About Creativity

An Interview with National Novel Writing Month's Chris Baty

2009-05-14T15:45:14Z

How does National Novel Writing Month define a novel?

We define a novel as a minimum of fifty thousand words of fiction. Which is just kind of a ridiculous definition, but it creates a sense of structure, and the boundaries of the game are set. That's about as close as we want to get to coming up with a definition for it. Leaving it malleable and open fits in well with the idea that, really, what we want to do is be sort of a creative kick in the pants for everybody.

We get a lot of emails saying, "I'm doing X. Am I allowed to do that in your contest?" And the answer's usually, "Well, as the official keeper of the Great Rule Book of Month-Long Creativity Escapades, the answer is no, but as somebody who understands the joys of making stuff, we're gonna pretend we didn't get this email, and you just go about your business." [laughs]

What do you think it says that one hundred and twenty thousand people signed on to write a novel last November?

There's a profound love of the book, and I think that that hasn't changed. There's some absolute magic in these stories bound and placed on pages, whether digital or paper. The idea of creating this world that you, as the originator of the world, lose yourself in first, and then subsequently, you can share that pathway into this realm with others -- both creating and sharing are incredibly enriching things. There's nothing quite like handing somebody this brick of paper that they can step into and meet people and smell things and see things. It's an act of alchemy, really....

I think also, fundamentally, not many of us are lucky enough to have [a job] where we invent and we dream and we conjure. And the idea of spending thirty days exploring the outer limits of our imagination is appealing, whether that's writing a novel or a script or recording a record. Having that time period where, "It's going to start this day and end that day, and in between, this creative project that tends to flow to the very bottom of my lifetime to-do list is going to be at the very top, and I'm going to orient my life around this project rather than vice versa" -- that's deeply appealing to people who have very busy lives.

So even if there's not necessarily a reader at the other end of the month, people just want that experience?

Right. It feels good. It pokes your brain in ways and places your brain's not otherwise poked. It's a lot like playing a sport in that you're competing against yourself and you have the focus and momentum that only comes when you have this set of boundaries.

What have you found helps people make it all through?

[Your NaNoWriMo novel] isn't something you're likely to get paid for, so it's very hard to make it a priority. One of the ways you can help yourself make it a priority is the deadline. Another way is to let as many people as possible know that you're on this adventure and they should hold your feet to the fire....

We have regional chapters in about five hundred cities around the world now where almost every night of the week [during that month] you can go into a Starbucks and there'll be other National Novel Writing Month participants there writing, and those people are going to say, "Hey Dan, how's your word count?" And then there are online check-ins, and you have this very public author profile that has a word-count bar on it. As you write, you add to that number, the bar grows, and that's a little bit of razzle dazzle to help the author feel good, but ultimately, it's also there for their cheerleaders to see....

The big lesson for any sustained creative activity is that there'll be ups and downs. There'll be parts where you feel like you're king of the world and that you should've been doing this your whole life. And there'll be times when you just feel like the biggest hack that's ever lived, and all you want to do is bury your laptop in the backyard and pretend that the whole thing had never even started. And everybody goes through that whether they're a Nobel Prize-winning author or this is their first book and they're just feeling their way through it.

If you don't have some sense of what will happen if you quit that project, if there's not this fear of something, it's just so easy to let go of it and think, "I'll try it again next year" or "This isn't the right story." In National Novel Writing Month, I feel like every story is the right story, that there are really no wrong turns in this month-long experiment in creative writing, all books are good books, and all words are good words.

How does community help?

When you write with a partner -- not that you're sharing the work but you're each doing individual works -- it absolutely increases the likelihood of you both finishing. We have a lot of families that do NaNoWriMo together, and they're basically shoe-ins for "wins" because they're constantly comparing word counts: "I have 5,300 words." "Oh crap, I have 3,200 words -- and the last thing I'm gonna do is let my mother beat me at this." "Alright, I'm gonna stay up late tonight. I'm tired but I'm gonna do this" -- just so that in the morning you can say, "I have 5,400 words."

In that way, they're taking this absolutely terrifying creative undertaking of writing a novel in a month and breaking it down into this series of competitive leaps. That helps unspook people who tend to be spooked by this idea that a novel should be great on the first draft, and if the sentences are clunky they shouldn't be doing this. It gets them focused on quantity instead of quality, which in the case of a first draft is really all you should be thinking about -- this notion of creating this block of words that you can then later go back and revise and start fine-tuning into a more cohesive work.

Is that also intended to relax people into a state where they can let loose?

Yeah, and it really does. Part of National Novel Writing Month's success, the reason so
many people keep doing it, is that it's an event. I didn't study English in college. I always loved books. I loved writing. But I'm an anthropology major, and I didn't come at this from the position of an aspiring novelist who really was frustrated by the realities in the publishing market so I made my own world. It was really just like, "Man, books are so cool, and wouldn't it be cool to write a book?" And because of that, there isn't this unnecessary stultifying reverence for the literary art form.

I see novels as an enormous, exciting puzzle or something similar to the local middle school basketball court where you can go up on Saturday with your friends and have a great day losing yourself in this game and the thrill of competition. Novel writing is the best video game on the planet, one that requires so many different aspects of your imagination and so many different aspects of your life management skills. It really takes a lot of focus and discipline. The creative side of it is just one component.

What role does the website play?

Having a site that people can visit and update their word counts helps keep the bond to the book high and helps them continue to write. On every page of the site now, you can update your word count. A novel is such a miasma of ideas and prose and inspiration, it's such an indefinite thing, and when you can attach metrics to your progress -- nail it down in terms of words and easily feed that count into the machine and have the machine recognize it and start building that progress graph that shows that you're doing it -- you're halfway there; you're three-quarters of the way there! I think it really does increase the commitment to the pursuit and help people see it through to the end.

When you're revising your rough draft during the year, are there any techniques from NaNoWriMo that you try to apply?

Deadlines are an essential carryover. What I've found in revision is that it always takes about ten times as long as you think it will. At first, I would say, "I'm going to have this draft done by April 15, and I'll give it to you then." After blowing so many April 15 deadlines, I think what you need to do is try to keep it within a ballpark. Break it down into phases -- that's a really helpful carryover from National Novel Writing Month.
For me, making sense of what I've written in that month is usually a process of stepping back. I tend to then do a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of the whole book and make sure that the electricity is flowing through each [chapter] and the characters are in the right places and the settings are kind of a dynamic mix so they're not all taking place indoors in somebody's bedroom or something.

Where did the idea for creating a student version of NaNoWriMo come from?

It started back in 2004 with teachers at the elementary, middle, and high school level who had done NaNoWriMo themselves and thought, "Is there some way I can bring this into my classroom, some kind of hands-on approach to creative writing that doesn't feel too stilted, that's going to be engaging to kids?"...

We have kits with a poster for the classroom and a progress chart that has slots for all the kids' names, and we send them stickers. They set their own word-count goals -- for a teenage classroom, it might be fifty thousand words, but for second graders it might be one thousand words. And it can be per kid or per group.... You fill the progress chart up with stickers as you go that spell out NaNoWriMo, and then there's a gold star, and once you've filled up your graph, you get this really exciting candy-colored button that says "Novelist" on it and has some lighting bolts.

And just this idea of writing becoming like play -- something you want to beat your friends at -- it helps them lower their reservations about, "Ugh, I'm doing school work," or "Oh god, I hate writing." Instead, it's like, "I'm beating Joseph," "My word count is so far above Latricia's; you are so going down." It's been amazing.

We have a reading for Bay Area classrooms at a bookstore every year with first graders getting up and reading their stories about the Halloween Monkey. These kids are up to my knee, and we bend the microphone down, and that experience of having created something and going to a reading in a bookstore with a group of rapt adults standing around them -- that really changes their sense of what it means to be creative and who gets to be creative.

There's also an April event for scriptwriters -- how does that differ from NaNoWriMo?

The first year that we did Script Frenzy, it was a really interesting challenge. Everybody can have a novel that they're kicking around. Everybody's read novels and can understand the form. But scripts -- we've seen movies and TV shows, but nobody knows what the blueprint of those look like. And that's what a script is -- it's a blueprint for the version that gets staged or filmed. So there was a fair amount of education that had to take place.... It was an interesting and also difficult thing for us to do because for the first time, we were getting into the idea of how to do this, which is something we'd always avoided.

Instruction, as opposed to being in the creative-kick-in-the-pants business?

