Rebellion

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About 5 years ago I ran into a concept called “The Four Tendencies” by writer Gretchen Rubin. The idea was that each person can generally fall into a category of how we respond to external and internal directives. Her observations were that some people, for example, were really good at following directions when somebody else gave it to them, but really bad at it if they gave it to themselves. If you can figure out which of those tendencies you were, you could try to hack your own personality into being more productive, or happier, or well balanced or whatever.

I should note that this is not based in any sort of real psychological research. She's not a doctor or a therapist or anything like that.

Anyway, when I took the tendency test and read the articles associated with it, I came up as “The Rebel.” The idea of the rebel is that they have difficulty listening to the commands of anything outside themselves, and anything inside themselves. Basically, the moment somebody tells me something to do, I don't want to do it. At least, not in the exact way that I was told how to do it. According to Rubin, there's an independent streak in the rebel, so even if they're completely willing to do the task they are given, either by others or by themselves, there's always going to be a tendency to do one part of it just slightly different, or slightly their own way.

I was very fascinated by this angle for a while, but then I saw a real psychiatrist and started thinking about other things.

Still, I wonder if there's something to it. I've been trying to get back to writing my Persona 4/ 5 fanfiction story, and I just couldn't. I was in a part in the overall arc that I didn't really have a strong idea for when I first came up with the thing. It's a big gap in the story, and this happens sometimes to me while I'm writing novels too. When that happens, I just have to buckle down and outline a bunch of stuff until I figure out how to glue the previous sections in the next section that I already know how to do.

So I spent about an hour and a half one morning going through all the lead up, figuring out where I wanted to go next, and then outlining it. That was exactly what I needed to get back on track, and I've been regularly posting on that story again.

And then this morning, I wrote a portion of the story that was not something I outlined, or something that I had planned for. I was struck with the idea at a whim, and just started typing it out.

I'm happy with what I wrote, and I totally posted it, but I still found myself going “Why am I like this?” Why did I spend all that time carefully outlining every single step, only to throw it completely off by the third time I sat down to write?

Now, as I'm walking the dog, I started thinking about that Four Tendancy thing again, and wonder if there is a part of me that has to rebel against what I'm told, even if I'm the one that told myself. It's an extremely annoying habit , and one of the reasons, most outlining systems don't work for me. The minute I've decided how a story supposed to go, I feel compelled to not do it in that way. Sometimes that's a good thing, resulting in a really interesting, creative twists from what I was going to do. Or sometimes it just results in me not doing anything on that project at all.

There's always been a piece of me that loves the improvisational. I mean I was a jazz major after all, and the podcast is basically a large exercise and improvisation. I used to be a 100% "pantser” as a writer, but then I got frustrated with how long it took me to get anything done. I've tried to become more and more outline base, more on schedule, on track, productive.

But maybe I'm just delaying the inevitable. If I'm just going to buck every outline I make, is there a point in doing it? I don't know.

The Creative Pep Talk podcast the other day was talking about Taika Watiti’s tendency to write something, then leave it behind for a few years, then go back and tackle it again. I used to write like that. My rule was right, a novel, write another one, then go back and edit the first one. Heck, Heart and Soul Fist was the result of me going back and finding a story I had written 7 years prior.

So is that the true methodology of who I am as a creative person? Output output output whatever comes to mind, toss it in the metaphorical drawer, and then bring it back to life later?

Is it better to embrace your natural tendency, or train and mold yourself into something different?

More

There's a piece of advice that I heard a long time ago, maybe about 4 or 5 years ago now, that said "push publish more often." The idea being that the more things you submit out into the world, the more chance that you'll find the audience that you're looking for.

That didn't make sense to me at first. After all, as a consumer of stories and media, I often make a wholesale judgment of a creator based upon the first work I consume. So it would seem to me that you would need to make sure that everything you put out into the world was the best possible version you could make it. That's a perspective held by a lot of people who don't make stuff, and a perspective held by the big gatekeeper players, who have appointed themselves tastemakers.

But then I started thinking of it from a more practical perspective. Let's say I sold t-shirts. If I only had one color T-shirt in one size, my capacity to sell t-shirts is limited to people who like that color. And are that size. If I was trying to open a t-shirt shop and said that I was trying to get be perfect t-shirt, the one that would define me as a t-shirt maker, people would think I was stupid.

I've tried my best to improve upon that over the last few years and publishing more things. I think I would have kept secret before. I release short stories I write on the Patreon. But I certainly haven't done the best I possibly could with this.

It's not just being judged under my ability as a creator and writer. I think it's also a fear of being judged on my taste. Our taste is what defines what we determine as good are, and it's by meeting. Our own taste that week decide to put something out into the world. These days I'm not worried about whether I've still fully portrayed the thing I was trying to portray. I worry that people will think that my taste is garbage, and that I'm trying to add garbage to the world.

I think I need to get over that. One of the best things about the podcast is that we only get one try at it. Sure, I can edit it a bit, but there's only so much I could really do if I wanted to drastically change how something came out. Out. And since the podcast is so far, the most widespread success that I've encountered, I should use that as feedback that people enjoy the same things I enjoy. Which of course also makes sense, because if people didn't enjoy the same things that I enjoyed, those things wouldn't exist to begin with.

I feel like I'm writing in circles now. It all boils down too something I retweeted the other day: there are only two writing problems. Not knowing what to say. And knowing what to say, but being afraid to say it.

I think it's time to publish more often.

PS: please excuse any strange word choices or transpose words. I dictated this while walking the dog.

How to blog

Step 1: Decide to start blogging regularly in order to keep up a good connection with "your people."

Step 2: Enthusiastically write a first post announcing this change. Tell everyone everywhere.

Step 3: Have a thought that you think about putting on the blog.

