I’m noticing a certain pattern in my desires lately—writing, playing D&D, small forays into creating some digital art, more programming—and they all end up being outlets for me to in some form be creative and well, actually create something. This realisation doesn’t come as a complete surprise since these are all things I’ve wanted to be good at for a long time yet kind of always felt I wasn’t good enough to do, a common dilemma it feels for aspiring artists, but it still feels a bit interesting and somewhat scary to potentially start thinking of myself as a “creative type”—whatever that means in the end.

It’s also putting me face to face with my difficulties with, well difficulties and the failure that will inevitably rise from those and that one has to push past. I’m noticing a certain trend in myself of getting really excited about the concept of something, spending a small amount of time getting a very rough familiarity with that concept and then the surface level knowledge within an area—recent example being digital art—and after it gets difficult and I need to start actually practicing and refining my skill I kind of give up. I get the sense that anything for which I don’t notice something of a natural talent for, I subconciously categorize as too difficult and give up on it without giving myself the time to actually learn the subject at hand. Maybe it’s the age old thing of “everyone wants to know a foreign language/how to play an instrument/paint but nobody wants to learn how to do those things” at work, but at the same time in the realm of actual language learning I am doing somewhat well so obviously with the right conditions the capability and persistence from my part exists I just need to figure out how to channel it into other things.

In addition to this, also touching on the subject of motivation which I’ve discussed in other posts, I’m finding it a bit difficult at times to actually refine the concepts and ideas when it comes to things like D&D that I am already working on and are ongoing. Now I’ve mentioned it before that I have often felt that I was somewhat underprepared when going into our sessions and that had caused some level of anxiety for me going into those games, and though that anxiety has definitely lessened and I’m much more eager to get back to playing I still have the problem of having some very loose ideas where it is all going to go forward yet not really taking the time and doing the research necessary to actually feed those ideas until they are more solid as well as being able to present them properly.

Now in this instance there are of course a couple of caveats, namely that overpreparing can actually be somewhat harmful since in the medium in question telling the story is a group activity and if I try to prepare and solidify and predict too many things I might end up railroading the players to an unecessary degree which I don’t think is fun—I want to have the opportunity to be very surprised during our sessions too—and secondly, from the presentation standpoint, I’m actually doing well and don’t need the extra pressure and anxiety I’m causing myself, even if a desire to improve isn’t a bad thing either.

This all also becomes painfully obvious to me with my dream to write a novel, where I got really excited about the start, the initial concept, the rough sketch, yet I haven’t even managed to actually put a paragraph on (virtual) paper yet and actually started writing. I haven’t even started fleshing out those concepts, coming up with the world, the story or the goals, all I have so far is the start of a story. Now, to be fair, that is the general approach I take to e.g. these blogposts, where I have some very rough idea of what I want to write about and then flesh it all out as I go along and don’t look back, but I don’t think this is a sensible approach for the more longer form writing that a novel would be, possibly still appropriate for a short story or the like. Though, perhaps, why actually not? Why can’t I just start writing and discover the story myself as I go along, exploring the world I am creating while I am creating it? Editing is something very doable, if at a later date something doesn’t fit it can be removed or adapted, and then if nothing else it served as inspiration for what was to come. Why am I expecting myself to basically write the whole story out before actually, well, writing it? I don’t really need all of those tools that generally are there to make the writing process more efficient since I’m doing it really for nobody’s benefit but my own, so the pace of it all doesn’t matter in the least. I mean, I do hope to actually be done with it at some point, but that still a lot longer than even the slowest writing process I could conjure up would take for the task I have in mind.

So, I guess, even in this case, the thing keeping me from even getting started is the fear of not finishing it or it not being what I hope or dream it would be, either to me or others. Yet at the same time, if I keep so vehemently refusing to take those risks and actually working on things I want to see get done, none of those things will with certainty become what I want them to become, I’m not even giving my ideas the chance to flourish if I don’t execute on them. Maybe writing all of this down, once more, is a step towards actually starting to realize more of my ideas?