Image: Abstract Landscape GAN, Generative artwork by robbiebarrat
As may be clear from anyone who’s reading these posts, it’s not fully clear what’s going on here, certainly not to me. The goals I’m aware of are to form a habit of writing and thinking, and to do it publicly. I enjoy writing quite a bit, and in the internet age of course we don’t need to ask anyone to pick us in order to do writing. No one needs to accept our article for a magazine or publisher, and we don’t necessarily have to write anything useful for a large audience. So we have the luxury of writing publicly, reaching a small group of people who may be interested, and figuring it out as we go. No sheets of paper or printing presses were harmed in the production of these words. I grew up around writers, and something I was always taught was that it was impolite to ask writers how their writing is going. The answer is almost always badly. If for some reason it’s going well, they’ll probably tell you. Writing can be hard it’s true, particularly when it’s tied to our identity and self-worth. I am emphatically not a writer, and so writing this stuff is low stakes for me. That may be why I like doing it. At the moment my self-identity is caught up in my game project Monarch Black, and that’s probably why I haven’t worked on it seriously in a year, but I can write these blog posts every day. Funny how that works.
This points to an interesting fact, which is the more we build up this idea of self-identity around a project or process like writing or making games, the harder it gets. If I think of myself as an independent game designer, and that’s the thing I’m proud to be, somehow that work takes on existential stakes and becomes much more difficult. One model I like for writing is that of the journalist writing a column or filing copy every day. Journalists never get writers block. The copy must get filed by a regularly occurring deadline and so it gets written. So that’s one way I think about these posts. Journalistic dispatches covering the latest news of what’s going on in my brain. That sort of implies that my thoughts are newsworthy, which in my opinion they are not. But I like the idea that I am checking in daily, filing my copy and moving on. It’s a workmanlike process, not some tortured artistic activity. I don’t need any more of those, thanks.
If nothing else the process of writing daily is pretty enjoyable, and gives me a minor feeling of having accomplished something every day, which my salaried work does not always give me. Working as a manager I spend a lot of time communicating, writing emails, sitting in meetings and this does not always fill me with the satisfaction of a job well done, whereas in this case I can at least point to some words and say “I made those.” Apparently making things regularly is something I need and find satisfying, and as it turns out this type of writing is a pretty direct and accessible way to do it.
This music has nothing to do with the post, but I was listening to it while I wrote it, and I recommend it, it’s very nice.
