The Creative Process #51 - The Oversharpened Pencil

There is a classic worry when breaking out on a new hobby or creative project that you need to get the perfect tools and materials. I mean, if you were to start on a marathon, you wouldn't want to cripple yourself with bad shoes. You wouldn't want to cook a meal with a troublesome oven. So why not find the exact right pencil and the exact right notebook for a creative project?

I'm an absolute sucker for this. I have had an array of notebooks over the last decade. I always carry a soft, pocket-sized, black Moleskine commonplace book for random notes and ideas. I had a dalliance of a few years with bullet journals. When I listened to Cortex, I bought their theme system journal and Subtle notebook. For one Christmas my wife bought me an assortment of Creator's Friend notebooks from a lady in Queensland, including loose leather binding to keep together "the main ones". In an admission of guilt, I left the Android ranks temporarily to acquire an iPad Air. I have a lovely leather-bound book that I used to write significant life events in with the fountain pen my wife gave me (and wrote maybe two entries and never again). For Father's Day my daughter gave me an A6 notebook with the front cover saying "Dad is someone who wants to catch you when you fall, instead he picks you up, brushes you off, and lets you try again". For our recent campaign of Impossible Landscapes where I played a biowarfare expert, I chose an excellent Art Deco A5 book and carefully stuck the logo of USAMRIID on the front as the compendium of my notes in case of my character's untimely demise.

Last week we went on holiday down the coast, hence the lateness of this issue. I packed light - only four, no, five notebooks:

1. My commonplace book (obviously)
2. My iPad Air, although that was mostly in case of rainy weather for my son
3. A spiral-bound book to write notes in while I read a maths paper
4. My new grey A6 sketch book bound with a rubber-band to my new set of colourful gel pens
5. A top-spiral-bound notepad for scrap writing

Just the essentials.

This sort of sickness can pervade the digital realm as well. I've seen, tried and discarded many notes apps: Evernote, Notion, Trello... Wander into any forum about personal knowledge databases, and it's an endless parade of "which app is the best?" yearnings and testimonials.

And this is not just for note-taking. Any app type has a whole slew of variants for you to download instantly. At a step slightly less lazy, there is the promise of AI agents writing you bespoke tools for your exact needs. Even before this, there's long been the ability to weld together open source libraries into a composition potentially more powerful than the individual pieces - as well as being potentially more fragile. I spend a lot of my time in Emacs, an ancient, endlessly tunable system of tools.

We can hope that with the right tools, the right materials, our creative projects will come that much easier, and you'll be that much more productive.

The reality is that so long as the tools don't get in the way, they don't matter. Productivity is for factories. Creative explorations need the agility of turning ideas into things we can examine, and then edit or discard as needed. Later when the work is more mechanical, we can focus on productivity again.

I love to find the right notebook, or tune the right digital tool, but these things aren't my creative projects. My creative projects are in my head and need to not be.

I'm battling with unlearning the productivity fetish and focussing on creating. To understand the problem more I've been re-reading some of Maggie Appleton's work. She has a lot of interesting things to say about tools for thought, especially ones in the digital realm.

I like Appleton's way to think about creative output via materials/medium/meat. This works just as well in the digital realm as the physical, but I'll often use physical examples.

Materials are the tools you are using. This might be the choice of paper and pencils for drawing. This choice matters in what you can or can't do. Sloshy markers work on thin photocopier paper, but it's going to be hard to do dense, precise work, if that's what the work needs. Materials have affordances as well as constraints. Even in the meta-material world of the computer, your tools are likely to do some things well and others less so. You can do pixel art in a spreadsheet, but you may go insane.

Medium is how you're using the materials to convey your ideas. The exact same paper and pen can be used for: a map, a flow diagram, a mathematical proof, a comic, a sketch, a calendar, a script, a checklist, a crossword, character doodles, a budget, a gym routine, origami, a recipe, a design block-out, a role-playing character sheet, a timeline... Each one of these has a particular layout and set of rules for how you interact with it, optimised for a particular task.

Meat is the set of ideas you want to convey, which is the entire point of the exercise. This can be conveying something to someone else, or even just yourself separated in time. Even something as simple as drawing boxes on a page to practice sketching helps you capture exactly how good you are at telling your fingers what your brain expects to do.

The crux of the issue is that simultaneously:

Thought is the best technology available. Nothing is faster nor more flexible.

and

Thought is the worst technology available. No one else can access it in its natural form, and it is so ephemeral that it falls apart even in your own mind.

So we need to move our thoughts from our mind to the world. How you do that is the medium of expression. What you do it with is the material of expression. Making the right choice of medium can help or hinder this expression. Making the right choice of material can ensure it isn't harder than it needs to be.

Bringing this back to my own practice with interactive fiction, I know I have projects with substantial meat behind them, at least in my head. I have some fluency with my tools, and experience with their strengths and weaknesses. My current setup suffices because I've made interactive fiction with them.

I'm still not an expert in my medium, though. On an intellectual level I understand choices in games, and the role of language. I know the strengths, weaknesses and differences between choice and parser interactive fiction. I know how and when you might use storylets. But I don't feel like I have a strong aesthetic understanding of when to branch, why a story should loop, when to expand or contract the story to suit the interactions...

A current bit of work I'm doing is writing a gamebook for my daughter. Low stakes but with a palpable payoff. I'm trying sections of story and seeing where four choices are too much and two are too few. I'm keeping it so low stakes that I can recognise the errors and issues, and rewrite. No darlings to worry about killing, so to speak.

Instinctively through this process I'd reach for new tools or create new ones. I'm trying to shy away from that and just write, revise and rewrite. With enough attention to what I'm doing, I should identify workflows from the work, not the other way around. Once mastered, then tools can make them productive.

It is undeniably lovely to have beautiful tools, perfectly laid out, ready for action. But my mind is messy. My ideas are messy. I need to bounce them from my brain to the world and back. The more times I can do this, the less messy it should become. The materials and tools aren't the barrier - my command of the medium is the barrier.

So I feel I should stop sharpening my pencils and choosing my paper. I should just wear the pencil down and rip through the pages until we get to somewhere better.