I’ve fallen behind on these posts. I took a week or two to take care of some other things and fell out of the writing habit – I’m still working on falling back into it. What’s kept me relatively timely in the past is, in addition to the admittedly flimsy deadlines I’ve set, the sheer creative outlet of writing. It’s something I need some version of in my life, lest my head fill up with unsaid words and roll off my neck. One problem is that right now I have a completely different version of the same outlet in the form of the game I’m currently working on – I was working on a different game before that, so it wouldn’t seem like this would be a new issue, but the last game had almost no characters and relied primarily on visual storytelling for most of its beats, whereas this one is shaping up to have many characters, each with distinct perspectives and voices, any of which might carry the words that pop into my head.
My normal writing process is to come up with some thread of an idea – some sensation or conflict, image or desire that tickles something inside my mind, then to follow the threads of that, expand and unfold it, until I can see what it was that caught my attention, describe what it means, explain how two disparate ideas connect in subtle but important ways. Even aside from writing, this is just my thought process, is how I think and how I talk – and how I make games. Now I run into a tricky conflict: If I think of something, if I feel the tickle, if I see a thread I can pull on and explore and unfold, is that something I should immediately write about – or is it something I should turn into content for the game?
Hypothetically these oughtn’t be in conflict with one another. I could explore an idea here and then explore it again in the game, I could even put bits and pieces of what I write here into the dialogue, have it come directly out of my characters’ mouths. I’m pretty sure I’m going to end up doing that eventually whether I want to or not, may as well embrace it, right? Well, perhaps – but the problem is, the way one explores a problem, the way one unfolds an idea, is greatly influenced by what one expects it to turn into. If I’m writing for a character, the questions I ask myself to see where the conversation goes next are going to be very different than the questions I ask myself when writing an essay – and while I could perhaps just write from the same place twice, explore in different directions from the same origin, I know that once one departs from the original thread of thought it can be quite difficult to find it again. If I try to re-explore, I may end up instinctively heading down paths I’ve already traveled – or perhaps trying over-strenuously to avoid them, and creating a stilted awkward character who never says the thing that needs to be said out of fear of it having been said before. A self-portrait of sorts, I suppose, but not a flattering one.
I don’t know if this is why I’m so far behind. Maybe I’m just too tired, or too distracted by all of the other neat things I could or should be doing. Maybe I’m just burnt out on this form of writing, so limited compared to the infinite possibilities offered by game development – or, rather, of thinking about game development, before having to figure out how any particular thing is going to get done. Regardless, coming up with solutions can be educational, even if they are inevitably incomplete – and ruminating on it for a while is, at least, a way to catch up a bit on all this writing I am meant to have done.