Amazing as it was to live in the Highlands, it didn’t turn out to be the haven for creativity that I expected. All that time and space — surely I’d write and produce all kinds of books. But no, I didn’t feel like it, and life there was about other things.
Now that I’m here in Toronto, though, something has awakened inside me: a burning need to play and to tell stories.
I’m reading a book called Playful Parenting — an approach I can get my head around! — and it strikes me that play is an essential, vital part of life, yet one we neglect, thinking it’s a pointless luxury. Play, says the author of this book, is how children practice experiences, and thus learn about the world.
The things I’m dealing with in life right now are kind of Big and Important (potentially becoming a father, illustrating a long series of books, adjusting to an international move, &c.), so I love the idea of having a parallel play-world of my own in which to try things out, dabble with outcomes, and just pretend!
I’m wondering if, ultimately, we really need to take anything seriously. I mean, this life is all made up, and we don’t survive it, so why not make light of it and have fun? As Kurt Vonnegut said, “I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.”
I loved writing novels, because it was such a great chance to exercise my imagination like that — to create worlds and figure out what I think.
So I’ve started a few projects that give me a chance to do these things — and, of course, use my skills to create literal products of my imagination. As I said about my project-management materials, I’m drawn to use things that I created.
One of the projects I’ve been working on is a role-playing game. Over the holidays, I did a ton of reading and research, and there’s a ton of great material out there about creating games to play on your own (like Solo Roleplayer and DriveThru RPG).
From all this, I derived a very simple gameplay system that works for me, and my first campaign (story setup).
It’s just like writing a novel — setting up a premise, characters, and potential conflicts, then following the storyline along — except here it’s just for fun! No worries about being original or interesting.
(This story is about a cartoonist who’s just landed a job in a satirical magazine while a dangerously inflammatory politician rises to power. Think Charlie Hebdo meets The Dead Zone.)
So I look at the situation, decide what action my character wants to take, then roll a die. The result can be:
- “No, and:” It didn’t work, plus something worse happened.
- “No.” Simply no.
- “No, but:” It didn’t turn out like he wanted, but there’s a bright side.
- “Yes, but:” It kind of worked, but there’s a catch.
- “Yes.” Success!
- “Yes, and:” Not only did it work, something even better happened!
If I need to fill in some random twist in the story, there are Rory’s Story Cubes (wonderfully unexplained picture dice) and Deal-A-Plot (an ingenious free printable deck of random story-generating cards from the 1930s).
So it’s kind of a Rorschach Test for imagining and playing, along with “generative storytelling”. I’m writing down the story that emerges, and, of course, tempted to share it. But then I’d start second-guessing and trying to make it good for other people. That’s not the point.
What is the point? ‘Cause this is kind of a dumb, pointless exercise, no?
The point is play, and actively using my imagination — which is an invaluable resource for the kind of things I want to do.
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Speaking of which, my other project is a “visual novel”. That’s a “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style story that you click through on the web.
This is made possible through an insanely cheap piece of software called TyranoBuilder (seriously: it’s like fourteen bucks), which features simple, visual programming for creating branched stories and spits out HTML5 code. So when that’s finished, I’ll feature it here on my website.
This is something I’d like to do lots more of — produce simple, interactive stories featuring my drawings: Something fun, as opposed to just “look at my work”.
I figured I’d start with a quick autobio story called — wait for it — “How I Spent My Summer Vacation”. It’s tough to find time for this, especially while illustrating a book (as I should be right now), but I’m making slow and steady progress.
I’ve outlined the branches of the story, gathered together reference material, and this morning I did the character designs:
So that’s what I’ve been working on while not writing here over the past little while.