We educate ourselves in the arts trying to learn how to create better art, but the process of improvement is a strange and unsteady one and the paths we take don’t always lead where they seem to. The main thing one learns from classes and essays is structure: You learn how structures can help you build, can help you analyze what others have built, understand strengths and weaknesses of your work and of the work of others. After learning this approach you try to apply it, try to understand the structure of what you’re building as you build it, see where it’s all going, see what it’s all adding up to, and try to fully understand that idea before bringing it to life. This describes approximately where I’ve been, artistically, for a long time: I understand structures, I see my intent clearly and plan out how I’m going to achieve it.
I’m starting to see where this approach will fail to support me.
Don’t get me wrong, understanding structure is useful – however, being contained by it, being controlled by it, is not. The time inevitably arrives when one has to loosen one’s grip. For some people, this looseness comes naturally – they nudge by intuition closer to what feels right, and perhaps one day learn to apply structure towards understanding and developing whatever path they took. Myself, I find that every project I start begins intuitively, but that once I begin to understand its structure that structure starts overgrowing my thoughts, taking over my understanding of the project more and more the longer I work on it.
This isn’t an issue for small projects: At that scale, my understanding of the structure and completion of its component parts tend to reach fruition at about the same time. However, when I work this way for bigger projects I start to feel more constrained and trapped as I go, slowly grinding to a halt as I get more and frustrated by the rote actions of developing the exact project in my imagination with no room remaining for further imagination. Conversely, if I let intuition take over, I might keep working on very specific aspects or weird expansions forever and never actually get anywhere substantial, leading to a whole different kind of frustration as the large project balloons unexpectedly in weird areas, becoming a nebulous task which I’m never certain about the real beginning or end of.
Once I can identify this conflict, this struggle, the next question is obvious: How can I find a middle-ground between these extremes to occupy? How can I have the structure to keep this project from getting out of control without feeling that I am trapped in that structure, a prisoner of the perfection of my own idea, my only remaining task to color inside the lines indefinitely? What I’m coming to understand, what may have been obvious to many, is that understanding a structure doesn’t mean understanding it in its totality, each brick and each nail – it means understanding the foundation and framework, understanding its core requirements, abilities, and drawbacks. The difference between these conceptions is the difference between a paint-by-numbers assignment and a blank canvas! Paint-by-numbers can be rewarding, but if all I see ahead in a project is an endless line of numbers, that’s a difficult process to get passionate about. However, if what I see ahead is a set of plans that determine shape and size, determines approximately what needs to go where, and leaves every problem of specific material and color to me to determine as I go? That sounds fun! It’s as though, before creating the game itself, I’m making a meta-game for my own enjoyment – the game of making the game!
There’s still a part of my mind that wants to figure it all out ahead of time, to know what everything means, to map out the entire symbolism and cosmology and interpretation of every idea and connect everything together seamlessly, perfectly. However, while it might be interesting for me right now, I know that that in the long run it would mostly be boring: For me, playing my own little meta-game of making the game, and for you, someday in the future, playing the game itself.