The Creative Process #35 - Our Real Models

This month I turned 44. It was a nice birthday with the usual lovely blessings of presents, cake and excited acknowledgement from my two little ones. As years go, 44 isn't that special. It's not the big 4-0. It's just another one of the numbers you get to tuck into your belt if you're lucky to keep spinning around the sun. So it was a special day, but not a special day.

They say that you regenerate all your cells in your body every 7-10 years. Even though that's a bit of a biological fiction, there's something to be said about looking back and imagining your life in stages. Or to focus a little more on the point of this newsletter, you can imagine your creative voice growing in stages. Growing and multiplying in a fertile environment, maturing as you get used to it, and eventually shedding it when the environment or needs change. Here's mine.

Lil Kid Spectacle

Ever since I can remember, I've had this unconscious drive to write and design. Back in the 80s, when I was about six years old, I made a short-lived series about a punk rocker who got into a lot of Wile E. Coyote-style cursed interactions. In one episode, he got zapped by a wall socket, extending and electrifying his already-spiky hair. In another, he played an electric guitar that shook his very skeleton with a single note — the volume made clear by exceptionally long stems on the musical notes. That's how music notation works, right? My editor and sole reader (and mother) reviewed it as: "Oh okay."

These were a deliberate aping of two of my greatest enthusiasms at the time: Looney Tunes and the slapstick movie Young Einstein.

In year four or five I wrote a comedic reimagining of our school camp in short story form. My best friend at the time was the slapstick relief to the rest of the non-story. This was so successful I wrote a sequel, boldly stealing the fourth-wall-breaking manic chaos of Gremlins 2, having them break up my story before it returned, turning into a macho 80s-style action movie.

For the rest of my childhood, I was similarly transparently inspired by action and adventure movies. It was never fan-fiction as the term has come to mean. I always had my own characters, usually my friends or family. But I wanted to chase the thrill of the original by writing my own.

The Short Story Writer

In high school, I fell into being a writer. A short story writer, in particular. I was good at academics across the board, but I identified as a writer. Not that I thought I'd be a writer as a job, because I just never thought about having a job. I floated and occasionally would bang out a short story, apropos of nothing.

I did subconsciously try to shake the obnoxious 80 action movie pastiche, but replaced it with my own follies because I was a teenager who didn't know anything.

I remember writing myself into a corner about explorers finding an island with giant ravenous crabs. I extricated my characters from a situation in the way many silly early teens would — turns out it was all a dream! Phew! The end!

In growing older and trying to be a serious person who thinks serious things like emotions and love and stuff, my writing turned towards the melodramatic. I didn't have a model I was working from, just my own ideas about the world. Even then I could produce decently written prose. The issue was that it backed nonsensical situations.

One of the few stories I can remember is an early twenty-something guy who falls for the wild, pixie-cut hair girl — everyone has one of those stories, right? — who convinces him to go through with a convoluted romantic suicide pact about jumping off a bridge to collide with a train and he gets cold feet midway through the plunge. If that was an obvious reference to anything, I'd be surprised. There was some cool stuff with time compression and the effect of light and shift of emotions... but all in service of absolute nonsense emotions and rationale, and a frankly rude disregard for physics.

Without being too conscious of it, I was experimenting and trying to find a voice, encouraged and moulded by my teachers so that I might do more, better writing in the future.

I am Jack's Blatant Mimic

I moved interstate to go to university, far away from my old friends and situation. It was a new beginning. I still hadn't figured out who I was, nor had I thought to figure that out, but I had new friends, new situations and new influences.

This was just about the turn of the millennium when it was a great time in cinema. Pixar was hitting its stride. The Matrix and Fight Club came out. And I was looking for a voice.

It is recommended when you're looking for a voice to just copy one that you like. Write out their words verbatim to get the feel of it. Take their work and, over time, feel confident to colour it your own way or even add your own structure.

For better or worse, I fell into the orbit of Chuck Palahniuk of Fight Club fame and he was who I mimicked. He was the king of angry young literate men at a time that I felt like I should be an angry young literate man, even though I didn't really have anything to be properly angry about. Oooh consumerism, shake fist!

Chuck Palahniuk also appealed to my keenness for semi-technical approaches to creativity. He was open with encouraging new writers and wrote many blog posts explaining techniques. Other writers would rattle off the usual writing lessons starting with "show, don't tell" and then petering out quickly until it was "er, keep writing until it's good".

Chuck recommended specific techniques like choruses — repeated lines or phrases to reinforce character or theme. Or burnt tongue phrases that stop a reader at the end of sentence like a busy guillotine. Or throwing out adjectives and retaining verbs. Or using simple, blunt language.