Exactly. Craft rather than endurance. But I think you need that with script writing. And it turned out, actually, that the formatting takes about two seconds. There's free open source software called Celtx that anybody can download that makes it a snap.
That first year, when I took part and wrote a script, it was that same "Eureka!" moment -- that this is so much fun, especially coming from a novel-writing perspective where you have room for very flabby prose, the economical nature of scripts helped me understand dialogue in a way that I never had before. Everything has to lead to the next thing. You can't just have those circular conversations that are kind of charming because characters are funny. It needs to go someplace. And there are real joys there.

But because scriptwriting is such a professionalized thing, and you can sell a script and make a pretty good amount of money, it's a much more regulated marketplace. There aren't as many people thinking, "I write movies for fun." It's more like, "I'm writing a movie because I want to sell it and have Jean-Claude Van Damme star in it."

When we first introduced the idea, the existing script-writing community said, "This is stupid. There are no celebrity judges here. This is not going help me get a deal. Why would I want to do this?" This will be our third year, and we're now the largest script-writing event in the world. More and more everyday people who love movies and love plays are starting to have that same realization that NaNoWriMo participants had -- that you can do this, and it feels great to do this. And that's been exciting -- slowly making inroads into something that was very professionalized and cloistered in a way.

Where would you like this all to lead 15, 20 years from now?

For us, organizationally, our question is what other realms can we open up with this idea of community, a deadline, and some encouragement? If we can get one hundred and twenty thousand adults to write a novel in a month, and twenty-two thousand kids and teens in five hundred classrooms around the world to try the same project, and they actually do it and have a great time doing it, and it changes their relationship to writing and literature, what else can we do with that idea?

At the end of NaNoWriMo every year, we run this event called, "The Year of Big, Fun, Scary Adventures." NaNoWriMo nicely fades out in December, which is when you start thinking about the next year and New Year's resolutions. So I challenge everybody to come up with one thing in their life that they've long wanted to do but have always been a little bit intimidated by and maybe a little bit scared of -- it could be going back to school and getting another degree or starting a business or coming out to your parents. Just something that has been nagging at you -- and to publicly post that on the NaNoWriMo website in that "Big, Fun, Scary Adventure" forum and then spend a year going after it and keeping everybody up to date.

It's up to you to pick whatever your project is, but then there is that sense of accountability in community and then if you do it, we make a certificate for you that's like the NaNoWriMo winner certificate that you download can put your name on, and there's a little web badge. And it's kind of amazing, the things that people do and all they really needed was the sense of a public declaration. You give people a deadline and a community and miracles really happen every time.

You started this out with a circle of friends. Was there a moment when you realized you'd hit on something big?

I think that was the third year, where we went from one hundred and forty participants, most of whom I knew or were friends of friends, to five thousand participants, who I didn't know and who almost gave me a nervous breakdown [laughs] because I really wasn't ready to have five thousand participants on this website where signups weren't automated.

You had to send me an email and I would hand-post your name in alphabetical order on the HTML page, and I would personally send you a welcome email and then send you an invitation to join the Yahoo! club that functioned as our message board. The plan was, these people would email me their word counts three times over the course of the month and I would post it on their behalf and move the progress bar for them. And when you have suddenly five thousand people, just getting them signed up for the event ended up taking about a week, and having friends on board and doing this almost twenty hours a day.

[It] was really a moment of disbelief and shock for me. I just kept thinking that these people don't realize this is a contest without prizes [laughs]. Or that winning manuscripts get thrown away unread. I mean, that's not a great way to run a writing contest. And the idea that five thousand people would want to do this just for the sake of doing it really was an ah-ha moment. It didn't make sense to me except for the fact that I had seen that it works -- that this actually is a reasonable way to write a novel.
That year, in the midst of all of that, I had this surreal moment of listening to NPR -- this was around November 3 -- and hearing the sonorous NPR desk say, "November is National Novel Writing Month, and our correspondent...." and I did this double take at the stereo.

You just happened to be listening?

I had no idea it was going to happen. There was an LA correspondent who was taking part in NaNoWriMo and using voice recognition software -- it was this humorous piece about using voice recognition software. And just to hear Corey Flintoff or whoever it was say this, it was definitely a Fantasia moment where I was like, "Oh god, this thing has come alive."

The idea of naming it "National Novel Writing Month" was such a preposterous in-joke when it started. There were twenty of us. We were in the Bay Area. We clearly weren't national. We didn't know what we were doing on the novel-writing front. I didn't know if we were going to last the month [laughs]. It was just this overcaffeinated idea.

If you'd named it, "my pals are writing a novel together for thirty days" it might not have taken off the same way.

Overly ambitious naming may be key to any group creative undertaking.

By that third year, we were international with a bullet. Seeing that idea jump national boundaries was also exhilarating and totally terrifying -- "Oh God, they're doing this in Germany and they're doing this in France and in China".... It was one of those moments of just incomprehension at the way the idea had spread.

And I think the reason it spread is just because we do need a little bit of structure. And we need somebody to tell us it's time. And I think that's really what National Novel Writing Month's message is: There's a book out there that the world is waiting for you to write. And now is the time to write it.

Moving Day and a Tour of the New Digs

2009-04-20T23:50:01Z

Hi,
If you've visited this site before, you may have noticed a few changes of late. Here's a quick tour of the digs:

You can browse interviews by category, using the menu across the top of the page. You can also use the drop-down menu in the right column to see a complete list of interviews.
We've added a Community Project Log over in that right column as well, where we're hoping you'll share what you're working on. Below that you'll find a Tip (And Technique) Jar, where we're hoping you'll let us know what works for (or thwarts) you in your own creative adventures. Just below that's a Twitter feed with the latest posts from @aboutcreativity, where I'll be keeping track of new developments in the ever-morphing create-o-sphere.
We've deployed sophisticated "ShareThis" technology with each article to help you take that urge you may occasionally feel to share an article with a pal, and turn it into action.
Click on the Bios links to learn more about each artist. Right next to "Bios," you'll find a spot to add article comments.

Big thanks to Chad Capellman, who did fantastic work bringing the new site to life (and whose web-work I enthusiastically recommend). We've got more tweaks and a few more features in the works so if you have any feedback on changes you'd like to see (or any questions about what's where), I'd love to hear from you at: dbrodnitz at gmail dot com.

Thanks for dropping by and diving in,
-Dan

BayCHI Presentation on Creativity, April 12

2009-04-13T19:57:53Z

Looking forward to presenting at BayCHI in Palo Alto this Tuesday with Micah Laaker. If you're not already familiar with BayCHI, here's a little background from their site:

BayCHI, the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI), brings together scholars, practitioners, and users to exchange ideas about computer-human interaction and about the design and evaluation of human interfaces.

Laaker, who leads User Experience for the Yahoo! Open Strategy Group, will be talking about designing your product as a platform. I'll be talking about creativity lessons learned (to date) from this interview series. I've had a lot of fun working on the presentation and it should be an interesting night, with Q&A and feats of strength. But mostly Q&A. Did I mention that it's free?

If you're in the South Bay drop on by and say hi.

Tip (and Technique) Jar

2009-03-27T19:14:27Z

What works for you? We're compiling a list of what people find helps them get inspired, stay all wooshed up, and most of, get creative work done. Add your thoughts to the comments below.

Your Tips Here

2009-03-27T18:32:08Z

Some instructions from Dan go here.

The Creative Beat

2009-03-27T17:12:48Z

Dan you need to put some information in here.

Community Project Log

2009-03-26T19:31:36Z

We're curious what folks visiting this site are up to -- let us know what project(s) you're working on in the comments below.

An Interview with the Exploratorium's Adam Tobin, Part 2

2009-01-24T01:32:41Z

Cecil Vortex: I read that you also create mechanical art. What's that work like?

Adam Tobin: After I sold the first toy company, I had a few larger-scale projects I'd always wanted to pursue. The first thing I wanted to make was a clock that told time with rolling marbles. I'd wanted to make it since I was a kid. And I started making it and ended up making a few other contraption-type pieces. It was just such a joy for me, after years of designing things to be mass produced to say, "I'm just going to make one, and I'm not as concerned about how you can make 10,000 of these." In essence, they were very large one-of-a-kind toys.

CV: Do you still work on those projects?

AT: I have a shop in the East Bay, and I still work on some of those concepts on the side. Though I have to say, for me, there was something about it that wasn't completely fulfilling in that they were more solo endeavors. One of the reasons I got back in the toy business, and now I'm at the Exploratorium, is that I do very much enjoy different people's perspectives.

Tobin's rolling-marbles clock

CV: From what we talked about before, it sounds like having other people involved is as important to you as having a singular vision driving the project.

