You.
Yes, you. The prospective writer or game designer. The one with over 500 unread blog posts in your RSS reader. You.
We need to talk. Have a seat. Would you like something to drink? No? Okay.
Look, this isn’t easy for me to talk about, but I think you need to hear it. I’m not sure how to break this to you gently, so I’ll just be honest.
You need to stop spending all your time reading advice on writing and game design.
Don’t get me wrong. I totally get it. It’s hard not to find joy in Rob Donoghue’s mellow vibe. You get caught up in the frank nature of Gareth Skarka’s blogs. You laugh at the dick jokes and poop references that Chuck Wendig sprinkles into mad ramblings about writing. You have Will Hindmarch and Jeff Tidball and dozens of others pumping into Google Reader or Twitter, and you love every word of their sparkling, wonderful advice.
But… well, let me tell you a story.
Back before Al Gore invented the Internet, I would collect books on writing advice. I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I had written a couple of things that got some attention, so I decided that I needed to prepare to be a Real Writer. I was poor, so I couldn’t buy many books off the shelf, but I would scour library sales and used book stores, and over several years I ended up owning dozens of them. I would read and re-read each one, knowing that if I inhaled their advice often enough, I would eventually reach a point where I would be ready. I could accumulate the lore of Those Who Had Come Before, and be able to stride among them, a giant among artists.
And yet, during the entire time I was collecting books, I wasn’t writing.
Now that we have blog and microblogs and Facebook and podcasts and whatever, it’s easy to get fresh advice every hour of every day. You could spend hours reading and listening to advice, also learning from Those Who Have Come Before.
But I’ve been skimming those sites too. A few months ago, I saw you post that the blog on characterization was perfect for the first chapter of the story you were working on. A couple of months ago, the Facebook thread on setting was also perfect for that first chapter. Just last week, you were thrilled to learn how world-building would be just the thing for… your first chapter.
When are you going to work on that first chapter?
If you want to write a book, do it. If you want to design a game, make it happen. If you want to just read advice and appreciate what others have to say, that’s cool, but stop deluding yourself that you’re just waiting for that one last piece of advice to make your story or your game perfect before you start.
Because that perfect advice doesn’t exist. It won’t happen. The only thing that will get you writing and designing is to close the browser and open the word processor.
Now, see, don’t look at me like that. I know you’re mad, but it’s for the best. Let me explain.
If you never start, all of this advice might be Important, with a capital I. You might need that piece on dialogue cues, or there might be a place for that thought on resource management. So you become paralyzed, trying to hold it all in your head, trying to absorb it all.
But really, advice is best used when you’ve already done something. You reread chapter four and find that the romance subplot feels tacked on. Your character creation chapter reads like stereo instructions. You’ve called one character Robert and a different one Bob. You have a specific problem, and you need advice on it. That is when you go to the Twitternets and the Faceblogs. You’ll find the right piece of inspiration, the right piece of advice for your problem at the moment. Or maybe you won’t, but you’ll figure it out. That’s when the collective wisdom of Those Who Have Come Before will propel you, instead of inhibiting you.
For now, though, I think you need a break. Cut all your advice-lurking cold turkey, and focus on creating. Rob and Gareth and Chuck and Will and Jeff (and I) will still be there, ready to help you. We like helping and sharing knowledge, but we can’t help you write your book or make your game. Only you can do that. And it’ll be brilliant and terrible and inspiring and hateful and innovative and derivative. But it’s yours.
And then, you can give us some advice.
… yeah? Sorta?
I mean, I agree with the sentiment of this post, I do. Advice is meaningless without the act of creation there to bolster it.
But I’ve read this kind of advice (because in and of itself, it’s advice) before, and I don’t buy it because it suggests a false dichotomy. It puts forth a distinct separation between “Advice Reading” and “Making Awesome Shit.”
I’ve received a surprising number of emails from people that say, “You really helped me with Chapter Two,” or “Now I think I get this character,” or, “You really put a foot in my ass and today I wrote 3000 words.”
Do I think people out there just read advice endlessly and do nothing with it? Sure. But this post isn’t going to tell them anything, I don’t suspect.
I’ve read a lot of advice in my time. I have two shelf rows dedicated to writing advice. And it has all been valuable to me. I’m not a guy who dallies over that sort of thing: I take it, and I put it into play. And if I don’t like that advice, if I don’t like the feel of the tool in my hand (ahem, no penis jokes NO PENIS JOKES), I put it down.
But it was always valuable to me. Not as theory, but in practice.
I don’t claim to have the gospel truth over at terribleminds, and the last thing I want is people to sit and masturbate with my blog as the lube — the aim has always been to get them to act, to create, to write, and to think about their craft.
I guess my feeling is, yes, people should balance advice reading with creating. They should balance game playing with game design. They should balance TV watching with TV writing. Etc.etc. But just because some people don’t do it doesn’t mean that everybody falls into that dichotomy.
Engaging post just the same, and the sentiment is one I can get behind.
– c.
I don’t think there’s a false dichotomy here.
First off, I’m not addressing everyone, just people who seem to be paralyzed by reading advice.
Secondly, I think advice is useful — hell, I’ve given out plenty in this blog, and will likely continue to do so. I linked the people I did in this blog (like you) because I regularly find their advice useful.
However, I have seen people (and have myself been) wrapped up in reading advice instead of creating. Reading advice is a way to feel like you’re writing without actually writing. Once in a while, it’s a good break. With a specific problem in mind, it’s fantastic. But trying to collect it all in your head because you need it before you create is a problem.
Ultimately, I think we’re agreeing a lot here. It may be that my post came across as more broad than I intended.
I’d say if anything yeah, it’s that it comes across a little broad. It comes across (to my reading) as, “Hey everybody, stop reading advice and start creating some shit.”
But as a post exhorting those who only linger over advice like a swamp miasma rather than moving on and doing something productive, we’re on the same page. Learning is about enacting. Lessons are worthless if they’re purely academic. Then they’re just time-waters. As an ancillary note, it’s why school was always irritating — rarely any drive to do something with the information, rarely any example of what can come from what we were learning.
– c.
I agree. I like academic wank as much as the next… uh, wanker, but I force myself to take it and apply it somewhere. I try to constantly remind myself that if it doesn’t add value somewhere, then I need to focus on something else.
That’s actually why I’m trying to get back to posting advice, though, because something that might not be valuable to me could be valuable to someone else. But again, I need to force myself to not let that become a road to academic wank.
And yes, part of the inspiration of this post was that I enjoyed the inherent hypocrisy of advising people not to listen to advice.
Amen, Brotha
I also find it helpful to be working on multiple projects at once, so that you can switch to a different one if you get bored or uninspired.
You know what…
…YES.
I’ve been running smack-dab into this problem over and over and over again. I need to stop mulling over these blasted theoreticals and do something practical. I need to go write this stuff. I need to play some games, run some games…
Now to find the time. But…YES.
Glad you found it helpful.
I have to say this is my main gripe with apparent gamers who talk all day long about games, yet when asking for advice they never come back with any form of opinion that would be formed from putting that advice into practice. You just get more of the same rhetoric which can only come from those who don’t wish to try things out or take the deep end.
p.s. I like the new layout.
Thanks. I figured it was time for a change.