When I start getting to the end of a project I like to lay out the pages on the floor of my workshop. Sometimes I hang them up, fifty or so at a time, just so I can really get a sense of what I've done. This latest project has been good because it didn't signal the completion and recording of one idea alone.
- I want to do an early revision of my SS System.
- I want to compile all my world building works for D&E into a single tome.
- I want to write and draw a crappy but mildly amusing web comic.
Then there's the part of me that thinks I should disappear for three months and just write the first novel for D&E. I have a bunch of it already written, the world building is mostly finished, I could have a manuscript by my birthday. The act of writing the novel, and finishing the manuscript would put me into a sort of seclusion, I know myself well enough to see that happening.
The whole thing could be entertaining if I kept a photo or video journal of the process and posted regular updates 'from the cave', blurbs from the book, and other stuff. I could do a stop animation film of my patchy beard growing out over three months. Wow, my place in the Kingdom of Weird would certainly be assured.
Proposing the idea to my wife garnered me a barrage of incredulity and questions. *sigh*
Looking back at the floor, the idea of restructuring my world building system is really attractive. Like the way eating too much ice cream is attractive, or ordering cake after a seven course meal. The revisions would streamline what is a somewhat bulky and overweight system, but would put yet another set of rules in front of play-testers to learn all over again. Why people help me, I sometimes wonder.
Sometimes you have to hide for a while to get things done. I have squandered most of my creative talent by not using it for several years.
ReplyDeleteOccasionally when I am working on something and get a bit of inspiration even a tiny distraction like a noise outside or my wife asking what I want for dinner will cause me to completely forget what I had been thinking and it will take hours or days just to recover that thought, if I ever recover it at all.
I don't think the answer is always to go the Rivers Cuomo route and live in an empty apartment with the windows covered up and the phone unplugged, but sometimes a trip to the isolation chamber allows a certain type of creative thinker to work without distraction. It's not a very family-friendly practice, though. Many of the great religious, literary, and scientific thinkers spent time meditating on the intricacies of their chosen specialty to the exclusion of all else.