For all the things I watch or read about creators at work on the internet, I see little about creators themselves. The linked video is a year old and mostly on the mark — particularly this insight that creators are not expected to create "content" on Youtube, but "ad space." This is old news to a journalist like me, however, who learned in university that articles in newspapers have been there to create ad space since the 17th century. But Youtube is new and glitzy, and teenage creators don't have some old hand cold selling advertising on the phone to tell them what's what, like I did. All content is for the purpose of creating space for ads. That's the reason "public material" was invented.
It's no mystery here that I began playing D&D a bit more than 44 years ago ... but more importantly, I began working on my game at nearly the same time. Less than four months after my introduction, I had an idea for a game world and had convinced some fellow players, and friends who had never played the game, to give it a try. I don't know what calendar day I launched the world; I'd guess about a month after I'd gotten the D&D books for Christmas of '79. That is, sometime in the last week, 44 years ago.
Until 2008, all of 28 years, all the time spent in building and creating my world was done alone, with the exception that my players would see evidence from week to week of things I sought to introduce. In creator terms, it's something like a sincere group of musicians with ten years experience of playing together, who haven't yet published their first album for a record company. All that while, there's plenty of time to test things on audiences, change lyrics, change the bridge, practice getting it right and building a deep familiarity with the chords and colouratura of each piece. And there's time to write a lot of pieces, since constant touring and press junkets don't exist to get in the way of being a musician.
Which is why, as most know, the second album is rarely as good as the first. There's less time. There's all this fame in the way. There's the total uprooting of the musician's lifestyle to this other thing. There are fifty voices having a say beyond the band members. It takes someone who's either willing to fight every minute for the integrity of their vision, or be willing to say "fuck all of you" and walk away from money, fame, glamour and fans, knowing that in the long run their talent will pay off despite the temporary loss of these things. The greatest musicians, writers, designers and other creators are those with the strength to do one or the other — take on the industry and win, or do it without the industry.
This is not most people. Most people with talent will compromise; and nearly all of those without talent can talk animatedly about how fast they'd compromise, if only they got the chance. This latter describes nearly every person on youtube or any other creative platform. Because they don't have content to create, they spend years searching sites that might tell them what content they might create if only it would make them rich and "happy." What they're not doing is "creating," because they haven't anything to create.
To attain the top 1% of youtube creators, the cherished 610 thousand channel owners in the whole world, we need 56 followers who regularly follow our videos and watch them to the end. This requires a very minimal skill set. One has to be able to turn on a computer, sit in front of it, use a simple program that can be bought, and talk about something moderately popular for 10 to 20 minutes, three times a week. There are 61 million creators on youtube. In front of an audience of 2.7 billion. There are 44 watchers for every creator. It takes only the least bit of resilience to get our 44 watchers watching ... and yet only 1% of all would-be creators can do that.
None of this describes me. I didn't work on my game world for 28 years with the expectation of a musician. There was no rich moneyed company by which I could ever be "discovered." When I read the Dragon magazine in my teens, I thought the writing was shit, I thought the approach to D&D was shit, I thought the people involved were amateur writers who would never amount to anything. And as writers, except pitching to their own audience, that's all they ever were. None rose to the status of Leiber, Anderson, Anthony or even Asprin, much less Tolkein. None of the artists achieved anything. Neither have I, obviously, but for fuck's sake, when I measure myself against a "creator," I'm self-aware enough to measure myself against Zelazny or at the very least Pratchett ... NOT fucking Arneson. Jeebus. I may be just another of the D&D hacks out here, but as least I know it. I'm not here writing eulogies for so-called "legendary" game designer Jennell Jaquays.
Forgive me if I haven't got cares to give about people who have had zero influence on my work or my thinking process.