AT: A lot of the people I most respect, I look at and I think, "Wow, they had a dual gift," like Jim Henson, for example. The Muppets were his singular vision, and yet, he was able to incorporate/allow/involve an entire ensemble into his vision. They had creativity coming from so many different places, and he was, in essence, orchestrating it. Not all of the great ideas were his. They didn't have to be. And yet he somehow tied it all together. I really admire both of those skills and try to work on both in myself.

CV: Henson created The Muppets, but we assume Frank Oz created "Grover" -- Grover wasn't made by six people.

AT: Right. You know, I just saw the guy who played "The Great Gonzo" at a Muppet colloquium the other night, and watching what he was able to do as an individual creative within the Jim Henson construct was just -- I mean, "Wow!"

He was showing old clips from The Muppets pilot and their promo trailer for [what had then been] the new Muppets show and Sesame Street. If you watch what they were doing, it was just so authentic. Even seeing him up there, watching the movies along with us and still laughing his ass off at what he'd done, you could just see him remembering not only how funny what they created was, but how much fun they'd had doing it.

CV: Jumping back to the toy business, what do you think makes a great toy great?

AT: First off, it has to work within established play patterns. Kids are a certain way and they have certain inclinations and ways they like playing with things. There are things they like to learn and ways they like to be active. And by and large, great toys don't try to get kids to do something that they're not inclined to do.

A simple example would be role-play. Kids like role-play. They like to dress up as things, they like to pretend to be things. They have wonderful imagination. And so if you can create toys that work within that, augment it, enhance it, then you've got a good product.

Another [factor] would be extended play value. Most toy companies will create something that's shiny on the surface and you play with it for a while, and then you're done with it. You know, the whole, "It's Christmas this year and landfill next year," phenomenon. That's not a good toy. A good toy has depth of play and great play value. It's accessible on the surface and attractive to play with so it's fun right off the bat without a massive learning curve, but should you decide to dive deeper, it will go as deep as you want to go; it will provide as much opportunity for you to be creative, to learn, to learn a skill set -- whatever it is that it's supposed to do.

A great example of that might be a yo-yo. A yo-yo goes up and down, up and down. Most people can get it fairly quickly. But then, should you want to keep going, you'll have masters at the yo-yo doing things that you could never conceive.

The third is, really, authenticity. That means -- and this is true for a lot of creativity -- that you created something that you, as the creator, think is cool. That seems to be a consistent ingredient to a great toy. You have marketing people say, "I think nine out of ten kids will like this," and that rarely is as neat as some crazy toy inventor that thinks, "This is the coolest thing ever," and other people think so, too.

CV: What's the best advice you've gotten over the years, or the advice you'd offer from your own experience, about the creative process?

AT: You have to allow it to be what it is; that's the first thing. You have to work within your own natural flow. You just can't change it dramatically. You can learn, and you should strive to learn, to maximize the upside of your tendencies and minimize the downside.

When I talk, for example, about myself being obsessive, the fact that I'm obsessive cuts both ways. If I try to say, "I'm going to be balanced in my creative approach," I'm just going to be creating inner turmoil. At the same time, I can't let it completely consume me. So, you know, people have to go with their own natural rhythm, but they have to recognize the parts of that that are productive and constructive and try to compartmentalize or minimize the parts that aren't. And given time, that can be done.

But you can't make someone who's a slow burn into an obsessive, or vice versa. Whatever wiring inside you allows you or compels you to be creative, a lot of that wiring ain't gonna change over the years.

An Interview with the Exploratorium's Adam Tobin, Part 1

2009-01-22T18:13:56Z

Cecil Vortex: Do you remember your first invention?

Adam Tobin: I started as an electronics tinkerer. I made a burglar alarm to keep my sister out of my room. I took an old car radio that had been abandoned from one of the old family cars and got inside it and wired up quadraphonic sound in my bedroom. I began making wooden toys when I was young as well, like whirligig and rolling marble toys.

CV: Were you raised in a family of inventors, or was it something you got into on your own?

AT: I don't know where it came from. My father can't pick up a hammer.... For some reason, with me, I was just a tinkerer from the get-go.

CV: How did your parents respond?

AT: They encouraged it -- it meant that things around the house might get fixed that otherwise wouldn't. I remember I was seven or eight years old and somehow I was the only one in the house that could fix our stove.

CV: What was wrong with it?

AT: It had something to do with the timer. You had to pop open the front of it and get in and tweak the timer. I don't know if that's how it was supposed to be or it got broken at some point, but I found the sweet spot and could make it work.

CV: How would you describe what you're doing now?

AT: I direct the Exhibit Development Group. If you're familiar with the Exploratorium, it's an incredibly unique and creative hands-on interactive museum. They call it "The Museum of Science, Art, and Human Perception." The developers are responsible for coming up with the ideas and fabricating all of the exhibits on the floor. That can range from simple demonstrations of scientific phenomenon to more complex multimedia immersive experiences.

These developers are a rare and special group of creative individuals. The breadth of their creative abilities never ceases to amaze me. Part of the credo of the place is that you pursue your own creative passion -- you come up with great ideas through personal exploration. A lot of places, you'll have someone come up with an idea, then that idea's passed on to a fabricator and they fabricate the core of the exhibit, then that's passed on to a designer, or vice versa. Here, the developer fills most of those roles in one person. So they're both the source of the idea and the fabricator of the exhibit.

CV: What do you think are the benefits of one person handling so much of the process?

AT: There are so many intangibles in trying to communicate what you're after or what makes something fun or cool or interesting and these handoffs are frequently where good ideas break down.... [Here], with both the creative direction and fabrication centered in one person, our developers are able to iterate and refine their ideas without any dilution of their vision or intent. Another important benefit is the ability for new ideas to come from hands-on experimentation. In other words, sometimes you have an idea and then prototype it, and other times you play with a loose concept or area of interest, and from that experimentation you discover an exciting new exhibit idea. "Do I have an idea and I make it? Or is the idea coming out because I'm cutting wood on the band saw?" It can work both ways because there isn't a rigid flow with one person doing one stage and then handing it off.

CV: With your own work, what helps keep ideas flowing?

AT: Environment's a big part of it -- the creative space I'm in. The people that I'm around have a big impact. I'm a very strange mix of needing to do everything my way, and needing to be surrounded by creative people with their own big ideas. Everything has to be in its right place, and it has to be clean. And at the same time, when I'm doing what I do, I make a profound mess.

Whatever else might be bugging me, whatever other background thinking -- anything else that I'm obsessing over -- it all has to be cleared away because I am, in large part, an obsessive creative. My creativity comes in intense spurts; once my mind is seized on something, it can't let go, and I'll work on it even to the neglect of my health.

But, you know, eventually I come out of it and there'll be a space where I'm not focusing as intensely. If you look at what I've done, you can see that -- there'll be these three-year spurts, and then a year or two off, and then a three-year spurt and then a couple of years off. That same pattern, like a fractal, can work on a micro level as well, where there'll be a 72-hour period of intensity and then a 24-hour period of comedown. Once an idea's in my head, I'll be almost physically vibrating until I can get to the shop and to a computer to be working it out. I really won't be able to think about anything else.

CV: Do those periods come unannounced or are there things you do to try and generate ideas?

AT: That's the million-dollar question. [You'd like to say] "Ready, ah-ha moment now!", but it just doesn't quite work that way. But that's exactly what you have to do in a world filled with real deadlines; imagine if you have a writing deadline, or I have a tradeshow deadline for unveiling a new toy, or an artist has a pending art installation. This paradox presents the very question that I've been focusing on, especially in the last several years -- how, especially within a group and within a budget, do you summon the muse?

I've done this in the past, where in the toy business, we came out with creative toys that stood out from everything else and they were authentic, creatively, and they had ah-ha moments, and we did it on time and on budget.... [When I came to the Exploratorium] I thought, "I'm going to write out a document about how we did it, and then that's how we're going to try and do it here." But when I read what I had written, it sounded so antiseptic and sterile. It sounded just like all of those creativity or startup business self-help books where they say, "These are the steps to creativity: Step 1: Create a Creative Environment, Step 2: Come up with all kinds of possible ideas, Step 3: Come up with the big idea!" And, you know, I don't know if I can swear in the interview, but everybody who's creative knows for the most part, that's bullshit. It doesn't work that way. And here I was writing that very thing.

CV: What did you try next?

