Why Create?

Goal: To identify what we want out of our creativity, out of LIS10, and to define some measurable criteria to keep us on the right track.

This is the third and final part of our introduction to Live Interactive Storytelling, next time we'll start getting into more pragmatics and specifics! I know these abstract and fundamental discussions can seem unusual at first, but they're well worth considering to improve our enjoyment and creativity in the long run.

We started by assessing TTRPGs from a fan's perspective, then from the stranger's, and now we're leaving TTRPGs behind and  individually defining our own LIS10 goals!

Knowing yourself, identifying why you actually want to do something isn't an easy thing.
So this month we're going to turn inward and probe at that creative fire, stoke it a little, and come to understand ourselves a little better.

Separating The Thing

Let's start with an easy assumption, that you want to make a thing.

Whether that's a film, a video game, a world, or a TTRPG campaign, or you can't even put a label on it - you just have a fire inside to make... something... so don't worry if you're not certain, that flexibility may make this process easier for you!

It's easy for us to focus on the finished product, it's the end goal, so naturally many of our upcoming lessons will be targeted in this direction. But to you, the creator, that final piece of art is going to have a distinct personal meaning that won't ever be apparent to anyone else. From the journey you took to get there, to invisible decisions and compromises you see every time you look at it.

Your perception of this "thing" will never be as simple as it is to an outsider, your reward is not limited to "having made a movie", maybe you will feel the satisfaction and camaraderie of overcoming some unforeseen disaster in the middle of a freezing night, you'll have pride in a clothing design everyone told you was silly actually looking amazing, or your satisfaction is coming from achieving a much greater looking result than your budget should have allowed.

These feelings, these notes of satisfaction, are what we want to search for, because they are what're going to keep us feeling enthusiastic and rewarded in our creative endeavours.

Who Is It For?

There's a distinction between moments of satisfaction that we discover in the process along the way, like an untapped passion for crisp sound design, and those deep-seated internal desires that are bespoke to us and not a single creative process, like a warm joy when surrounded by friends and laughter.  

We want to focus on finding the latter, what are those creative drivers hidden inside you that you mightn't be aware of? 

A good place to start this search is by taking the creative "thing" you want to make and questioning it, starting with the "Who". Who are you making it for?

This isn't to probe you for some sense of greater good, activism, or deeper message - making a game to spread awareness and save the world - we want to hone in on the source of your fulfilment, your spark.

How easy is it to answer the "Who", and are you even being honest with yourself? Are you really sculpting because it's what you want to be doing? There is no one answer more correct than any other, maybe you only create for rent money, but ideally on some level you should be creating for yourself.

Why This?

Let's leave the "Who" alone and try a more confrontational approach:

Why do you want this?
Why do you want to tell a story?
Why Create?

If it's a TTRPG, why do you want to sit around a table with half a dozen people each week. If it's an Animation, why do you want to sit at a computer for tens of thousands of hours?

The only goal here is honesty with yourself, these aren't easy questions, and the unfortunate reality is our gut reaction to being asked "Why" is often far from the truth. Maybe we're a little defensive, or there's an answer we think we should be giving.

"I want to leave my mark."
"I want to shine a light onto something I experienced."
"I just like to draw, I dunno, I don't care what it is."
"I saw Star Wars and knew I had to make something like that."

All fair, valid answers, but are they the most honest expression of "Why"?

In Search of Clarity

Once you can identify what actually is driving you, gnawing at you, the clarity it affords will enable you to define goals that will maintain your interest and allow you to reap far greater satisfaction from the years you'll inevitably invest wandering down this road.

All the while providing you with the tools to more intelligently, and healthily, navigate around the burnout that ravages so many of the creative industries.

I can't provide the answer to your interest, your "Why", but I can arm you with some exercises, questions, and prompts to help you elicit something in the right direction.

And even if you think you know yourself, you might be surprised at what you manage to tease out of yourself. 

Actionable Advice

1. Challenge Your (Dis)Interests

A trap many of us fall into is thinking we know what we like - of course we know what we like!

Mick's Example:
I love fantasy books... do I?
Or do I just enjoy dialogue driven characters, or the immersion created from world-building, or the nostalgia of the escapism they provided in my childhood?

It's really hard to diagnose what matters most when dissecting something you enjoy. What makes ice-cream delicious? What's your favourite thing in your relationship? There're so many overlapping and compounding influences that led you to your conclusion "I like this." It's near-impossible to define... so where can we turn?

Instead, this exercise approaches from the opposite angle, I'm inviting you to dive into an experience with something you're expecting to find little-to-no enjoyment in. You'll find it's much easier to spot trees in a desert.

Maybe you don't like sports games, ska music, or beat poems, and there's no telling what your reasons are beyond the first impression, but by getting to know them from the inside out you'll gain a new perspective on why. Maybe it's something technical, maybe abstract, or even social or some meta-consideration.

Mick's Example:
I tried this out with Lovecraftian, Cosmic Horror, an unfamiliar quite vague concept to me that never seemed too appealing so I never really looked into it.
So I picked up some books, dove in, and continued even when I found... yeah I didn't like it at all.
But by continuing, and not simply rejecting it at face value, I came to a better understanding of what Lovecraft is, and I can now enunciate the specifics that push me away. The things I don't like, not that they're wrong, simply that they're things I would change, things that I value, and would do differently if I were writing Lovecraft to make it more appealing, and satisfying, to me.

