Due to new medication, I'm battling insomnia this week. So today I want to talk about health, and to share how I sustain my creativity. This post is inspired in part by this great post on GM burnout, which led me to find this helpful thread, as well.
I canceled my weekly game to rest and am avoiding driving, but blogging I *think* I can do. We will see.
Before I get started, you might be asking, what creativity are you talking about Velocitree, what do you know about it? Well yeah I have a new blog and run weekly games, and a couple small RPG publications in the oven, but I also have a secret day job where for 18 years I have been regularly writing different things, mostly articles, on often-depressing topics. I work alongside other creators in that field, and we often talk about how we keep going. So, putting humility aside for a moment, I have experience with maintaining creative output over decades, of burn-out, and life challenges.
A follow-up: please forgive me for writing an advice post. I am no paragon to be imitated, but this bone-deep exhaustion I feel makes me want to help people right now. If anything I say here works for you, I will be content.
The War of Art: How I fight
I don't have a lot to say regarding creativity. What I want to talk about is how I, personally, stay creative in the long-term. So this is not:
- general advice on GMing (I have only been at it a couple of years)
- about blogging (1.5 months!).
- on the creative process itself (I am still learning!) Go read this stuff:
- Character archetypes and NPC templates
- Crafting dungeons and adventures
- Writing a lot, writing a novel in 3 days
- Being creative (plus, blobbins!) and solving writer's block
What i want to talk about today is how I keep going as a creator. It really boils down to several overlapping habits, for me picked up at different times, to different degrees. Each habit helps with a problem I face as a creator. In no particular order, the problems, and my solutions so far.
1) Creating things is emotional:
I make something new because I love it (either the creating, the created object, or both). I identify with it, it excites me. And if you are like me, we clearly see my creation is not perfect. It has flaws. Other people see those flaws and come up with more. The mistakes I made, they make me sad. Or life gets in the way, pulls me away from projects, out of the headspace or time I need to finish them. I accumulate projects that never see the light because they are flawed, I lost enthusiasm for them, or both.
Past failures can weigh me down, make me think that past is prologue, and why bother trying again? I have been to that world, seen the sights, could write a travelogue.
What works for me, to pull me out of that space, is a few choices that I try to make every day.
Radical Optimism. The world is on fire. Species are going extinct everywhere. Rabid narcissists stoke fear and hate, and the center sometimes seems like it will not hold. And yet Jane Goodall, seeing a world full of loss, maintained her optimism as a choice.
Choosing to fight for the world I want, the creations I want to share, instead of listening to the dark and giving up--that's how I try to hold radical optimism. It keeps me going.
Self-forgiveness. I tell myself that humans can't learn if they don't make mistakes, and one day I will believe it. Self-criticism silences writers: I keep reminding myself that that asshole, my inner critic, wants to protect me from sadness. Those past failures? Fuel for the future: ideas to mine, lessons learned.
All this is easy, flippant, to write. But every fresh disappointment means I do the work all over again in my head. It's getting easier, slowly. And if I never produce another thing? I am still worthy of love, just as a baby is: I don't have to be productive all the time.
I will never be big-time, or ever achieve all of my dreams. So be it. It's all right to be small-time (or 'little-bitty', like this great country song), because I am creating what I can, how I can. To get my voice out, I just have to kick a little, to do the work, and I am not alone in that (best lyric: "It's too soon for accolades, and too late to quit"). It is what most artists, most creators, do.
Four things have helped me forgive myself, accept criticism, and keep pushing:
-Meditation, particularly the 1000s of free meditations from Insight Timer.
-Music that grounds me, like the good older country and new americana stuff that helps me see that all people struggle, you are not defined by your worst day, and the broken road you are on will bring you to good places.
-Surrounding myself with good people (friends, the family I created lucked into, supportive colleagues). These people keep me positive, keep me seeing that I am worthy to create. I just have to meet them halfway.
-Getting diagnosed. As someone who just didn't realize how neuro-divergent I am until late in life, a lot of the failings I have felt great shame over are perfectly normal for how my brain works, shared experiences with thousands like me. That is most freeing.