AT: I returned to what had worked well for me in the past -- find a way to create a framework that best allows (if you'll allow me the oxymoron) structured, organic creative flow. For example, if you set up what seems to be a rigid structure for a six-month project where you say, "First stage: for the first two months I'm going to immerse myself in the content. Second stage: for the next two months I'm going to explore many possibilities in a rapid way. Third stage: for the final two months I'm now going to dive into the real thing," and you adhere to it as dogma, then you wouldn't get something wildly creative in the output. Or it would be harder. But if you use that as a framework and you say, "This is where I feel like I should be right now," and you don't eliminate other possibilities, it just becomes more of a conscious decision at the time where you should be moving from one stage of creativity to another. You can say, "I'm not ready right now," or, "We don't have the great thing yet -- the muse hasn't struck." And by being conscious of that decision, you're more likely to get something done on time. By not dogmatically sticking to that decision, you allow for further possibility of the muse striking.

CV: So the key was guidelines instead of rules?

AT: Exactly. Guidelines for flow. And if you set them up right, they shouldn't dictate creative process; they are a reflection of a natural creative process. Given a creative task, people may have different methodologies; one's going to go take a hike, one's going to go to another museum. You know, they're going to need to stimulate themselves without the feeling of pressure. They're going to need to play around. They're going to need to give themselves enough time to experiment. And they're going to need to give themselves enough distance from what they're doing to allow the muse to strike.

There's a great analogy for how I view this kind of creative process. I don't know if you ever read the Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

CV: Sure.

AT: There's a passage where he's talking about how you can fly. And the way he described it was, "You have to throw yourself at the ground and miss." That's the creative process. You have to throw yourself at the ground and miss, and that's how you fly. It's a combination of action and faith.

I see enough creatives that will wait around, wait around, wait around for the muse to strike, and you can wait a long time. And then you'll see others who are like, "I have to have it happen this way," and, you know, that kind of shuts the door in the muse's face. In other words, you have to keep trying, keep iterating, keep exploring, keep making decisions -- don't wait for the perfect moment, don't wait for the perfect idea to come to you. If you don't throw yourself at the ground, you'll never miss.

As I recall, another important aspect to successfully flying in The Hitchhiker's Guide, in order to miss the ground, something would have to distract you at just the right moment. And there were even people who would provide the service of giving you the appropriate distraction so you would miss the ground.

CV: What do you do to distract yourself?

AT: I'll work on something unrelated. If I'm in the shop and I know I need to solve a problem, then I'll take out a very simple something that I can work on that doesn't require a lot of planning or thinking, but simple execution. You know, something that broke a while back and I know I need to drill a hole and tackle it and fix it and then it's done. So there isn't a lot of, "Oh, my God, how am I going to do this?" It's just some mindless hands-on execution.

I'll get out of my environment and go to another place where I'm just stimulated. And generally, I try to do that in completely unrelated places. If I'm banging my head on a toy, I'm not going to go look at other toys because my mind is already saturated in that area. I'll go to a carnival or I'll go see a movie or I'll go hear music or something that's completely unrelated. And very frequently, I can find the ah-ha moments in those other places.

***
The interview continues in Part Two.

An Interview with Dana Reinhardt

2008-12-15T17:51:47Z

Do you have a writing routine you hold to?

I do. I try my best to stick to writing every workday. It's a bonus if I do any writing on a weekend. I try to write Monday through Friday as if I had a real job. My goal for each day can change but in general, my rule is that my workday's not done until I have three pages, which is roughly 1,000 words, maybe a little less. So it's somewhere in there. I generally don't let myself off the hook until I've done that. And sometimes I can do that in 40 minutes, and sometimes it takes me ten hours. But I try to have that done every single day.

Is there an outline you work off?

I don't work with outlines. I know a lot of people do, but I don't. I mean, I know where I'm headed, usually. Before each book so far that I've written, I know generally the arc of the story and how I want it to end. And sometimes I'll have certain things I have an idea that I want to have happen halfway through. But in general, for me, the fun about writing is finding out what happens between the beginning and the end of the story.

Do you try to get a first draft out and then go back and revise? Or do you tend to polish as you go?

I do a little bit of very minor polishing as I go. Generally, in the morning before I start my new pages, I'll read the pages I've written the day before and fix that up a bit. Sometimes I'll go back a little farther. But I try to just keep moving forward and get to the end.

Are there any tricks that help you be productive on those days when you're not feeling particularly inspired?

Well, I wouldn't say tricks, but I think that the reason I put myself on the schedule I do is so that I can't not produce on the days I don't feel inspired. I guess I don't really believe so much in the idea of waiting for inspiration. I think that that doesn't come until you're in the act of writing.

So it's about getting yourself into the process?

Yeah -- I think inspiration only comes in the middle of writing. I think thinking about writing doesn't work; writing works. And the act of writing is when the inspired moments come, I believe.

I've had a similar experience with scripts. Once you're 'in script,' things happen. Sitting outside the script, not so much.

Right.

How do you power your way through when it's hard to get something going?

There are days that are like that for whatever reason. Moments that are like that. Usually what I'll do is stop and take a walk. I have a dog, so that helps. And I'll take a walk around the block and try to think about how to get back in. There are moments in writing where you aren't quite sure what happens next, and sometimes you have to step away. But usually I won't let myself step away much more than one or two blocks. Then you just have to get back and do something.

Are there any tools you rely on to capture ideas?

Not really. I have a notebook, but I'd say for each of my books I barely even take notes. Sometimes I'll think of something -- a turn of a phrase or an idea that I'm not ready for yet, that feels like it should come later, and I'll jot that down. But there's very, very, very little that I write down like that. I have this kind of crazy theory, which probably is crazy, but -- and I guess this applies more to ideas for books I haven't written yet -- sometimes I'll have an idea and I'll think, "Wow, that's a great idea," but I don't write it down on the theory that if I don't remember it, it wasn't a good enough idea.

That's living on the edge.

Yeah, I don't know -- maybe that's just an excuse for the ultimate laziness, that I don't even want to write the idea down. But if I'm thinking about big book ideas, if it's good enough, it sticks around, and if it's not, that means I don't go back to it again mentally.

Do you ever worry about getting burned out?

I think everybody's got to feel that way with anything they do.

What do you do to keep things fresh?

I just try something that I think I can't do. I'm in a place right now with that. You know, the ultimate experience is sitting down to write your first book because [you think], "I don't know how to write a book. I can't do this." I found the experience of writing my first novel to be so exciting. It was the most fun time I've had writing so far. And I think a lot of that was just jumping into something that felt so undoable.

Why do you think you got through it?

It was in some ways the easiest experience I've had writing a book. And I think that's because I never really knew if anybody would ever read it, and that gave me a lot of freedom. I didn't second-guess things. I didn't wonder, "What's my editor going to think about that? What is one of my readers going to think?" I just wrote it, and I had no idea what the rules were about writing a book, and that was incredibly liberating. I'll never have that experience again because so far all the books I've written I've been under contract, so they now feel -- there's a different relationship.

When you're not writing, what do you do to help feed your creative side?

I feel my powers of observation now are -- I'm sort of in tune with them a lot more. Before I was spending my time writing novels, I wouldn't necessarily stop and really look at the person who caught my eye walking by me on the street. Now sometimes, if somebody catches my eye walking by me down the street, I might take something away from that moment that I use in a character I'm writing about. So I pick things up: a lyric from a song, the way something looks in a certain light, whatever it is. I feel like my time not spent writing is often just spent collecting images or bits and pieces of things that might work their way into a book.

And that helps keep that part of your brain vibrating?

It does.

I've read that you worked in the foster care system. Did that play a role in the kind of books you write?

I think every choice you make and everything you do influences your writing when you sit down to write. I love teenagers, I really do. I loved working with them, and I find everything they go through, everything they think sort of endlessly fascinating. Writing about that experience is something that I really enjoy. I haven't written about a kid in the foster care system, no, but, you know, it was just more exposure to the people I write for.

How do you stay in touch with today's young adults and how they view the world?

Well, I think that writing from the point of view of a teenager is -- there's nothing current, necessarily, about doing that. It's a universal experience. We've all been teenagers. I think growing up and coming of age is sort of timeless.

That said, kids, as readers, have no tolerance for inauthenticity, and they can smell [inauthentic] moments a mile away. So if you write about a piece of technology or music and you get it wrong, it's going to ruin the book for them. Those things I definitely have vetted with kids I know who will pick up details. You know, "Kids don't wear Doc Martens anymore" or, "That kind of guy wouldn't listen to that kind of music." Something happened in my second book where there are two characters who communicate only through instant messaging. It happened only a few times in the book. One of them is only a secondary character. But, you know, I've never in my life sent or received an instant message, so I literally didn't have the language to write that. So I wrote [the messages] and I gave them a friend who's sixteen, and she translated them for me.

That's great.