And once you've shone that light on what you don't like, you can question that, you can dig in and figure the reverse, what is the thing you care about that's lacking here?

Mick's Example:
For me with Lovecraft, I found the hyperbolic writing style irksome - okay why?
Well it felt like there was no room for interpretation or character personalities... Everything is written as an absolute, and is impressive or horrific because the reader is simply told it is so, I felt there was no question or mystery.

I also found the time period very unwelcoming, early 20th century America, but metaphorically it's the precipice of transformation and discovery... but without  hope. While I prefer stories with a thread of grounded optimism, these felt flat for no reason other than the apathy of the writer.

All these opinions, right there, are pointing to motes of my creative passion.
Why do I create? What drives me? 

Well now I can tie down something more specific than "I like fantasy stories", I value creations that are "honest", "hopeful", and "intimately relatable".

2. Sabotage Your Creations

This next exercise may seem counterproductive, but hang in there!

I want you to take something you're already creating and intentionally change it for the worse... or just for no reason at all... try something, anything, you wouldn't normally do!

Tangent:
This is similar to some common advice for novice writers.
If you love SciFi, you want to write SciFi, you always practice writing SciFi... well that can be a huge mistake.
You need to broaden your palette, your experience within your craft, to forge out a perspective that enables you to actually write good stuff... good stuff that just so happens to be SciFi.
Otherwise you may find yourself unknowingly reciting the same SciFi standards of the last 80 years.

For our purposes now, this means that you can keep making what you're already going to make, but change it, twist it just a little. Branch out and write, create, stuff that... you don't think you'll like, or have any real interest in.

This can be as minor as changing elements of the characters, the setting, the medium in ways you didn't consider.

Do you always write character's inner thoughts before they speak?
Do you always design your games to be played with a controller?
Do you always draw faces on your cartoons to convey the emotional intent behind their words?

Go crazy with it, don't just change one thing, change a bunch and stick with them for a few days!

That main character you've been developing for over a year? They're now a different age, different gender, and have a huge change in their backstory.
Your world is a medieval land? Now it's a modern westernised beach town!
It's a gritty modern detective mystery? Not anymore, now it's on a space station flung far into the future.

If you immediately hate it, great! Stick with it for a week, and articulate why, or maybe you somehow come to prefer it.
That kind of strong reaction is an interesting and meaningful discovery about yourself, but so is indifference!
If you make a major change and it's neither better or worse, what's that telling you?

If you really wanted it to be set in warring Japan, but now it works just as well as a tale of gang violence in England... maybe it doesn't have reason enough to be either?

Mick's Example:
I tried this out most recently with a genre rewrite, what was a drama I reframed as horror, and found that it led to me really pushing and exaggerating the emotions and transparency of the character's intentions.

I was also suddenly giving every interaction between characters far more consideration and tension. There were no more purely calm, civil conversations anymore, everything became far more focused on the audience excitement, and predicting their engagement and foresight for every moment.
One one hand this made me more aware of my own genre biases towards horror, but it also gave me... permission(?)... in a way to be more expressive with dramatic characters in a dark moment.

To apply this to my "Why", I think it highlights that a directness of communication with the audience is key to me. It's not about the words, action, or a messages, what I value is creating moments of absolute connection and resonant empathy distinct from any of those abstractions.

3. Spontaneous Collaboration

So many creative disciplines are isolating, and even those that are surrounded by other creatives, they are creatives within the same niche or discipline. You'll be a model-marker in a warehouse of model-makers, an environment artist in an open-plan-maze surrounded by other game artists.

Branch out, and seek opportunities to soak in the ambience of other creative minds that are very different to your own.

LIS10 is an ideal means to an end here, and of course as an out-of-the-box hobby for creative friends something like a card, board, or tabletop game is a great chance to have creative experiences with others.

But there are a few more ways we can go about this.

Present your story to others, not as a pitch, but as a brief interactive moment. Not in the framing of asking for advice or feedback, you're simply painting a scene and giving them agency as if they're a character in your world.

Maybe this is a moment that's not up for debate, you already know your character is going to act the exact way as you wrote months ago, but... when thrown into that scenario, what would someone else creative come up with?

When their answer is different than your own, and it will be wildly different, think it through. Is it because of something intrinsic to the character, or something that speaks more personally to you and your preferences?

Even if they have no response, the simple exercise of forcing yourself to communicate this story, this universe, you've been creating with just a few sentences can be staggeringly confronting. How well can you do that? What techniques, emotions, set pieces, are so meaningful to you that they get included in how you describe this moment to others?

Worksheet

The purpose of the worksheets accompanying each Lesson is to provide another pathway of reflection and creative discovery.

This is not homework, it's not a quiz, and it shouldn't be seen as a hassle.

I've always found that I learnt more from something I could approach, and interface with, in multiple ways. If you just read through a LIS10 lesson, or watch one of the videos, maybe that speaks to you, or maybe you find it confusing or even that that particular one irrelevant to you.

The worksheets are simply an alternative way of prompting you to find something meaningful, something worthwhile, from a lesson that you can use to grow from.

Maybe that's something completely disconnected from the lesson itself, there are no right answers here, this is your journey.