Creative Process

the most important advice i can give for this is DO LITERALLY THE SIMPLEST THING POSSIBLE!!! i feel like all of my advice for making art falls into this category. so here’s a few concrete things.

there are lots of skills that go into creating art. being able to finish something is a skill you need to develop if you want to finish things in the first place. so make the smallest complete thing you can, and say it’s finished. a part of this involves sharing it with people, asking for feedback. that’s a skill too.

this is why people talk about doing game jams together a lot. you may have a big idea for a visual novel that has many characters and spans a long time, but you can’t do that big idea in 1 month even when collaborating with someone else, so reduce that scope! the deadline of the jam in and of itself isn’t really the point: the point is to finish a thing. having a deadline relatively soon in the future is just a tool that is used to make sure you don’t plan too much to finish in that period of time. the point is also to have other people around you motivating you to do the same thing because your art should be pro-social but shhhhhh

part of this also involves reducing the friction between you having the idea and you doing the thing. only feel the energy to write dot points? just do that. only feel the energy to search for sources but not enough to actually check them out? make it easy to keep track of them to go back to later. can’t be bothered sitting down at your computer to write? keep a copy on your phone, a synced one so you don’t lose work!!! do this even when it doesn’t perfectly work. it’s too hard to do revision passes on your work so close to the last time you looked at it? put it down for a bit and go do something else. “i make visual novels in renpy i can’t work on it on my phone” that may be true but you can draft stuff on your phone either way. you can even write in the syntax so you can copy it later. but you don’t have to write that syntax if it’s going to get in the way of you making the thing. look into automating whatever is a piece of shit to do when you have time, but don’t only automate things either. you aren’t here just to make the process of making the thing easier, you are here to actually make the thing! something something crystal tools.

this idea of reducing friction also includes learning tools. here’s an example that applies to me now as i write this: i want to make a visual novel. i haven’t made any visual novels before and im unfamiliar with the tools. so i will fiddle around with them beforehand. im gonna download the example project for renpy and see what i can do with it, so i understand how to make something in it. same with whatever art tool im going to use to make backgrounds. same with whatever art tool im gonna use to make the character art (which is gonna be the bare minimum i need to make something like this). i do not know how to do the art stuff, and it means i also don’t know how to even learn the skills i will need, or even what those skills are. so i need to mess around with the tools for a bit and see what i can do first. and then the idea of making a visual novel will seem less daunting because i will understand how to do it! extrapolate from there for your own case.

again, on the pro-social part: being around other people who make art can be a good motivator! i say this as someone who, in the past, made art that no one i know really looked at or cared about or engaged with in any meaningful way. and it sucked! it was incredibly isolating. do not do this! this reason is ALSO why game jams exist, it means you get to either make art around other people who are making things like you (good) and or collaborate with them (even better). having friends who you think are cool and who think you are cool (artistically) is very helpful for doing art! if you get jealous from seeing other people make cool things instead of inspired by it, im sorry, it is a shitty position to be in. but you really need to train yourself out of that mindset. because again, that mindset is friction that gets in the way of you doing the thing!

only point of caution i would give on the above is that, when it comes to fiction, in some cases you should endeavour to only tell people about it as little as you can. talking about something you want feels the same to your brain as having actually finished it. you don’t need to stay tight lipped, but if you find yourself explaining details to people and then never finishing things, that might be why. do you want to finish things? if so, and if that is getting in the way of it, get a handle on it!

i think this mainly applies to fiction where you can explain the entire appeal to someone. it’s easier for me to explain what i want to write than it may be for you to, for example, explain an art piece you want to do, because my fiction is also words and your art is not words. also i can explain the overall plot and world building, but maybe there is a specific scene i want to write that the world building doesn’t cover. at that point i have still left that scene as something for myself to work on in order to tell people about it (by them seeing the finished product). i also find for me that this is the case for my fiction writing but NOT my nonfiction. mainly because i think i can write details and explanations with enough revisions better than i can explain them (and i want them to be accessible to other people).

more concrete examples from me specifically:

writing a novel is a lot harder than writing a short story. one of the first things i tried to write, i wanted it to be about 20k-30k words. but that was too much for me to keep in my head. eventually i stopped trying, though i had done a bunch of work that would now never see the light of day.

one thing i wrote that ended up being “more successful” (in the sense that it got closer to be done) came from writing short stories. eventually i wanted to tie them together as a big connected thing, and when i did that i already had a lot of small completed things to draw from. that DID get completed but a) i lost it and b) it was under my deadname anyway.

writing twitter microfiction was a very good way for me to get into writing after abandoning all of that. reading long stories in that format is hell, so it can’t be any longer than, let’s say, 800-1000 words. each tweet also is 280 characters and you only have like 15 tweets before you hit that limit, so each tweet needs to count. you don’t have to actually finish a story using that method but it could be a good drafting method, even if you don’t use twitter.

when i first started writing, most of what i wrote ended up being very autobiographical, and i wasn’t fond of how literal the autobiographical parts were. but it was the thing that was easiest to do, so it was what i ended up doing. and i finished those things. didn’t really show them to anyone though. but i did it! and then, the more stories i wrote, the more i felt “oh i should try this new thing in this story” and it became less autobiographical because of that. finishing things gave me the experience i needed to experiment more afterwards.

for essays my process is something like: i want to write about this game. here are the topics i want to cover, let’s give those their own section. let me dot point roughly what i want to say. let me paste some links in that are useful. and then i expand the dot points. some times i don’t have the energy to flesh a part out, so ill leave it as a sentence or two and come back to it later. i flesh out the parts that i feel like fleshing out. then those parts are done, and only the small bits that were difficult before remain, but there is less total work needed before i get to the point where only revision passes remain.

anyway here’s a good example of reducing friction. this post is a mess but im not gonna clean it up and im just gonna chuck it on my notes section. ok thanks smile