It wasn't easy for me to see or accept (also normal), but self-diagnosis is easy now, and got me started. I have been creative in spite of my difficulties, which when you think about it, describes everyone who ever made anything. I just see now that my brain means I can't do it like everyone else: I gotta find my own way to Rome, and can stop worrying about not taking theirs.
Finding Community. Every few months, I get together with friends who do I what I do, and we share what matters to us. Every few weeks, I have lunch with a friend in my field and we complain if we want to, or gush, or just listen. Every week, I play creative games with my friends and family and chat with my neighbors about life. Every day, I hop on supportive Discord and web forums to talk with nice people about this ridiculous RPG hobby.
Unlike my family, who are always here for me and give me the strength to reach out, each of those different communities is one I sought out in the last decade. Before that, I often struggled alone. They are all places I want to sustain, as they allow me to realize that I can share, in disappointment or stress or joy, and they broaden my field of view. To create, I surround myself with creative friends, and learn.
I got a good piece of advice recently, on one of those Discord servers--give up on social media for debate. Reddit isn't consistently curious or courteous; ENWorld is. Any place folks feel anonymous serves up bad behavior on the regular.
I gravitate to in-person and online communities with regulars, sustained by good will and mutual respect. RPG conventions are great for making new, like-minded friends. Just like Coming to America said: "You can't go to no bar to find a nice woman. You've got to go to nice places, quiet places, like the library and church."--except for fellowship, not a wife.
2) Creating things is exhausting:
Everyone gets tired; making stuff is hard work. When I am excited about something, my mind whirs and I forget to take breaks. Or when I commit to something (on deadline, or to a colleague), I am crap at planning and then finish in a blur of overtime. People approach me with ideas, and it's so hard saying no to good, fun things, even when I need to so I can yes to great things later on. Too many projects pull me too many directions, chopping my time up and making me feel like I am making no progress. I move at the speed of a growing tree. And inevitably, as I try to kick my line of work soccer balls down the field and also be a good dad, self-care takes a back seat.
So, yeah, it's hard. Here are the things that work for me, to hack through this jungle and get a creative work out.
Prepare the field. Everything I make grows from a time and place when I am healthy enough to create. To do that, I have to prioritize good self-care habits, like rest, meditation, nutrition, and exercise. Rest is hardest for me, followed by exercise, and sometimes, like this week, good rest is out of my hands. It's frustrating, but the habits I am building yield at least some quality time each week.
Not every creative needs health and rest to make amazing works--a survey of the daily routines of hundreds of famous creatives is illuminating. There's no one way to create--drunk or sober, up all night or in bed before dark, standing or sitting. But the vast majority of productive artists have consistent creative habits--doing art at the same times, and often. And self-care is what I need to be consistent.
No thoughtless escaping. With the various pulls in my life, between work, home, and hobbies, I am a champ at escaping into a screen when things get stressful. That has started to ease, as I have finally tamed my video game hobby by restricting it to small-screen games that don't take much time, like Carcassone. Being addicted to video games was not something I realized about myself, until some bad news caused me to disappear into Baldur's Gate 2 for ten days straight. I also read addictively at times (half the night, on a weeknight), but I am making progress there too. Repeat after me: "We don't start new books after 10 pm, and we don't feed the Mogwai after midnight."
I still allow myself to escape, but in the directions I choose--towards writing, crafting games, drawing, gardening, and board games. Choosing an escape purposefully, and limiting the time I spend escaping, is incredibly empowering. This blog is one-such escape, made possible by deleting Shattered Pixel Dungeon, the best OSR game on iOS (until they finally port Caves of Qud). Making space for blogging was literally the effort of a decade, with so many setbacks (and great video games) along the way.
Varying it up. I thrive on variety, as you may have gathered. Right now I have 250+ tabs open on my tablet, and another 100+ in two browsers on my computer. The only way I make progress on a creative project to work on it exclusively, but that quickly becomes boring, and work slows. My sweet spot, it turns out, is to to work on two creative projects in one day, in DIFFERENT fields. If they are the same field (my work projects), I feel like they compete for my mental focus. But if one is a hobby project, and the other for work, I am happy to write for an hour or two for fun in the early morning, and then transition to work writing before lunch. It gets my mind flowing, and puts a smile on my face.