It was if I needed somebody to translate it into French. It was that different. But as far as the emotional side -- getting in the head of a character and the emotional reality, there's nothing that you need to stay current on for that.

Your work gets a lot of praise for the strength of your character's voices; how do you approach dialog?

I generally read out loud what I'm writing. That helps a lot, with dialog especially. When you hear yourself read it out loud, you can catch things that don't sound natural.

Are you reading aloud as you're writing those three pages a day?

No, I'll go back. I usually don't read out loud until a little bit later; maybe the next day or maybe even in the second draft. Most conversation I read out loud, or if I'm stuck writing something and it's a thorny paragraph or page.

Is there any advice you've gotten over the years that stands out, in terms of how to live a creative life and be creatively productive?

I have a friend -- this is a piece of advice I really like that really helps sometimes, especially in those moments where I'm thinking that what I'm writing is just crap -- he says what he tries to do is what he calls "a jewel on every page" -- just one moment, one turn of phrase, something on each page that makes him proud.

And, you know, my biggest goal is to do that. It's not easy because there are a lot of pages in a book. But one small thing can make the whole chapter feel worthy of being there. And I just try to work on those moments.

Jesse Thorn, on backing yourself into a wall

2008-09-16T04:20:29Z

I posted an interview over on the O'Reilly digital media site with Jesse Thorn, the host of "The Sound of Young America" (an excellent radio show that's distributed by Public Radio International.)

Thorn's launching an intimate convention/vacation/education/entertainment extravaganza this summer called MaxFunCon. Most of the conversation was about that event -- where the idea came from, what the focus is, why it won't feature half-naked pictures of Dane Cook.

At the end, he shared a bit about how he gets stuff done that I thought would make a nice addition to the About Creativity interviews on this site:

MaxFunCon bills itself as, among other things, "a convocation of awesome people who seek to become more awesome." In your own life, is there anything you've found that helps you achieve more awesomeness?
When I was just out of college, I couldn't get a job. I was really depressed about it, and I had been trying to get a radio job. But I couldn't even get any job. It was really horrible. I was applying for retail jobs and not getting them.

I was really down, and I was thinking, "Why am I driving back and forth to Santa Cruz, an hour-and-a-half from San Francisco?" At the time, I didn't have a car, so I was driving back and forth in my mom's car. I thought to myself, "I should just quit doing this. There's no reason I'm doing this."

And I talked to my now wife/then girlfriend, Theresa. And she said, "Well, you don't do anything else," and I thought, "Yeah, that's true, I don't do anything else. Maybe I should keep doing this." [laughter] And it has been the regular demands of making sure that I'm doing something that has backed me into a corner in order to be creative and think of new things. The fact that I have to make a radio show every week. For many years I did it when I had a real, regular day-to-day job, and now it is my job. The fact that I have to think of new stuff to connect me with people. It's sort of boring, but it's that backed-into-a-wall state where I'm able to be creative.

I'm a very harshly self-critical person. To be honest, I'm a very harshly critical person in general. [laughter] Which I think is one of the reasons why I find improv so beneficial. I'm only able to really create when I have to. So I've set up my life so that I do have to.

And the things that I have to do are things that I love to do, so it works out.

toonlet talk

2008-09-08T14:36:11Z

So-called Bill and I have been posting about digital creativity over at digitalmedia under The Creative Beat. This subsite is an extension (an outgrowth? a spur?) of the interviews you've found over over here, with a little more focus on things-tech.

Last week, SCB had a fun post on Eno's Oblique Strategies and where they can be found online. And mere moments ago, I added a chat with Craig Schwartz the co-founder of toonlet.com, a neat site that makes it easy peasy for folks to make cartoons. Drop by when ya get a chance....

An Interview with Blizzard's Chris Metzen, Part 2

2008-04-25T00:41:10Z

Welcome to the second part of this interview with Blizzard VP of Creative Development Chris Metzen. If you haven't already read Part One be sure to check it out to hear about the power of spinning ideas, and how Metzen got his big break on a bar napkin.

What do you think are the ingredients of good storytelling in computer games?

You definitely want "show -- don't tell." And it's difficult in interactive spaces because "showing" usually means it's very keyed into specific art resources or the way your game engine works. Also, more often than not, you don't want to stick the player with minutes worth of exposition. Ultimately, it's a video game and people are conditioned to want push buttons or click their mouse. Whether they're playing Pac-Man or Half Life 2 or World of Warcraft, they want to feel like they're in the driver's seat -- that's the difference between the interactive medium and film, for instance. In film you're pretty much a captive audience. You're going to sit there for two hours and experience what the writer and the director and the actors want you to experience. You have very little say in the matter other than how you process it after the fact, right?.... [So] even if we take control away from you for a couple of minutes to show a pre-rendered cinematic, or a cinematic sequence that shows the next story note unfolding, we want to get people back into the action as soon as possible. And that determines the way your story unfolds. You have to tell it in bite-sized chunks because you know that control must resume for the player pretty soon.

How do you typically kick ideas off?

CM: I just get geeked up walking into a room where we all sit down and jam. (I use the term "geeked up" a lot -- like you're just out of your mind for an idea.) I'll throw out an outline of, "Here's where I'd like to go" or "Here's a rough painting." And then we'll all sit around and absolutely sculpt a grander vision. My ideas are usually kind of the initial spark, but I'm surrounded by a really good team. We've been doing this for a long time together. Instincts are honed and there's a great chemistry, so these guys wind up taking ideas and just running all the way down the field with them.

It sounds a little like the classic sitcom writers' room.

CM: Actually I think there's a lot of correlation to TV writing.... You jam really fast. And you might track one route of the story and then turn on a dime and start tracking another way. That's really the way we design. We're shooting shots across the bow and responding with a lot of energy. It's very iterative and group-based.

What's it take to make that approach work?

CM: If we're talking about a new zone or a new kingdom or a new race, and my cells are aflame with anticipation, and I just can't wait to get the idea out, and my partners are flinging ideas back: "Wow! Have you considered this?" or "Whoa, dude! What you're describing is straight-up Klingon. Why would we wanna do that?" or whatever it is -- everyone's poking holes in things -- you've got to try and keep it together, take a step back, try not to let the ego engage. Because that's what we are as artists, right? We're called upon to have passionate opinions and fling ideas out, and go, go, go!...

With games, you've got a team of upwards of one hundred people who all have passionate viewpoints, who are all experienced. Ultimately we're all gamers, right? So if I'm just convinced of an idea, and six out of eight people come back and go, "I don't know, dude. I respect your passion, but this is a bad way to go," or "Actually, this was done three years ago -- didn't you see that?" or whatever their reservation might be, you have to remember that, at least in our neck of the woods, that's really important. Because they're all the target market. And despite the fact that I may have a burning vision for something, we're all in it together, and we all police the content....

I don't know how similar that is to movies. [With movies] you've got your director, sometimes you have a mega-writer, and these people are very powerful and very recognized, and it's really their show. So, if they want to put rubber nipples on Batman's suit, they get to put rubber nipples on Batman's suit.

Do you have any particular patterns or techniques you've found that help you tap your creative side?

CM: One of the goofy things I do is when they come at me with map ideas, let's say there are fourteen maps in a specific campaign, I'll start with titles -- fourteen zippy lines, titles for each mission strung together into the flow of a story idea. It helps me get my thoughts together as I start to break down each idea, each mission concept, relative to the characters involved and the dialog, unfolding the information in a linear order. Having really hot titles up front helps me focus my ideas and wrap the story around the mechanical skeleton of the actual mission.

Are those the equivalent of story names or chapter titles?

CM: Exactly -- it's very much like having chapter titles even before you know how it's all going to unfold. So it's kind of an ass-backwards way of going about it, but I always find having the right title or heading or tagline helps me keep the energy of the concept in mind.

Do you ever think about trying a different kind of writing?

CM: Oh for sure. I did an e-book Warcraft story a few years ago [Warcraft: Of Blood and Honor]. And I have an ongoing comic series that I'm working on.

Are you writing and drawing that?

CM: Just writing.

Is it a Blizzard project?

CM: This one is just on my own steam. It's kind of about the second American Civil War, very near future. An old soldier comes home seeking his identity as the nation is seeking its identity. It's just a totally different kind of trip than the super-fantasy or super-sci-fi stuff we've been doing at Blizzard. Every once in a while you need that pressure-release to just do something on your own.

What's your plan with the comic?

CM: Well, I want to get all the art done first. It's a twelve-issue gig, and we're still pushing through on that. I think [the artist is] drawing issue ten as we speak, and I've got the first few scripted.... I'd like to get it out before I have grandchildren one day. That would be stunning.

