Thinking offline
Limitation breeds creativity, friction begets thought
Somewhen in the summer of 2010, I remember discovering a piece of software called RPG Maker. I was a 10 year old running a bootleg version of Windows XP that a technician installed on the family computer to «make it go fast», my days were empty and I had enough of a command of English to browse the web and find a pirated and translated copy of RPG Maker XP, which the forums I lurked on described as the «best and most customisable version» of the software — apparently the recently released RPG Maker VX «had less scripts» and «looked worse», something I didn't really investigate for myself until much later.
This discovery quickly turned into one of the most creative periods of my life: like every other kid with a copy of RPG Maker and a limited familiarity with game design and especially JRPG design, I immediately started working on the biggest JRPG anyone has ever seen, cast every single friend of mine in the role of a boss, NPC, major or minor villain, ally, post-game secret encounter, or whatever else I could think of. This all very quickly collapsed under the realisation of just how much work developing a JRPG is and my unwillingness to actually put all that work in — I was just a bored 10 year old after all.
I've had many similar experiences, before and after that, with Pokémon ROM Hacking, other versions of RPG Maker, fanfiction websites, the Java programming language. And I even managed sometimes to choose and finish projects that were much more approachable, putting that creativity to proper, "public" use — like writing a short Kingdom Hearts fix-fic or making a simple Java calculator.
After a few years, this stopped. By this I don't mean to say I became wholly uncreative, but the careless, childish form of creativity where I was just constantly throwing stuff at the wall praying for something to stick was replaced by a more "controlled" form of creativity, one that involved careful planning, feasibility, timetables, and trying to schedule when I could create and what — poetry is maybe the only thing I still felt comfortable creating "on the go", wherever I was, at any time, for any reason, probably because of some romantic preconceptions about what poetry is even supposed to be.
And until a short time ago, I would've said that's simply how it goes: the flights of fancy of childhood leave space for a more reasoned, maybe even "higher" kind of creativity and thought, and the full schedule of an adult life leave you with not much time for creative pursuits, inherently limiting your output except for the occasional poem written in ink and whiskey like poems are supposed to. It's sad, but that's life.
Then I accidentally fixed the problem.
What creating looked like until High School
We're gonna go back to my childhood RPG Maker days for a second, just to see how the "development process" of my game looked like. By "development process" I obviously mean "the process by which I spawned and refined ideas to use as a starting point in an iterative process of actual development that never really happened", so what I'm gonna describe is not exactly a methodology that I'd ever suggest anyone try emulating, and that's probably part of the reason why I never sat down with it and properly analysed it with my adult eyes.
I had a notebook. I had an idea for the game. If it was a small idea, then I slapped it on the first 10 pages alongside a bunch of other small ideas. If it was a big idea, I chose a blank page and wrote it down and added drawings. If it was related to another idea, I went back to that idea's page and expanded it as if I was still writing it.
That's it. That's the whole process, and now you might be wondering if I just wrote about 650 words just to say «When I was a child I wrote stuff on a notebook». Well, kinda. The important part isn't the notebook: it's why I even used a notebook in the first place — after all, I was quite the tech savvy kid, what stopped me from using a Word doc, or a txt file, or literally any one of a billion other technologies meant to store text data and readily available to anyone with a computer and an internet modem?
The answer is deceptively simple, although it requires stepping out of the present for a bit: it's because to use a Word doc, or a text file, or anything else, you need to be in front of a computer, and most of the time I was not — I was out of the house, playing with friends, going to school, just walking around the neighbourhood because I didn't really wanna stay in my room doing nothing. And this means I had to jot down my ideas, keep them in my notebook and in my mind, and then spend between one and twelve hours waiting for the moment I'd be actually in front of a PC to check if it's doable, how to do it, look up anything that might've come to mind around the idea, et cetera.
