately put myself into a mode where I’m going to either come up with ideas or do things with the ideas I already have. (This seems a more optimistic approach than simply waiting for inspiration to ’strike’.)

And if that’s possible, it should be possible to push myself into other active mental states as well. By ‘active’ I mean action-oriented—I have my doubts about moving into something like ‘happiness’ with this kind of exercise. (An extended version of this kind of thing might qualify as ‘meditation’, however, and it appears likely that various forms of happiness can be aided significantly through meditation.) For the moment, I’m concerned with putting myself into a good state to do specific things.

The first one of these I actually came up with, and which gave me the idea for the others, was “consideration steps”. This could also be called “how to make a decision”. I found myself with a bunch of things to do like “Consider mootools (http://mootools.net/download/release)” and “consider [some] directory structure”, and found that I was shying away from those, so I came up with these steps:

* Take 5 deep breaths (I think this should probably be added to more or less every checklist…).
* Read over whatever it is.
* Write 5 or more thoughts that come to mind after reading it.
* Decide whether there are future actions that could be taken.
* List those actions, and list how much time (approximately) that each might take.
* If the action is “further consideration”, move onto separate list for this.
* If actions are indeterminate, that is, I’m not sure whether I really want to do them, move to “possible future action” list.
* Make notes on this process, and make sure that the action items (that is, the actions I’ve decided I want to take) are clear.

Nothing radical there, just a checklist for considering something and coming up with some kind of decision. The important thing appears to be deciding to make the decision, actually… and these steps help with that in the standard “delineated small things are easier to achieve than undifferentiated big things” way. At the least, I think these will get me in the right state of mind for decision-making. They’ve worked so far—except that I don’t always apply them. Decisions tend to go better when I do.

One I’ve only tried a couple of times, and which I’m superstitiously leery of using more often (something I want to get over by using it more often), and which I haven’t codified until now, is for getting inspiration, or getting into a creative mindset. What I note below is something I’ve never used (except in unconnected bits), and which I intend to try out.

* Take 5 deep breaths.
* Prepare working space for whatever creativity is going to take place. This could be notebooks, a computer, a whiteboard, paint and a canvas, whatever. But there has to be a record of some sort.
* Write down the theme or setting or desired output or whatever it is that you know about what you want to get inspiration about.
* Take 5 deep breaths again.
* Recite:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
(Obviously, substitute whatever works for you here. The Yeats is just something that seems to do it for me.)
* Close eyes and focus on the theme/setting/desire output/whatever. Write (or paint, or output however you like) whatever comes to you at this point. Repeat this step, and keep repeating it, until you have something you think you can work on. If that doesn’t happen and you get stuck, repeat the last two steps and this one. If you get more stuck than that, go away and do something else for a while, then come back and repeat the whole thing.

~~Obviously, I can’t really recommend this, as I haven’t tried it as a whole! But~~ I’ll use it for all my blog posts (and possibly my work on my novel) in the next week, and then report back on how it goes. (Update: I used it, it went very well, I now recommend it.)

Tags: consciousness, creativity, personal, psychology

Inspiration

Tadhg — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 07:27:04 +0000

A while ago, when I was in L.A. and up late and avoiding my AFBH post for the day, I came across this blog (possibly this post), which has the brilliant tagline: “Being a good writer is 3% talent, 97% not being distracted by the Internet.” Naturally, given what I was doing versus what I was supposed to be doing, this struck a chord. I was reminded of it tonight, as I was thinking about inspiration.

I think there are two basic kinds of inspiration: the kind that gives you ideas, and the kind that gives you the impetus to work on those ideas.

And yes, without the latter, the former is pretty much useless. Without the former, the latter is hard to come by, unless you can work on someone else’s ideas (and sometimes that’s fine).

But where do they come from? And, more importantly, how do I get some?

I think that everyone has creative ideas. They might start small, but they’re there. If you want more, start with noting down the ones you have already. Or note the ones you had when you were younger. Try recording your dreams and using stuff from them. Try recording what goes through your mind as you’re about to fall asleep and use that. Try taking the next time you say to a friend “hey, wouldn’t it be funny if” and just going all the way with whatever that idea is.

We’re all creative people. I suspect that all of us would accumulate tons of ideas if we tried all the above and recorded it. What really holds us back is the concept that all of the ideas we have are boring, or crap, or unoriginal, or impractical, or too twisted for sharing with others. But that’s a tangent from what I’m talking about. The basic point is, if you really want creative ideas, you can get them by dint of that kind of work. Just accept that you’re a creative person (try The Artist’s Way if you’re having trouble with this).

Deciding which ideas to work on can be a problem, and I’m going to skip over it here.

Now, what about the impetus to work on the ideas? I’m not so sure about where that comes from, or how to get it (which is why I’ve been unable to finish a second draft of my science fiction novel). But sometimes this helps:

Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
—from “Under Ben Bulben”, William Butler Yeats

When I visited Yeats’ grave, somewhat unwillingly brought there as a teenager by my parents, I was no fan of poetry. I liked prose, but poetry did little for me. I had no interest in Yeats, either. But when I saw those words on his gravestone, cold electricity walked up my spine and opened up some part of my mind. Suddenly, I felt the raw power of words. Not the accumulated impact of a novel, but what can come from just a few words if they are right. (No, I don’t know what “the right words” means. But in Drumcliffe I found out that they exist.)

So that helps. It takes effort on my part, but I can summon the mental state required for creativity by saying those three lines.

That may be a long-winded way of saying that we can be inspired by the works of others. That’s certainly true. We can also be inspired by the attitudes of others. Reading yet another interview featuring Brian Michael Bendis this evening, I was again struck by how much fun he regards writing.

Unlike last night, tonight I wasn’t struck by any particular passage (this is in an interview between Bendis and Oeming, in the Powers #5 collection) but rather his overall attitude. He works hard at it, but he does what he enjoys doing—meaning not just that he enjoys writing, but also that when he feels like working on one thing, he does that, and lets other things go, rather than forcing himself to work on something he doesn’t like doing. Yes, he has a bunch of strategies to make sure this doesn’t backfire on him, and yes, I’m aware that following that tack might lead one (meaning not necessarily you but definitely me, as I have problems finishing off creative projects) to skip around with the fun and easy stuff and never do the hard work of actually getting to the point where something is done, finished, sealed, buried, out in the wild where you can’t stop others from looking at it (even its unpolished bits). But despite those dangers, the simple fact that he clearly enjoys writing so much is in itself an inspiration. Enough of an inspiration that I went and wrote a significant chunk of a short story that’s been in my head for maybe a decade and which I finally wrote a sketch outline for seven weeks ago. That seems like a form of inspiration that’s pretty useful.

You can get it from yourself, and you can get it from others and their works. You have to be open to it, but that really isn’t as hard or as Zen as it sounds. And if you’re stuck in your head and you want to do something but you can’t think of anything (or anything ‘worthwhile’) or you feel you ’should’ do X but really can’t face it right now, well, just do something. Pick a thing that might be fun, or at the least bearable, and do it for an hour. Or half an hour. Or five minutes. But do it, and then see how it goes. Trying to do it doesn’t count, you actually have to do whatever it is. Who knows? You’ve got creative genius lurking in you, and that might just jar it into the open.

Tags: consciousness, creativity, personal, writing

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