How does that kind of writing compare to your Blizzard work?

The idea of going out on my own, having done that e-book or doing this comic, it kind of fills me with dread because I'm so used to having a team of super-creative people around me -- either game designers or artists or the other writers I work with -- that my level of confidence is based on the team's identity. We do this together. Even though I might be the creative lead or I might even, on some of these products, be the lead writer, your confidence as an individual creative person is drawn from a bigger well because the ultimate goal is corporate -- we put out a game and that's a hundred people having affected that thing. And while I might have had a big role creatively in it, you can fall back on the fact that it was this group process, and where my weaknesses show up, they were more than compensated for by my buddies' strengths.

So with the comic, you're kind of naked?

CM: Yeah, you're totally exposed. I mean you're either very good or you're not.... Doing this comic, it's not checked and balanced by the guys closest to me here that are so good and will think of things that I'm not necessarily thinking about or serve as really good sounding boards when I've got these wild ideas pinging out of left field.

It's pretty weird to step out of that tribal space and have a voice, just heard cleanly. So yeah, I'm petrified. I'm petrified to put this comic out. But I know it's something I need to do, you know? I just get a kick out of it. I think it's cool. And people will either think it's cool or they won't.

Is there anything else you've learned in your years at Blizzard that you'd like to pass along?

CM: The thing that's striking as I look back over time, back at the kid who wanted to be the next George Lucas, the kid at nineteen who walked into Blizzard and wanted to be this story guy, the one thing I've learned overall is that I'm still that naive and I still want to be that George Lucas kind of dude, but more than anything else I've learned that it's not always about you. It may be in other mediums. But for interactive storytelling specifically, whatever I thought of my abilities or whatever I thought of my gumption or my need to achieve and be recognized, as I look back now, it's all about tribe.

Whatever ideas I'm trying to sell or themes that I think are just going to be brilliant or little story hooks or the way a certain character comes off, all that stuff is important. It's really important, and more often than not on these games, I've gotten in just about what I've wanted to get in. But what I've had to learn is you have to route it through the crew. You have to route it through your buddies. It makes for a better game. It makes for a better story. It makes for a better virtual experience. And I found that my ideas are ten times more refined having gone through the design process, as opposed to me just pushing them through to the detriment of the design process.

And I didn't expect that. I expected, when I was young and full of beans, that it was all about force of will or salesmanship. Or, if I'm being totally honest, "If I achieve a higher rank in the organization, then I'll be able to get my ideas through easier." And in truth it's never been about that. All of that's illusory....

It's frustrating up front every time. As a matter of fact, we're doing StarCraft 2 right now and yeah, my shoulders are tensing every few days just going, "Grrrrrr -- I've been working on this thing for ten months, and here come the designers weighing in." It gets tense. But I know because I've been through this many times over the past with every product, that when it comes out the other side it's going to be far better than I had ever imagined because all these people that I really respect are weighing in. And you get a product at the end of the day beyond your initial vision -- it's grown into this amazing thing. And that's the key I think to Blizzard's creative process and by extension my own because I learned it here.

So it takes a village?

CM: It does in our instance.... I don't know if I'd agree with it in terms of raising a kid, but I can tell you in terms of raising a video game, it does take a village. And maybe specifically it takes the right village.

We've all been doing this a long time and we get it and we have great chemistry and we share the same inside jokes. We all grew up together, this core team at Blizzard. And that's a big part of it. Could you do this process without that chemistry? I don't know. Is it something that's unique to Blizzard? Again, I don't know. I don't think so. I know that other companies have very large creative teams. By virtue of not having worked anywhere else, I can only speculate. But I know that that's absolutely part of our magic.

And as I've matured just as a dude and as a writer and as a world designer, I'm so happy that I came up in this environment where the free flow of ideas is as important as the ideas themselves. And that creates a very different story at the end of the day. So, you know, I'll never be Stephen King. And that's okay -- I get to be me. And by extension we get to be part of Blizzard.

Are there any semi-explicit rules or guidelines that Blizzard uses to foster that kind of environment?

CM: I don't know if there are rules explicitly, but there's kind of a code of conduct and it's kind of unspoken but it's really felt by everybody. "Don't be a dick," at the end of the day.... If you're a bull in a china shop, stepping on toes, bruising people with backhanded comments, and super aggressive with ideas without being sensitive to how this creative group is shaping and forming over time, you're going to be in trouble. I think our culture is built to not allow that kind of stuff....

At first you might think, "Oh well that sounds terrible." But I think when you work in a group like this and work as a creative team like this and you get over yourself as the center of the universe, the ideas sometimes come even easier -- coming to consensus about how to apply certain ideas comes even easier because you're all geeked up together. If you're forthright and earnest about an idea and you're not trying to crush people -- it's not about you, it's about the idea itself -- I think people respond to that, the purity of idea and the excitement behind it.

And more often than not, if you thought you would have to sell an idea through exercising ego or shutting people down or just being the loudest guy in the room, just your raw energy about an idea will geek them up. You don't have to sell as hard. You don't have to be this mega personality in the room, because it's about the thing itself, not about you. And I think that's part of that purifying fire. Not only is the idea purified, but your whole read behind the idea is too.

It's gets back into the whole artist thing, the creative process. How much is you, yearning to get out in these ideas or in this painting or in this dance move or whatever the creative expression is? How much is you? And how much is purely the joy of the idea? And that's a sliding scale. All the little eccentricities or funky ideas we throw out all day long, some of them are personality quirks. But some of them are just beyond you. And when you have a group that's firing and owning the creative process like we have here, those are the things that come to the surface. And you're all just sitting around slapping your heads going, "Oh my God, this idea has momentum beyond us -- beyond our will to see it made." It just becomes this ball of energy -- these different ideas just start singing. And everyone's nodding their heads going, "Wow, we're writing something here that's beyond even who had the idea in the first place."

It starts to sound almost spiritual -- the death of ego.

CM: Totally. I think the times that I look back on in my career that have been absolutely the most rewarding are not the times where my own personal ideas went through and were handled cleverly. That's wonderful. It makes me feel like a million bucks. Hey that scene worked, or that character really worked. I love that stuff. It just makes you feel really good that it seems to be working. But more often than not, the times or the themes or the ideas that I look back on and they just send a thrill through me -- like an actual chemical rush through my body - are when we're all jamming an idea, and we're looking around the table and everyone's just kind of smiling and just going "Dude, we can't hit the ground running fast enough on this idea." Because we own it as a group. We're just coming out of our chairs because it's so pure and it's so right and it's not just about the appeasement of ego, it's about, "Wow, this is going to make these kids flip out, right? The end-user is going to flip out."

[With interactive storytelling] the idea is bigger than just story. It's when story translates to stunning gameplay, and there's the visceral power of it, the hand-eye coordination part of it where it's not just you watching a movie -- you're moving through it, and it's peaking emotional reactions as you're clicking the friggin' mouse. That's where you know you've tapped into something beyond the individual. And it's off to the races.

An Interview with Blizzard's Chris Metzen, Part 1

2008-04-21T15:42:22Z

This is the first part of a two-part interview. Be sure to also check out Part Two to hear about the ingredients of good interactive story-telling, the power of tribal creativity, and why Blizzard's game makers will never put rubber nipples on Batman's suit.

How do you explain to nongamers what you do for a living?

My core responsibility is coming up with the worlds our games take place in. And over time, the worlds are becoming the game, strangely enough.

When I started out in this racket about fourteen years ago, we were making war games. Essentially, you're playing through a sequence of maps with this virtual army you build over time. It was my job not only to create the single-player component of the game -- the storyline that you ultimately track through in these ongoing wars -- but also to just kind of create the universe behind the game so that when you weren't actually playing, you might still be chewing on these concepts or characters or places that you'd experienced.

What were some of your big influences growing up?

Well, figure that everyone in the industry just loved Star Wars. Star Wars created a monster. But I think what shaped the monster [for me] ultimately was a mix between Dungeons & Dragons and comic books. Those were my absolute loves, as most geeks around here will probably repeat. I'm more a comic geek than anything else, honestly. I still have about a thirty-dollar habit per week. It's gotten bad; I need a twelve-step program. I even still buy Marvel. So I just grew up with serial storytelling. Every week you could go to the store and see somebody's latest adventure. That template -- the way comics unfold over time -- had a really big impact on me.

I loved D&D -- I loved the big worlds, the big spanning themes, the big epic quests, the unfolding settings with ancient civilizations and ancient secrets coming back to haunt the present. I loved all that. I love mythology. And somehow, as a little kid, comics was the conveyance system -- the media that really captured my imagination.... There was continuity, high drama, threads from beyond space and time. There were threads from the past. There were gods walking the earth. Everything I wanted to have my head in was right there.

