5 ms·

I'm an amateur writer / hobbyist. Having had a decade+ practice of this back-and-forth procrastination with my writing, I'd add "blank page" to War of Art and y

by salemh 10y ago

I'm an amateur writer / hobbyist. Having had a decade+ practice of this back-and-forth procrastination with my writing, I'd add "blank page" to War of Art and your excellent comment. "Blank Page" refers to having a separate notebook, or open document page on your computer, that you write why you don't want to write, during your time period. If I don't want to write, I write that: "I don't feel like writing today. It's not going to mean anything, or I'm bored with the story. Today wasn't that good of a day.." etc. Eventually, it dumps the things distracting you, and after five minutes I'm typically back into writing my actual work. Creative endeavors/procrastination has always been interesting to me, as I haven't had an issue dumping 90-120 hours into different employers, but have the issue with my own writing. This is also a tool used in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in various forms of use, namely, sleep. If you can't sleep at night, sometimes you need to dump everything in your brain on paper (which many times turns into a huge to-do list).

barkingcat 10y ago
Both of these are excellent ideas! I'll try them out!
DigitalJack 10y ago
This is very interesting. I'm going to give this a try for when I procrastinate at work.
rpazyaquian 10y ago
An important thing to note: I wouldn't call this a fool-proof way of getting creative, necessarily. I tried this just now, and writing down my concerns and "stoppages" actually brought up some pretty good points as to why not to bother. I tried this for gamedev, just for some background. I've been putting off starting some sort of one-off game in Unity even though people scream at me "just make something!!". I thought about why I was hesitating to do so, and wrote down a Blank Page. Here's a few notable things I came up with: --- > It's too hard on my own. Games are multimedia projects. They incorporate audio, video, input, networking, etc. Game development teams are composed of experts in each of the fields the game touches. It's like making a movie, and making an entire movie on your own is somewhere between extremely difficult and laughably impossible. > It involves a lot of planning. In order to make games the "right" way, you need to design the right way from the very beginning. There's a lot of prep work ("preproduction") that involve determining gameplay systems, art and sound direction, and a whole bunch of other things in advance. > It's not something I already know how to do. True, nobody is born knowing how to make a game. But that just means you need to gain the skills in order to do so, which involves learning said skills, which involves time and effort. Therefore... > It's a big time investment. Making a game is in fact a significant time investment. Even if you're offloading graphics and netcode work to someone or something else, you still have to write gameplay code, playtest, debug, redesign, and iterate. Games can and often do take on the order of years to develop. And even outside of developing the actual game itself, the skills needed to even start (e.g. programming, game design, art, etc.) are things that people spend their entire lives mastering. > I won't really be able to make something worthwhile. Even if you do spend your free time putting your game together to the point where you're happy with its polish and development, it can still ultimately be an uninteresting failure - in which case, all that time and effort is arguably time not well spent. That's a huge blow, especially in a day and age where free time is at a premium. This makes trying to make a game a much less appealing prospect. And even if someone can make something worthwhile, it'd be after a few games that aren't as great anyway, so that time and effort spent multiplies. --- Writing this down actually helped me put my concerns into words: games are not single-person endeavors, even for relatively simple ones. Books can be written by a single person since they only touch upon a very specific subject and field that's reasonable for a single person to handle, but games are a very different beast that tie together many different disciplines. To put it in software development terms, books are comparable to web apps and command-line utilities, while games are more comparable to operating systems and enterprise software. That's not to say the Blank Page exercise isn't worth it, not at all - it's very helpful for organizing your thoughts and for self-reflection, and you can see how it helped me. But sometimes, if you procrastinate so much over doing something, the reality is that you might just not want to do it in the first place.
- x2f10 10y ago
  Question: Do you like being a game developer or do you like the idea of being a game developer?
  - rpazyaquian 10y ago
    I've never been a game developer, so I'd have to say the latter. It'd certainly be fun to work as a game developer and learning about game design is fascinating (if mindblowingly complicated), and I might be open to working as a game dev on a team sometime in the future, but at that point, it's much like any other dev job. I like games, I can tell you that, and I want to see more games of the kind that I like, but I'm certainly not learned or developed enough to put those games together myself.
    - rpazyaquian 10y ago
      To expand on this: there's a difference between being interested in something, and being motivated or driven to become something. I'm kinda meh on all sorts of software engineering fields like networking and systems programming, but I was hella motivated to get into the software industry so I could get a job and become independent. Likewise, I find game dev and design interesting to read and learn about, but I don't really have any motivation or drive to dive headlong into the game dev and design industry like I did software dev. They aren't mutually inclusive.
- lifeformed 10y ago
  I think you're overthinking it. Making simple games isn't hard. Just sit down one day and write a clone of Tetris in 24 hours, adding some twists of your own if you want. If you do that, you'll be a million steps ahead of anyone who thinks, "I should make a game someday." You'll have learned more than any book or tutorial can teach you, not just about technical matters, but about your own abilities. Or just join a 48 hour game jam and make some small thing with some friends. After making some small things like that, you'll see how easy it is to just jump into some cool idea you've been thinking about. If you don't do this, and instead just plan out some big multi-person hobby project, there is literally 0% chance it will ever get finished, or even started. It's literally never been done before.
soperj 10y ago
I don't keep a separate page, but this is pretty much what I do as well. If nothing is coming, i just write garbage until I find something I find interesting, gets the thought process going, and lets me concentrate on something other than "i can't think about what to write next".
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

by salemh 10y ago

barkingcat 10y ago

Both of these are excellent ideas! I'll try them out!

