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bigstuffedcat
@bigstuffedcat

(This is a bit about how I'm annoyed by stock creative advice. However, it's not a joke.)

For your very first project, start as big as you can. Work on your dream project right away. Learn how to tune and present things by bashing your head against something bigger than yourself. Internalize the feeling of defeat, the feeling of spotting the white whale at last. You'll need them if you want to make anything meaningful. Only after enlightened exhaustion can you begin your work on Snake.

Give into fear and shame. Your ancestors did not evolve fear and shame over millions of years for you to ignore them when doing something expressly meaningful to you. Ask yourself why you feel these things-- Do you fear failure? What are you ashamed of? Can you learn something about your values by asking these questions? Listen to fear and shame, defeat them if it's necessary for your soul, but never ignore them.

Think inside the box. There are thousands of years of tradition on how to write good sentences; even if your artistic medium is too young to vote, the question of how to do good writing did not originate with it. Just figure out the problem you need to solve ("My page is blank", &cet) and write the most obvious of the good, voiceful sentences that could solve it. Problem-solving creativity-- Do something weird, outside-the-box, &cet only when you (a) can clearly articulate the problem you need your sentence to solve, and (b) have tried the most obvious solution and it's not enough.

Seriously, don't worry about whether your art is something only you could make. Anyone can make art only they can make by publishing their social security number on itch. Worry about making obvious, good, voiceful sentences. You ever read a mathematical proof? Hundreds of the most obvious possible sentences strung together, literally just "if this is true, then this is true", and they still read like the author is pulling back the curtain of the night sky to reveal truth. By just saying true things in an order.

Don't worry about the inherent qualities of your medium. Sure, people have different ideas about what constitutes a good sentence in blogwriting vs. poetry vs. TTRPG design vs. Rust programming. But your voice is more important than any of these things. Just write a good sentence at a time (I keep saying sentences, but a single good whatever the atom of your creative project is). Then, figure out what problem your text has, and write a good sentence to solve it. Don't worry about whether you're in the "right" medium, and by god don't worry about whether you're saying something you can only say in that medium.

Think obsessively about your audience. Even books are interactive. Even self-indulgent smut for your eyes only starts a conversation between the you-author and the you-experiencer. Conversation. Whatever moral values you have regarding spoken or written conversations apply here, too. Even a tiresome monologue needs a listener.

Distrust your intuition. When you write a sentence that just seems right, and you don't know why, don't say "Well, my intuition knows best." That's how you get thoughtless caricature antagonists, the replication of kyriarchy laundered in as archetype or intuition. Perhaps say "I'm going to pause a moment and figure out why this sentence is effective", or perhaps "I'm going to continue writing, as a way of engaging with this sentence to figure out how it works." There is no Outside.

Don't join an artistic community. Find world-weary weirdos. Make loved ones, those who you can make art with, about, for. Learn to pick fights about art in a kind, compassionate way, and then pick fights about art all the goddamn time. Get people who will talk about art with you like you're an opponent in a board game. Be a bit of a curmudgeon, if you can do so kindly.

Don't try to change the world. Art is all talk. If the process of making and distributing your art feeds people, that's something you are doing rather than the art (and that's a very good thing).

Accept only perfection. Or at least a local maximum. Fight for something.


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in reply to @bigstuffedcat's post:

reminds me of a common quote about maths/statistics: all models are wrong, but some are useful. (ok i looked it up it's from George Box.) same with general advice, i think. no one framework is going to give you the answer to all situations you find yourself in, particularly the simple ones

Unironically love this. I feel like the opposite "conventional" advice is geared toward creating art-as-product, as in something you can finish in a timely manner and then sell. Idk if this post is good advice per se but it does inspire confidence and creativity and that's the best kind of artistic advice there is in my book.

I also have conflicted feeling and did skip over most of it. Also I think this is important and should be shared wildly.

hmm, perhaps I have issue with it because it start by advocating to go ahab while I am too much of a coward to go on such an epic journey or too dumb to understand that when I first opened RPG maker and failed to make even the first map, that was it.

[...]

I guess that was it because after voicing it, I read it in full. About art only you could make, think about love song. People don't do "hmmm, someone already write a love sing, maybe I shouldn't make another one.". They wrote one more so people can sing love song in karaoke booth all night long.

Whew, the first piece of advice is an interesting one for gamedev in particular (as well as any creative medium, but I'm biased and I've heard about enough MMORPG Kickstarters to see how much can happen while trying to follow through with that), thank you for this post!

This post might be the only creative advice post I have ever read that I agree with.

This part in particular is tricky, though...

Think obsessively about your audience. Even books are interactive. Even self-indulgent smut for your eyes only starts a conversation between the you-author and the you-experiencer. Conversation. Whatever moral values you have regarding spoken or written conversations apply here, too. Even a tiresome monologue needs a listener.

...because it is predicated on you somehow actually selecting an audience in the first place -- something I have found to be a monumental and confounding task.

Your audience can absolutely be "me and my friend Keith", for instance. I do TTRPGs, for instance -- one of the things I've found is that if I target my game to "people with the same interests and table dynamics as me", I'll catch a number of other folks in the net. Something spoken (even metaphorically) to a single specific person will have more interesting things to say than something spoken to "meh whoever".

My only conflicting feeling on this are the first and last one, first because way too many projects have gone wrong because of overambition (especially in the gamedev scene), and last because as an OCD, I do not need to hear more about being perfect, my brain already does that, the main thing that harms my writing is how I can't even begin to figure out how to get rid of the flaws and so I get too embarassed to write