Did you create your own comics?

I was building my own little comic worlds and my little stapled-together cheesy colored-pencil comic books from age twelve on. Since about age six, I always drew. I really enjoyed drawing whatever -- cyborgs, alien warlords.... When I was around twelve I had the fictitious Capital Comics Company. I had a stable of characters, and it was all pretty loosely based off of whatever I was reading at the time.

Around sixth grade, I found Dungeons & Dragons. Buddies of mine had moved in from another town and said, "Hey, have you ever played this before?" "No, I haven't. What's that?" And I was immediately swept away.

Was Tolkien an influence too?

It wasn't actually Lord of the Rings that did it. I wouldn't read Lord of the Rings until late in high school. But [D&D's] Dragonlance and the other worlds that TSR [the company behind D&D] had put out -- I just couldn't get enough of them, whether I was reading the books or dissecting their campaign settings in my own D&D campaign with my buddies.

We'd usually just make up our own stuff. I remember thinking pretty early on that that's all I ever really wanted to do with my life was just make stuff. It wasn't necessarily film. It wasn't the media you would first think of. I wanted to work at TSR. I wanted to make the next Dragonlance. I just wanted to get in on the ground floor of a company like that, building a world like that, and just make stuff up.

So how did you get your start at Blizzard?

It was totally random. The path of destiny took a detour for a couple of years. I was singing in a few bands and just having a blast at that. I thought that's what I wanted to do for a few years out of school.

We were playing a gig at a club one night, and I guess I had drawn a little dragon on a cocktail napkin, just screwing around. And this guy walked by who knew a friend of a friend of a friend and went, "Hey, that's pretty good! Have you ever thought about drawing? I know this one place that's hiring artists." "Really?" And he handed me a card that said "Chaos Studios" (that was our name before we became "Blizzard"). I didn't even know what the company did. I thought it was a graphics company -- graphic design or something like that. "Seriously? They pay people to draw? Really? Stuff like this?"

I went down one weekend or Friday afternoon and walked in the door with my life, with all these worlds and characters that I had created since I was a kid, and just tossed them all over the boss's desk. Within about fifteen minutes he's like, "Hey, man, you want a job?" "Dude, I'll sweep your floors." I walk in the door and there's radio-controlled cars and superhero posters and Iron Maiden posters all over the walls. I didn't even know what they did. All I knew is that whatever this is, I want a piece of this.

What was your original job at Chaos Studios?

I was actually an animator. At the time, we were making a fighter game like Street Fighter, based on the Justice League. They wanted me to animate Batman. "Okay. I've never animated anything in my life, but I'll give it the college try!" And it just took off from there....

By the time we began Warcraft II, I stayed late and wrote up a few paragraphs of what might have happened between the games that would set up a sequel, or begin to set up the scope or anticipation of the sequel. I didn't plan to show it to anybody, and I guess one of the other designers showed it to the boss one night, unbeknownst to me. A couple days of later we're at a meeting, and the boss says, "Oh, and, by the way, Chris is our new designer on Warcraft II." I'm like, "Holy crap! Really?! Why?" But he knew. He knew that while I loved drawing...ultimately he knew I just wanted to make stuff up.

How would you describe your approach to the creative process?

It's all about spin, right? We're essentially sponges -- especially artist types. If you're a songwriter, a dancer, whatever -- we're sponges. We take in data. We take in things that we dig. In my case it's likely comics or Star Wars or Dragonlance. I absolutely devour the stuff. Strangely enough, I devour the same stuff over and over. It's really weird. I'm not very experimental. I keep grilling things deeper and deeper if I have an initial reaction to it creatively.

I think we soak in content. We chew on it. We digest it. What are the bits of these themes or these characters or these places that strike the chords within us emotionally? And our job is to spew back into the world. Spin the archetypes, right? Sometimes it's a matter of mixing and matching different archetypes. Sometimes it's a matter of just paring an idea down to its most naked truth. I think spinning ideas back out with our own spin on it is really where the magic comes from. It's not necessarily from the innovation, although that's very striking as well. But I bet if you tracked a lot of innovative ideas, they're born from two or three other things that that person had seen already. We all stand on the shoulders of titans.

As it relates to my craft, or specifically, Blizzard's craft, I think we've done pretty well by that. We don't necessarily try and come out with the craziest new concept you've ever heard of. We actually base the games we do on whatever we happen to be playing. If we're having fun with a game like Everquest [a 3D, massively multiplayer, role-playing game that predates World of Warcraft] -- and we were -- we were all sitting around pretty much going, "Dude, how much fun would it be to build one of these? We think we could do X, Y, and Z a little cleaner, a little better. We think we could simplify this, but we think we can blow all these other ideas out and really have some fun with it." That's the way we typically approach our projects....

You know, the name "Gandalf" was not unique to John Tolkien, right? He pulled that from Icelandic myth. "Orcs," means what? "Devil" in some language no one speaks anymore. Ultimately what Tolkien did was take these elements that were really disparate -- they didn't necessarily have a lot of [potency] anymore in the great membrane of pop culture -- no one really cared about these ideas -- and he brought them together in a way that reinvigorated what they were. He blew it out by a thousand times the magnitude they had had for hundreds of years. And he clothed it in a world, and he molded this world with older ideas, but in such a way that it was absolutely fresh and it was absolutely true.

How does that approach show up in your own work?

We put out a game called Warcraft III a few years ago, and one of the things I really wanted to do was take orcs, who are the perennial bad-guy race -- the dark, subhuman, barbarous race in most fantasy -- and I wanted to take our orcs and spin 'em. They're still green and tusked and very brutal -- the visual of them plays to the archetype, so it's very familiar for someone coming to the setting. But we started to take them on a route where, what if they weren't innately evil? They're looking for identity. They've been roughed up, and now they're trying to become this noble thing again. That was a decided spin on a pretty classic archetype that, well, time will tell whether it worked well. But that's the trick, right? Keeping the archetypes in the foreground -- because that's ultimately what people want. It's part of the magic of the escapism of these fantasies.

What did we do with the latest one? You know, we've got elves, right? Everybody gets [the character] Legolas from the Lord of the Rings film. Ultimately what we decided to do with our elves in the Warcraft setting was make them addicted to magic. They're like an entire race of crack addicts; they just can't get enough magic. And they're just on the brink of losing everything they've ever been, to this almost genetic addiction to something that may or may not be very dangerous to play with.

Looking at them, the visual archetype holds very strong. From Tolkien to D&D to where we are today, current fantasy -- "I get it! The long ears, and they're graceful, these other-worldly creatures." But inside there's a reflection of something that might be relevant to today. How often do we see stories of addiction in our extended families? None of this is stunning; none of it's super innovative. But again, it's not coming up with a new race -- it's finding a way to make the older archetypes sing again.

Is the art in finding the balance between the archetype and the spin?

Totally. And could there be a more subjective science? I don't think anyone's really hammered it yet. But for me, that's the fun part.... Being the geek I am, given my wiring, that's all I ever wanted to do.

***
The interview continues in Part Two.

An Interview with Ianthe Brautigan

2008-03-31T13:59:23Z

What sort of writing had you done before you started working on your memoir?

I was actually a Theater Arts major, and I was going to the Junior College, and I fell in love with my English 1A class and ended up writing nonfiction essays. At that point I realized that I was going to be torn between the two worlds, and I decided to choose writing. I still went to New York and worked for Roundabout Theatre and was in the theater world and toyed with that for a little while. And then I came back to Sonoma County and really started writing in earnest and did all the things that writers do -- I took creative writing courses and did workshops and worked with Robin Beeman, who's in the county and is absolutely phenomenal. I got my undergrad in English Literature at Sonoma State, which was the best thing I could have ever done.... You need to read a lot of stuff and get an idea of what's going on. Then I got my MFA at San Francisco State University, and I don't recommend that for everybody.

Going back to my memoir, God, I had started that in the form of poetry right after my dad died. And I'm a terrible poet. But I wrote a prose poem and Don Emblen read it and he said, "You're onto it -- this is what you should be doing; stay away from that poetry stuff." [laughter] And I began writing about my dad. And as you might imagine, it took a long time.

Was the transition from short stories to poetry to memoir writing difficult, or did you feel like you were finding your natural genre?

I think it's important to try all sorts of stuff. I love writing short stories. I've written a novella. I think that in memoir and nonfiction writing, you're using the craft of fiction writing. In fact, a lot of what makes, I think, a good memoir is that it has a lot of fictive elements, except it's based on truth.

