The Three C's of Life Advice - Cancer, Creativity, and Computer Trouble. The advice I'm in need of is on the second. I'm not sure I even have a purpose for this appeal, but it's one of those things that seems to move along better when you know someone else can hear you talking. "Hear" in a relative sense anyway. I'm rambling. My problem isn't with Creativity, it's with implementing it.
I am a font of ideas. I can't get through a day without designing some new creative project, or rehashing in detail some project rolling around from times before. And I'd like to believe that my ideas are pretty good ones. There is a process to thought and imagination, and it can be honed like anything else. Somewhere between constantly redesigning all my creative notions, perusing textual analyses, religiously absorbing production notes, taking film critique classes, digesting rulebooks for games I'll never play, and reading TVTropes until my eyes bleed, my creative process has gained a systemic framework. Every big "project" is a machine in itself, with it's constituent parts, connections, and extrapolations. Ideas can be judged useful or extensible or otherwise, and I think I've got a pretty good handle on my mind at this point.
That probably sounded pretentious and egotistical as all hell. Because it was, but the fact that it took me nearly two hours to conceive of and write this post illustrates my problem. I have virtually no ability to turn a brainstorm, however thorough or detailed, into actual work, or if I make it that far, to see the work to completion. It's not fear of criticism or distrust of my skills or lack of time, I've got those down pat. The problem is much more simple and insidious.
I'm lazy. Very lazy.
Down in the Forum Games section, I recently completed a
playthrough of the original Colonization. Pretty good if sparse response, but that wasn't really the point. I just wanted to do it for it's own sake. But in the end, what was it? An annotated journal of my thoughts on a fifteen year old computer game I've played a hundred times before.
Nevermind that is was a completely linear process with a fixed ending. Nevermind that even that took me three months to finish. Those just make worse the basic fact, that it's the only creative project I've ever taken on of my own volition that I've carried to anything close to completion.
I find that disheartening, and unsettling.
My mental and physical workspace is packed chock full of projects in need of attention, every one of them, to me at least, a diamond in the rough.
-Three different series of novellas, each more award-winning than the last.
-An idea for a simple but characterful table top RPG engine.
-My separate
DIY table top wargame engine.-An ongoing 'Let's Play' of The Sims 2, with everybody from the forum as neighbors.
-A Dwarf Fortress succession game, of all things.
-A Call of Cthulhu campaign I think this community would enjoy in forum game form.
-Two other ideas for forum games that would each require extensive preparation.
Some of those projects have been refining in my consciousness for months or even years. Not one has gotten farther than a few napkin sketches if that. Which doesn't even touch on the depressing wasteland of coding attempts, game-maker trash, aborted webcomics, crappy short stories, crumpled drawings, and other imaginative detritus stretching back into my adolescence. Or my more recent (and blockbuster) idea for an MMO and follow-up titles, just waiting for a quarter million in startup capital. Or, of course, my meticulous plan to get that capital which I could be working on right now, but obviously I'm not.
I'm great at finding excuses for myself on why I never develop anything. Too many other things to do, when I've got nothing but time on my hands. Need to practice more first, when I know damn well I never practice anything. The real reasons come in exactly two forms. Often I go into complete mental vapor-lock when I try to turn a developed brainstorm into actual written words and images, and I'm stuck in impatient frustration from the get-go. Or I lose interest and let a project fall by the wayside, then never return to it out of a mix of confusing misdirection and self-loathing for giving up in the first place.
In essence, while I can come up with a great creative impetus and overall course of action, I always either become paralyzed by indecision when trying to plant the first step, or I just can't find the effort to make the second.
Maybe I'm making too much of common issue. Maybe I'm too attached to too many dreams. But seeing exactly one finally come to fruition, namely the most simple and frivolous one of them all, tells me I need to change either my method or perspective. I'm sure I can't be the only person who's let a masterpiece go unpainted for want of the strength to lift the brush. And there's only so many self-help guides I can thumb through in the bookstore before I decide to just ask somebody for advice. I know the obvious answer is to yell "Do it already" at myself, but I've been doing that for the better part of ten years and it hasn't worked yet.
So fellow forum peoples, any advice for a Leonardo da Vinci trapped in the body of a Jerry Springer attendee?
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Topic: Ideas: check - Effort: not so much (Read 1985 times)