Practice and First Drafts

I've been doing a lot of planning, a lot of editing of gameplay footage, and a lot of the composing of world lore the last few days. And it's one of those funny situations where the more you do, the more you want to do.

I know my brain likes accelerating like that, but there's the element of practice to it as well.

When I first started writing, I listened to a lot of NPR, specifically This American Life, and one of my favorite things that Ira Glass talked about ( perhaps duringThis American Life, or maybe in an interview) was on the topic of 10,000 hours of practice. Not that anybody can become good at anything, but that in order to become good at something, you have to do it for hours and hours and hours. You have to practice it.

And of course that thing that you're doing, you're practicing, that could be almost anything. Writing, playing an instrument, jogging. There's always going to be that hill that you have to get over of "I don't want to do this anymore, but I need to if I'm going to do that other thing I dream about doing."

And when you get over that hill, when you get past that anxiety or that fear or just that lack of experience, sometimes you find that you're still just as confused as a schnauzer that will wind himself around a post on a leash, because becoming an expert in a truly deep and fascinating subject often brings to light more subtleties the more you learn.

I was very opinionated when I started writing. Opinionated on what sort of stories I wanted to tell. But the funny thing with how my opinions sometimes go is I still feel a lot of the same things about the stories I composed, I feel like the shape of them is still mostly there, but the details... yeah, I would probably tweak some details if I was to go back and rewrite, say, the Oliver Lucas adventures.

I think part of why this is on my mind this morning is the obvious bit that I've been recording a lot of videos. I've been using these daily vlogs to just kind of get my mouth moving in the morning, get my brain composing, and then I edit them and turn the transcript into a revised article her eon my website. And that process of getting some of my words out, even if they're not fully formed or not even 100% correct to what I think if I sit and study a topic, breaking the words free and getting the rust off of the gears is super helpful.

So when you're trying to accelerate yourself to launch a new thing, or try a new thing, or make a major life change, you often need to get the initial ideas out before you can refine them. I'm working on this series that I call "Seven Sessions on Creativity." It's probably going to be summer before I release it, because I've got three recorded, and they're okay, but there's a strong temptation to re-record them. I'll likely release them exactly as they are, but then the next four will probably look a little bit different. Or the next one will look different, and then I'll pause for a little while, and the next one will look a little different. Because that is part of the creative process.

Maintaining consistency of style or consistency of output is a very important skill, but as you're working on that consistency, you also have to have the flexibility to adjust. Not to every little wind, not to every little change in society or change in your mood or change in the marketplace, but to what the story needs.

That process of getting out your first draft and then continuing to get out the first drafts and move past the one particular darling first draft you've been thinking about the most and focus in on the best parts of it so you can refine it and improve it... that's perhaps the most challenging part of the process. That's something I'm working on now.

Narrative Eversion is a first draft kind of show. And I know that sounds kind of weird because it's long. It's a lot of me talking. But it's part of my process. I have to get my ideas out. And I do it best verbally on first drafts, I'm finding, because if I sit there and stare at a page, the page stares back at me and says, "No, you don't need to write that." Or worse, it stares back at me and says, "Aha! Well, you have made a mark moving east. That means you must continue to travel eastward with your plans. Maybe deviate a little north or south, but go not west."

And sometimes you get three quarters of the way through a story and realize that you've been writing a western. Or, in the case of Conan Doyle, you get about a quarter of the way through composing A Study in Scarlet, then decide to switch to telling a western revenge tale, and then go back to writing a Sherlock Holmes story.

I think this is also on my mind a little bit today because last night I finally saw Tron: Ares last night, and I'll be honest, I actually really like Tron: Ares. It might even be my second favorite of the series. Not hard, of course, when there's only three. On first viewing, I respected what it was trying to do, I think. I need to re-watch a couple of the action scenes and oh my goodness, the exposition parts were rough, but as much as there were bits of the script that totally needed a tweak I admired the... restrained tension in a lot of the scenes.

We hear a lot about bombast when we're talking about film these days. About the Marvel style. About overlong run times. And in some ways I think that the cinematic pairing of Deadpool & Wolverine from this weekend and Tron: Ares from last night is a rather fascinating comparison to make. Leaning into the bombast versus gently working within the context of bombast, but not going too far. Like, change six lines of dialogue and maybe cast a different hero/villain, and Ares would have been a really solid film.

And that's kind of where Narrative Eversion takes me and where these morning vlogs take me. I like asking a piece of art what it is trying to do. Or asking a person what they're trying to do. Or watching a dog and seeing what they're trying to do. And based on those observations, seeing if it works as a whole.

And this can be complicated, because of course with access to the internet, so many times getting a review or analyzing a story feels less like looking at the actual text, more like looking at its cultural context. Figuring out who the actors and the writers and the directors are, and placing everything within a framework. And I love that. I am kind of a structuralist at heart, though with my own twist on the formula.

I find myself always asking: What is that structure? Is the structure what is imposed upon it by the author or the filmmaker? Is the structure the edits that were made by the studio? Or is the structure something that emerges from the finished product as a holistic blend of elements that may be totally different than the intention of the authors or creators?

And the more I do this, the more I feel like that is the key to the work I do.