Step 4: Decide "meh, why would someone want to read about that?" (even though sharing thoughts was exactly the reason you started the blog)

Step 5: Forget to blog.

Step 6: Remember, then feel guilty about it.

Step 7: Blog.

Repeat.

Video Game Sacrifice

I was telling my Discord server that I just got my sons into playing Civilization 5 and how it had been nearly 10 years since I had played Civ. Someone remarked that was a long time to go without Civ.

And they were right. I did miss it. I miss video games a lot.

But when I decided in 2018 to bring writing back into my creative practice, I had to cut something, and video games went by the wayside almost immediately.

Now, if you've listened to Chit Chat with Chris and Matt or followed me on Twitter or...watched me on Twitch, you'd know that I still definitely play video games. And there are still times I overindulge in them. But I also know that some video games are part of my self-care, part of how I can manage my stress throughout the year.

But there's certain things I can't do. I can't get into a big multiplayer FPS thing. I can't touch anything Free-to-play. I like it too much, and it'll suck away time that I can never get back.

As it is, I'm having a hard time justifying the 125 hours I've spent on Elden Ring...

Doing consistent creative work requires making choices. Not all of them are fun.

Unrealistic Characters

My Guardian of the Two Worlds series is about a girl named Jane who is caught between trying to be a normal teenager and living a “secret” life of her family’s clan of fighting dangerous spirits.

But the most unrealistic thing about my books isn’t the anime-like martial arts and superpowers, or the Miyazaki-Last Airbender-esque spirits floating around. It’s that the teens communicate with extreme clarity and emotional vulnerability.

And it’s not just to “that one person who gets me” - Jane is open, vulnerable, and direct to her family, her friends, her romantic interests, and even her enemies. And whenever she isn’t, there’s some sort of issue or fallout that arises from it that is usually only able to be resolved by returning to open and honest communication.

I know it’s not “accurate” or “realistic.” I’ve been working with teenagers for years. But it is an intentional choice for them to do that because I want the characters to model what we should all strive to do in our relationships. I mean heck, let’s be honest, most adults don’t even communicate like that. But it would be better if we did.

My hope is that Jane - or at least how she handles her relationships - can be aspirational.

Checklists

I'm back at work now, but the students aren't back yet, which means it's time for my annual attempt to figure out the best possible system to manage everything I'm doing at the same time!

Yay!

I think I've talked about before that. I regularly review and modify my work schedules and methodologies. However, this time I'm trying something very very different. And it was inspired by all the traveling I did.

Checklists.

When you travel with four small children and you're bringing all of your clothes, food, and in the case of one trip nearly all of your kitchen appliances, you can't get anywhere without checklists. Between the sheer volume of things to remember, and constant interruptions from children, I would undoubtedly forget something important. So I have persistent checklist that I have saved for any time we travel. In preparation for these trips, my wife and I also made a bunch of task checklists to make sure we didn't forget to do something before we left either.

During the second trip, I realized that all of those checklists made the entire process a lot less stressful. I wasn't constantly trying to rack my brain through everything, because I had offloaded it onto literal pieces of paper.

So I got to wondering: what if I had a checklist for every day of my life?

And I don't mean a to-do list, of which I've used and have had various iterations of in the past. I mean more like a pre-flight checklist, routines written down that I want to accomplish every single day. After all, one of the barriers to getting a lot of creative work done is mental fatigue. And there are a bunch of studies that show that that mental, decision fatigue wears down throughout the day as you have to make decision after decision. Decision. By creating a routine with a physical checklist that I had to check every day, I could offload a lot of the mental stress of decision making.

So I drafted a version while I was on vacation, and then two days ago I printed them out: for evening and one for morning. I'm back on an early morning routine where I get up extra early to give myself time to work on writing and podcasting etc. So the evening checklist is all about preparing for the next day: packing my lunch, making sure my keys and wallet are in the right place, deciding on what I'm going to be working on the next morning, that sort of thing.

The morning checklist is pretty sparse since most of the time is reserved for the created task that I decided the evening before. But it does include things like walking the dog and making sure I have time to make and eat breakfast.

It's gone decently well. So far. There are glitches in the system, particularly in trying to get to bed on time. It's waking up super early. Means I have to go to bed earlier that I'm used to, and my body hasn't quite adjusted to that yet. I also think the checklist need a little bit of tweaking still. But, I do feel like it has already made a vast improvement in getting myself to do what I want without added stress.

I'll keep you all updated on how it goes, but if you try it out or have ideas that could improve my checklist system, let me know in the comments!

PS: I dictated this blog post while walking the dog, so please excuse any weird typos, transpositions, or odd word choices.

The Archives are Incomplete

I've wrote a blog post while on vacation #2 a couple of days ago. It was a good post, talking about the creative things I was thinking about and struggling with before I left on the trip.

I also wrote it in the squarespace app, which while I like the interface, is clearly not designed for users who have children interrupting them every twelve seconds (and therefore you have to put your phone down and pick it back up over and over).

So I lost the post.

I was so irked by it that I decided to not bother until my trip was over, since it was all a massive waste of time.

But then the next day, I had a major ephihany that cleared up several questions I had written about in the blog post.

That's the irony of trying this constant blogging, especially when I write about the things I'm struggling with. The blogging itself clearly helped with figuring out the problem. But putting it all out there makes me look... I dunno, wishy-washy? Fickle? I spend all this time saying I'm thinking or doing one thing, and then because of that I change my mind. If I don't say anything, then it looks like I have a plan all the time.

But that isn't really the truth, is it? So I suppose it's probably better to be open about the entire process rather than perpetuate the myth that all creators and writers always know what they're doing all the time.

Anyway, heading home today. Had a great trip, but the day job starts up again tomorrow. Still, I'm encouraged and rested about the future.