DigitalJack 10y ago

This is very interesting. I'm going to give this a try for when I procrastinate at work.

rpazyaquian 10y ago

An important thing to note: I wouldn't call this a fool-proof way of getting creative, necessarily. I tried this just now, and writing down my concerns and "stoppages" actually brought up some pretty good points as to why not to bother. I tried this for gamedev, just for some background. I've been putting off starting some sort of one-off game in Unity even though people scream at me "just make something!!". I thought about why I was hesitating to do so, and wrote down a Blank Page. Here's a few notable things I came up with: --- > It's too hard on my own. Games are multimedia projects. They incorporate audio, video, input, networking, etc. Game development teams are composed of experts in each of the fields the game touches. It's like making a movie, and making an entire movie on your own is somewhere between extremely difficult and laughably impossible. > It involves a lot of planning. In order to make games the "right" way, you need to design the right way from the very beginning. There's a lot of prep work ("preproduction") that involve determining gameplay systems, art and sound direction, and a whole bunch of other things in advance. > It's not something I already know how to do. True, nobody is born knowing how to make a game. But that just means you need to gain the skills in order to do so, which involves learning said skills, which involves time and effort. Therefore... > It's a big time investment. Making a game is in fact a significant time investment. Even if you're offloading graphics and netcode work to someone or something else, you still have to write gameplay code, playtest, debug, redesign, and iterate. Games can and often do take on the order of years to develop. And even outside of developing the actual game itself, the skills needed to even start (e.g. programming, game design, art, etc.) are things that people spend their entire lives mastering. > I won't really be able to make something worthwhile. Even if you do spend your free time putting your game together to the point where you're happy with its polish and development, it can still ultimately be an uninteresting failure - in which case, all that time and effort is arguably time not well spent. That's a huge blow, especially in a day and age where free time is at a premium. This makes trying to make a game a much less appealing prospect. And even if someone can make something worthwhile, it'd be after a few games that aren't as great anyway, so that time and effort spent multiplies. --- Writing this down actually helped me put my concerns into words: games are not single-person endeavors, even for relatively simple ones. Books can be written by a single person since they only touch upon a very specific subject and field that's reasonable for a single person to handle, but games are a very different beast that tie together many different disciplines. To put it in software development terms, books are comparable to web apps and command-line utilities, while games are more comparable to operating systems and enterprise software. That's not to say the Blank Page exercise isn't worth it, not at all - it's very helpful for organizing your thoughts and for self-reflection, and you can see how it helped me. But sometimes, if you procrastinate so much over doing something, the reality is that you might just not want to do it in the first place.

x2f10 10y ago
Question: Do you like being a game developer or do you like the idea of being a game developer?
- rpazyaquian 10y ago
  I've never been a game developer, so I'd have to say the latter. It'd certainly be fun to work as a game developer and learning about game design is fascinating (if mindblowingly complicated), and I might be open to working as a game dev on a team sometime in the future, but at that point, it's much like any other dev job. I like games, I can tell you that, and I want to see more games of the kind that I like, but I'm certainly not learned or developed enough to put those games together myself.
  - rpazyaquian 10y ago
    To expand on this: there's a difference between being interested in something, and being motivated or driven to become something. I'm kinda meh on all sorts of software engineering fields like networking and systems programming, but I was hella motivated to get into the software industry so I could get a job and become independent. Likewise, I find game dev and design interesting to read and learn about, but I don't really have any motivation or drive to dive headlong into the game dev and design industry like I did software dev. They aren't mutually inclusive.
lifeformed 10y ago
I think you're overthinking it. Making simple games isn't hard. Just sit down one day and write a clone of Tetris in 24 hours, adding some twists of your own if you want. If you do that, you'll be a million steps ahead of anyone who thinks, "I should make a game someday." You'll have learned more than any book or tutorial can teach you, not just about technical matters, but about your own abilities. Or just join a 48 hour game jam and make some small thing with some friends. After making some small things like that, you'll see how easy it is to just jump into some cool idea you've been thinking about. If you don't do this, and instead just plan out some big multi-person hobby project, there is literally 0% chance it will ever get finished, or even started. It's literally never been done before.

soperj 10y ago

I don't keep a separate page, but this is pretty much what I do as well. If nothing is coming, i just write garbage until I find something I find interesting, gets the thought process going, and lets me concentrate on something other than "i can't think about what to write next".

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]