I attribute my "success," as it were, as I have more than most on Patreon, to my disregard of success as a goal. It's something I'd like to have. It's something I think I deserve to have ... but I don't have it because it's not a "goal." It's not something I'm aiming to achieve and it never has been. For reasons that make no sense to most people, I'm trying to make a world here — the best possible game world I can create, with the best possible rules, and the best possible tools to make it go. It happens that a lot of things I've learned how to do, and things I've happened to create, are things that other people find worth seeing or having. These are things they haven't figured out how to create themselves. Having these things gives them an opportunity to have a better world, with better rules and tools.
My readers aren't going — I should gawddamned hope — to stand out in the rain at some vigil upon my death, because they and I don't give a rat's crap about my halo effect. When I die, the spigot gets turned off. That's the only thing to feel sad about. Chances are, I'm going to weaken and be unable to do what I'm doing now long before I actually die, just as happens to nearly every creator. It's a pity that Chita Rivera died on Tuesday, without much fanfare I notice, but it's not like she was in the middle of making of film or anything. Carl Weathers died too, day before yesterday. I'm sure they'll be missed sincerely by their families. The rest of us are entitled to a feeling like, "Gee, I remember watching them," and that's about it. With the one who says,"I heard this and I am soooo saddened by it," it's more selfishness than sadness. But I digress.
Now and then, I've got to back away from writing blog posts because this isn't getting me anywhere. Just now, I'm exercising some 400+ minutes a week — though gently, very gently. I get in about 90 minutes of floor stretching and 330 minutes of walking, most of the latter on a treadmill that we bought for ourselves a year ago because Tamara needed a firm, reliable surface to walk on. Calves and thighs are toughening up, I'm shedding a little weight and I'm in a state of calm tiredness and moderate sweating that awakes in brief hot flashes, mostly at night when I'm sleeping. Blood pressure is steady at 120/80, heart rate is 65-66, I'm eating less and not doing too bad.
When I'm too tired to work on this — because, frankly, wanting to be both accurate and interesting is more important to me than getting it done — I spend bits of time here and there working on mapping the Balkans. I got interested in resurrecting the map blog because I found I needed some kind of thing to pass the time that felt moderately robotic and yet interesting enough to get my head out of the Guide occasionally. My partner told me to "smile" the other day, because I haven't for awhile. It's two weeks into my work-out plan (with the kidney foundation being quite supportive, I should say), and between that and the Guide I admit I've been fairly grim. There's nothing for it. On a good day I get three quarters of a page of new-written material done, or a full page of editing done, between other commitments and the limitations of my energy supply. So when I have enough gumption to distract myself, I work on maps.
When I haven't got the mental energy for those, I drift into some mild problem-solving game like a jigsaw puzzle or Oxygen Not Included, or I drive in EuroTruck Simulator 2, or Two-Point Hospital or whatever, while listening to a movie or music. This is just waste time, honestly. But I'm the sort of person who can't just sit and stare. If I do that, then I start thinking about what I'm not doing; and if I'm not doing the Guide, and thinking about it, this doesn't encourage me. It fact, it makes me quite aware of how BIG the damn thing is, and how STUPID a person has to be to start a project like this, and how it's still an unbelievable time before it's going to be done ...
This doesn't push me towards doing it, it pushes me away. I've learned these last ten years that this is a sort of self-preservation thing; that as homo sapiens, spending too much time doing something without an expected yield in the short term is a great way to die of starvation in the savanna. To get the Guide done, I have to trick my animal brain into thinking I'm doing other needful things. Then, at some point, playing a game or making a map, I have a thought that goes, "Why am I wasting time with this drivelling shit when I could be working on the Guide?" Then I close everything and work on the Guide. It's quite a reliable technique, even if it does involve putting my animal brain to sleep while sneaking up on my ego with a dagger.
Being creative is about getting something done. It's not about making money, or becoming famous, or winning approval or respect. Those who succeed at it are those who want to get things done. If the thing getting done is popular, all the better. If the success gets in the way of getting the thing done, well, see the success for what it is, kick it to the curb if need be, and get it done. Because getting it done is all that matters.
For people with nothing to do, who want to have youtube channels or blogs, well of course they're never going to achieve anything. Because from the start, they've never had anything to do.
