Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Diversify Your Skillset

A man goes to the school of a great swordsman. The man says, "Master, how long will it take me to become an expert with the sword?" The master says "It takes five years to become an expert swordsman." The man says, "But, master, what if I spend every waking moment of every day practicing and training?" The master smiles and says "That's different. If you do that, it will take you ten years."

If being an author is your goal, if that's what you want to do with life, then you should treat being an author like a job. Work at it, get better, produce finished material. And just because you decide you're a professional word wizard who takes this shit serious, yo, doesn't mean writing will stop being fun. But odds are it will become more stressful. When you're not just writing for yourself, when you're not just writing for the pleasure of it, you become acutely aware of your audience (even if they're mostly imaginary at this point) and, more than likely, of the higher standards of performance you're now imposing on yourself.

Taking a step from writing as hobby and fun times to writing as work and fun times without replacing it with a new hobby and fun times is the perfect recipe for burnout and burnout is not what you want. What you want is a way to relax and to engage the creative parts of your mind without feeling the pressure of performing for an audience. I believe this is why so many creators and performers take up creative side projects. Stephen King is in a band, Robert Downey Jr sings, Jim Carey and David Bowie paint. Creative people are creative because of an intense desire to do so. If you also like to play video games and watch movies, that's cool, too. But you should spend some of your leisure time on something that stimulates you creatively.

Me? I run and play a lot of role playing games in my leisure time. It's how I get the bulk of my socialising and creative stimulation when I'm not writing. But ever the experimenter, I've spent a lot of time on drawing, photography, creating pixel art and, most recently, playing with Lego. I'll be honest with you, most of it is intensely, painfully, almost shamefully amateurish. In fact, a lot of it's just bad. But that doesn't matter, because I'm not creating for an audience. I might show them to interested parties - and to make a point, I'm going to show it to you - but these creative efforts are for me. They are a way to relax on my own and still be creative.

I've said before that statements like "you're not a real writer if you don't write every day" are bullshit. Real writers are people who write. There's no other box you need to tick. If you write for half an hour every weekday morning, well done, you're a writer. If you write for six hours on Saturday and spend the rest of your week living up to your other responsibilities, congratulations you're a writer. If you can and do make the time to write every day, excellent. Go you. Just because you don't have to, doesn't mean it's not awesome if you do. But you'll also probably burnout faster if you don't take care of yourself.

And you know what? The more you do in life that isn't writing, the better your writing will be. This comes back to something else I've often said: writing what you know is a challenge to know more. Your experiences away from the writing desk is fuel for the imagination.

Okay. I'm about to show off some of my non-writing creative endeavours. You will not be impressed by these. I will not be basking in the glory of these works. But neither do I care. Not caring is fundamental to the practice. I actively turn off the perfectionist parts of my brain and just create for the fun of it. If I get better incidentally, great. But if I don't? That's fine too.