And then, when I am done working and have fed the kids, I consume creative works. I eat articles and books and blogs, drink audiobooks while playing the short video game du jour, chug videos and movies, and devour other people's games, for both rules and art. This absorbing time both relaxes and inspires me--mixing things up from disparate origins is my favorite way to be creative, mulch for the soul.
Feeling burn-out. After a creative disappointment, or a big deadline, or just because every week I have players to create for, I get burned out. I linked to articles at the start of this essay about GM burnout, and I found myself nodding along and taking notes. I don't have an easy solution here.
But what I do now when I get burned out, is to slow down as soon as I can, and not pretend anymore that I can push through it. I stop working on hard projects. I don't reply to nonessential emails. I watch comfort shows, read some sword and sorcery or sci-fi series, go on hikes in the woods, do different things, and rest. Best way out of a rut is to turn the wheels, if you can't be pulled out.
3) Creating things is daunting:
Blank pages, and unfinished projects, are all too easy to look away from. At some level, all creation is about having enough faith in yourself to believe, that if you keep going, you will finish something worthwhile. I read the War of Art a while ago, and while I don't think Resistance (procrastination, fear, self-doubt) is a metaphysical force, it certainly is a psychological one for me.
I avoid starting. I avoid finishing (more often). I see flaws all too clearly, and have spent years perfecting projects when I would have been better served getting those ideas out there, learning from feedback and playtesting, and then done something better. I think I worry folks will think less of me if they catch the weaknesses I see, and so I anticipate their feedback and respond to it. It's emotional shadow-boxing, and if taken to an extreme of perfectionism, paralyzing. To avoid being stuck, to push myself out of my comfort zone of navel-gazing, I do one thing.
Contemplate death, then work backwards. If you want a good explanation of how I put this solution into practice, I do recommend the War of Art as a book. I follow it as best I can, and try to write every day I can, for at least a half hour. But the one thing for me that unlocked that habit, that made it possible for me to read the War of Art and then, after a couple of years, implement daily writing in my own life? I kept asking myself what mattered. Often. Over several years. And then, I went to Mexico on a work trip two years ago, and it all became clear.
Having faith in myself is hard; having faith that I will die is easy. What do I want to get done creatively before then? Write a fantasy novel? Yes. Make a mark on my field of work? Yes. Publish a few role-playing game ideas and a creative new game system? Yes. Why do these things matter, why are they good uses of my time? They will bring me great joy and make this world a tiny fraction brighter.
When Tyler Durden holds a gun to that mini-mart clerk's head and tells him to drop everything and pursue his passion or die, that's inspiring, but it's not a realistic road map. To create new things, I need to make space in my life by choosing which habits and urgent commitments must be done now. I now do that by thinking what I want to do by the time I die, and working backwards to daily commitments of time. Every day I write, I want to be writing a tiny bit of my tombstone and obituary, if you will. The big end-of-life goals have to come first, be present every day, or I will not make them happen.
Because one day, I hope that my family and friends will gather around my tombstone, and tell our stories: about how much i loved them, the creative work of my life, and the fun we had togther. In Mexico, on Day of the Dead, I walked a crowded cemetery and quietly cried, watching a family remember grave-side, watching people dance to a brass band on the path through the graves, then go back to remembering, tending flowers.
Every country should celebrate Day of the Dead: Mexicans have discovered that sharing memories about our lost loved ones is the only form of life after death that matters. But facing mortality is numbing at best, and mixing joyful celebration with sadness makes that easier. That's their special wisdom, and why I was crying in the cemetery: it's just beautiful. So yeah, that's how I write: I face death, plan backwards to now, and then do fun, creative things each day to make it easier. Creation is always a matter of life or death, and joy when we clear the sill of the world.
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Thanks for reading. Sorry if I got a little earnest there, but if you read this far, hopefully you know I am with you in this fight. You got this.
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