This was a bit of a necessity: I had one computer, and it was at my desk, in my room, so whenever I was out the house I couldn't access it, and I would've found the idea of only having ideas and thinking hard about them when I happened to be in front of the computer and had nothing else to do really dumb given that could've easily meant maybe working on the game 1 hour every 2 days during the school year. So I got a notebook, and tried to arrive in front of the computer full of stuff ready to be categorised, organised, looked up, studied, dissected, attempted and many other verbs that accept "stuff" as a direct object.
What creating looked like until last year
For all I've been saying about the notebook not being the important part, turns out for the 10 years of my "creative drought" — as I said, I'm calling it a drought improperly, but "period where I still produced many thoughts and ideas but not as many as I would've liked or expected given my past record" sounds terrible — the notebook had been the only part retained from this childhood process, although often digitally.
This is how having an idea looked like before Liechtenstein legalised gay marriage:
- I had a thought
- Can I act on it immediately? Act on it
- Can I not act on it immediately? Jot it down and identify when I can act on it or move into a zettelkasten or look it up or whatever, don't think about it until then
In all honesty it's not a terrible system. And it's probably what 99% of the human population settles into because it's pretty much a description of what the verb "to postpone" means.
The goal of this was opposite to how creativity worked when I was a child: I was practicing "Inbox Zero" [1] on my mind: new thoughts go in the inbox, they get handled immediately, then you forget about them. It means that if I'm working on something and I have an idea about something else, it doesn't just get filed for «I'll keep going as soon as I can» purposes, it gets moved into the «This is an idea about writing a short story, I'll think about it during the scheduled Thinking About Writing A Short Story» timeslot.
The reason I didn't really notice that this was the problem is that this is a very logical and reasonable system to have when you can in fact dedicate the appropriate time to everything you want to do in front of an electronic device — since I didn't have the limitations on physical access to a computer that characterised my childhood, it made perfect sense to say «let's postpone thinking about writing until I actually have access to a text editor and Google», or, when a question popped up, to immediately look up stuff on my phone, jot down the answer somewhere or send myself a link, and then forget about it until I actually properly needed it.
The issue with this is that, to simplify, the time when I can work on something is not guaranteed to be the time when I'm actually having ideas about that something. Looking at a notebook with a bunch of ideas half-scribbled on it doesn't do much to bring me back to the mental state I had back when I had the ideas themselves, which means I might sit at my PC intending to finally get to work on my short story just for me to get blank page syndrome instead, and the amount of stuff I have available to jog my memory was minimised by design!
What happened to fix it?
Earlier this year, I decided to try and opt-out of much of modern internet-based culture, not because of some hipster obsession with old tech but because I felt like I was getting my time stolen for no reason by platforms and tools I mostly don't like. This means, among other things:
- that my smartphone turned into what amounts to a brick with access to the national digital ID application, greatly reducing my need to have it with me or take it out of my bag;
- many workflows for which I used online or digital platforms just because it sounded cool when I signed up for them years ago were turned back offline, greatly reducing the time I am in front of my own PC — which as a programmer is often the last thing I want to see after 8 hours in front of someone else's PC anyway.
You might see where I'm going with this: I ended up taking on the same limitations as when I was 10 regarding computer access and time, and accidentally stumbled back onto the same patterns for idea management that I had spontaneously developed back then — and when I say accidentally, I mean it: I haven't for a second stopped to reason about it before realising I was back walking around the grocery store thinking of background happenings for my TTRPG campaign.
Obviously, I'm still hindered by the fact I now have an actual busy adult life where I can't exactly write a novel while working my day job, but even just allowing myself to keep thinking about it during my breaks has done wonders for my creativity.
All this might not come as a surprise to many: after all, after the fact, the writing had been on the door since I was a child, and even the act of getting away from the computer to reason about a problem — something I've done often at work, to great effect — is fundamentally exploiting these same principles. But I feel like, no matter how ridiculously obvious it sounds afterwards, this is an epiphany one has to "try out on themselves": I myself hadn't even realised the shift from "thinking all the time" to "thinking to schedule more thinking" happened until the circumstances forced me to undo it, and instead operated under the assumption that I was in fact thinking about stuff all the time and just properly handling all the thoughts.
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