My writing took on a few of his stylistic flourishes, and I still use them. I did, however, grow out of his work. Twenty years later, he's still writing Fight Club wearing different shirts and I'm too aware of the craft to appreciate the work.

My other huge influence at the time were the Matrix movies. I love them all, and if you don't, come fight me in a CGI dojo. I really dug the multi-layered script with references and inspirations from all over the place. I had just learned the term polymath, and decided that I was one. Whilst studying mathematics, on the side I was also teaching myself piano, Zen Buddhism, CGI and animation, cinema, philosophy, and computers. And writing.

I was still figuring myself out so my writing was complicated but my understanding of society and relationships and life in general was really simplistic. I wrote a novella that was part-homage to Romeo and Juliet, and part experiment to large ensemble narratives with something like a dozen "main" characters and a relationship network that I needed to graph out. Terrible! I had also shed my penchant for action movie homages. I knew that my best artistic skill was writing, but also had the opinion that action scenes are nowhere near good enough in the written form.

Nevertheless I was carving out a narrative voice.

Death and Undeath

At some point I decided I would stop messing around with short stories or novellas and write a proper novel. It was called Breathe. It was a story about a young woman going through the transition from university to "the real world" and trying to find herself amidst changing personal dynamics and meeting a Zen Buddhist. There were fewer but stronger characters. I was trying for a naturalistic approach.

Over years I persisted with Breathe, writing and rewriting and re-rewriting. The circular writing process was very on-theme, but it was not productive. I took the piece to writing clubs and got good feedback. I took it to writing retreats and got good feedback from even more serious writers. I entered it into — and won — a mentorship with an established writer, John Clanchy, who was ever bit as wonderful as a mentor as you could wish for.

But I didn't get beyond about 30% of the novel, despite an enormous amount of work.

Over time my work life became more mathematical and technical. And this is not necessarily antithetical to creative work, but under certain pressures and focuses it can be. And it was.

And I feel like I lost my creative drive for years. I lost my mentor as well. He recognized some of the fire had gone out in my writing. We drifted apart as I kept promising More Stuff Any Day Now. I had squandered an opportunity.

Over time, I crawled back to producing things like short fantasy stories inspired by songs by bands I liked. I wrote some little, half-finished interactive fiction games.

I did try a big scope, big ideas, big technical foundation project called The Day After (no relation to the film) to get my groove back. I took it very seriously, deepening my technical skills for it, and even commissioning art. It was just a one-man open-world 3D narrative RPG. No points for guessing how that turned out.

I had long ditched Chuck Palahniuk and my literary influences. I had lost touch with my mentor. Creatively I was adrift.

The Finisher

While I never really stopped playing around with creative projects, at some point in my late thirties I got my life together. I went to the gym. I bought new clothes. I found a girlfriend. She turned into my wife, and then mother to my children. I got a house and a thoroughly good job where I was still technical but also creative. I think I got all that intentionally, but I couldn't be sure.

It was about this time that I gave up trying to finish Breathe and The Day After. I was determined to make smaller projects and finish them. This brought me to my interactive fiction piece Hand Me Down, which I finished and it did well. It also brought me to this newsletter that I appear to keep writing, 35 editions in.

Finding your voice is often considered a young person's engagement. So is finding models and mentors. But I disagree. Every few years we shed our cells; the older, more damaged, less relevant ones. Every few years we should shed our influences and constraints.

I no longer yearn for that stealth one-man indie hit that accidentally makes me a billionaire, or at least be popular in literary circles. I just want to make cool, little things that do something interesting.

The world is currently obsessed with Large Language Models. The proffered global universal creator has ingested each and every thing its creators can get their hands on, and they have given it the voice of a bowl of porridge. Capable, but corporately-palatable to damn with faint praise.

I'm trying to do the opposite. I'm trying to carefully select who I listen to, seeking out unique voices. I want to take some of their wisdom and perspective, but not everything. And I want to grow to be someone alongside them, not be a usurper. I don't want to be the best. I just want to try to do what's best.

One of the recent voices I've been trying to learn from is the audio zine Venthuffer by Halstrick, a "reverie of the Steam Deck". I like the quiet confidence, tight script and positive outlook.

I'm still ambitious in my own projects and possibly bite off more than I can chew, but perhaps now at the level of eating a whole chicken rather than an entire elephant. I still like to layer and reference and pastiche and wander outside of the trammelled path. I'll likely overpack each creative work with too much, but hopefully only a little too much. I'll regularly evaluate my style and experiment with something new.

And in ten years I hope to course-correct yet again. And ten years after that. And ten years after that. Or as many as I'm blessed with, because I intend to keep creating until I can't.

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