Can you elaborate on that -- how fiction-writing techniques can play a role in memoir writing?

Well, you just are set free. Because you've been writing short stories and working in fiction-land, maybe starting novels that you discard, you develop your muscles for description and for structure.

How much of the way you approach structure and description in memoir writing is driven by the linear flow of events versus stepping back and applying a frame to life?

Well it has to be truthful. Memoir has to be truthful. Like, [if] you were speaking about your father and the way that he taught you to jog, that's a memory that's very clear in your head. And you know that that's truth. If you just wrote that down, in three sentences it would be done. But if you wanted to write about that as a chapter of a book or as a turning point in your life, it would be longer, and you would reach into the tools that you've learned as a fiction writer to make that scene work.

You would start to go, where was I? What was there? Were there trees? Was there grass? What kind of tennis shoes was I wearing? All those details, which are real, evoke incredible memory for you as the writer, so you're able to get the soul, you're able to get at the heart of what you're trying to write. But at the same time you're painting a fictive picture.

Did you develop techniques for bringing your memories to the surface? I remember one sequence in particular where you were a child in your father's Geary apartment...

You know what? Part of that had to do with getting all his stuff. I have some of that and so looking at that stuff again...

Objects triggered memory?

Exactly.

Was that true for places too? Did you try to revisit specific locales?

No. I didn't go back to Montana until after the book was done pretty much -- it was too painful to go back. I could only go back in my mind. I think when you're dealing with memoir, dreams are a big aspect of it.

Tom McGuane had this great thing he told me. We were talking on the phone, and we don't talk often but I was in the middle of the process, and he said, "What are you doing?" And I said, "Well I'm writing a memoir" -- I knew he would disapprove because those guys, they have their own code of things.

He was a friend of your father's?

Yes, he was a friend, along with Jim Harrison. And I knew he'd -- not disapprove of me writing a memoir in particular, but you know, they're fiction guys, they write fiction.

And he said, "Well, whatever you're writing has you by the back of the neck. And you just kinda have to go with it." It is what it is. You have to accept what it is. And that's the roughest part about memoir writing -- or any kind of writing, I think. I love Toni Morrison; I think she's incredible. I will never write like her in a million years. It's just not going to happen. I have a very distinct style. And it's not that. [laughter] So it's accepting your writing. If you're writing a memoir, accepting that this is what it is.

And then you have to find a structure for it.... I read a million memoirs. And I would find somebody and go, "Oh, OK, you can do this; this is a structure that will work."

What were you looking for?

I was reading books that had writers who were willing to take on way beyond what I had suffered, like Primo Levi, Natalia Ginsburg. And I was going, "OK, so these people are willing to take these heady things on and they survived." Because I think that's the biggest element of memoir writing -- that if you're going to write about something incredibly intense, you better be able to survive it. That's the first thing I tell people -- they'll tell me a really sad story that happened and say, "I want to write a memoir." And the first question I ask is, "Do you think you can? Do you think you have the strength to do it?" Because this is not something you take lightly.

One of the things I wondered was what the aftermath was like in terms of your creative life. Your memoir was also a healing process. What was your writing life like when the book was finished?

To be honest, it kind of sucked. [The memoir] was such a true thing. Now I'm dealing in the world of fiction, and so how do I make my fiction as true as that was?

How did you cope with that?

Well, it has to do with, I would say, writer discipline. I have a new writing pal, and what I'm learning from her is that it's about the pages. It's not about whether it feels good or not because it's pretty brutal, you know? [As I'm writing my novel] I'm constantly questioning myself going, "Have I lost my mind?" You know, all of a sudden these people are going to California -- what is going on?

"These people" meaning your characters?

Yes. [laughter]

It's lovely in California.

I know, I know. But they were in Nebraska just last week! My friend who's really helped me with this said, "Don't worry about it, just do the pages." (I have a certain amount of pages that I do every day.) She said, "And don't take a day off because you take a day off, it's really brutal going back." And she said, "Then you can just rewrite it!"

How many pages do you write each day?

I'm trying to do five a day.

Did you consciously decide, "I'm gonna find myself a writing pal" or was that something that just happened?

No, it was an accident. I have a really good writing friend, and we keep each other going, but she's on a different level in writing than I am. She's got it kind of dialed in. This new friend has been really interesting because she's newer to the process. She's writing three books this year. [laughter] I'm learning a lot because she's really disciplined.

There's a Tillie Olsen documentary that's just come out that.... She wrote an amazing book, Tell Me a Riddle. And then she wrote a book called Silences, which is about writers not writing -- women writers.

In this documentary somebody asked, "Why didn't Tillie write more?" She'd been a working-class woman in the Depression, so for a long time she didn't have the money to write. Finally she had the money and time but it was too late in some ways. She was incredibly generous and gave a lot of talks, was very active, but she wasn't publishing.

And Alice Walker said this beautiful thing. I'm paraphrasing, but she said something like, "The mornings are very beautiful; one can do many things in the morning." You know, you can garden.... And I thought, "Ah...." At some point you have to say to yourself, "What do I want to do?" And know that it's gonna be rough. It's not going to be easy.

Where do you think creativity comes from -- what role do you think it plays in our lives?

I think for some people, the genes can run in families because I know that my daughter is a writer. My aunt said the most amazing thing about my dad. She was trying to explain him to me and she said, "Well he was different than everybody." I said, "What do you mean?" And she said, "Well he would say things like, "Look, look at that beautiful tree. Look, look at those flowers over there."

And this was a poor, working-class Depression family, and he was noticing beautiful things. They lived in a beautiful part of the country but nobody would articulate that. So he passed that on to me. And that has been passed on to my daughter -- you know a sense of observation, maybe.

With "look at that tree," there's also that desire to share the observation and not just keep it inside.

Yes! Exactly. And this willingness to suffer to try to say it in the best possible way that you can. Not that all of us are Toni Morrison or Jim Harrison or Faulkner, but if you can, as Tillie Olsen would say, if you can rise up to contribute your best -- if we all can do that, in our writing or in our creativity, that would be what creativity is -- can you rise up to contribute what's best in you?

You know, years ago I'd stopped writing for a while, and I ended up having a bunch of mini-epiphanies that got me back to it -- one of which was actually related to this idea of improvement and had to do with your dad.

Really? In what way?

Well, I love his poetry. And I picked up The Edna Webster Collection, with his unpublished poems from when he was much younger. And this will be blasphemy so I apologize...

Thanks. [laughter]

But I didn't think that collection was that great. Which was a revelation to me.

He didn't want it published; he called it "juvenilia."

I think he was seventeen or so?

Yes.

He had so much confidence in those poems. And that picture of someone who wasn't yet great but then managed to bring out that greatness, it really hammered home the idea that we should keep working because we're just here to get better.

Well, my mom said that my dad used to say, the difference between a good writer and a bad writer is twenty years.

That's perfect.

The writing world is a strange world right now. You have to be writing, not for somebody to give you tons of money or to say something really fantastic...and at the same time, a writer has to have recognition in some form; otherwise they die. It's what you were alluding to with sharing. You know, when you get an acceptance, you're just thrilled. "Oh my God! Somebody loves this too!" [laughter]

That was one of the questions I had, having never tried memoir writing -- how do you get feedback and recognition along the way for something so personal?

I was in a novel class and I had a workshop, and we had to copy the whole darned thing and give a copy to everybody. My teacher was finishing a novel and she wasn't as helpful as she usually had been. And I had this wretched session where people were giving contradictory ideas and nobody was really making any sense. I was sitting there and this one young woman, she was twenty-two, she came up to me afterwards and she said, "I just had to tell you, I read this on the plane and I cried." She said, "It made me want to write a book about my father because I had a complicated relationship." And at that point I literally came home, threw away all the other remarks and kept hers.

So that showed you she was a receptive reader?

Yes. And at the same time, if you don't agree with something you don't want to be resistant -- you don't want to put up a big fight or make a big deal. You don't stand up in a workshop and burst into tears and go storming out. You just go, "uh huh, uh huh."

Working on the book, was it a challenge to keep your personal life and your creative life balanced?

There was a woman who had a great quote that really helped me when [my daughter] was about five. This woman said, "You can inconvenience your family; just don't damage them." And I like that, and that's kind of how I've lived my life....

I wrote a lot of my book when [my daughter] was little. At that point my office was in the house because when they're littler, for some reason, the kind of noise they make is different than when they become teenagers. When she became a teenager I moved out, and I have a studio outside.

Teenage noise isn't compatible with the writing life?

It's not, it's a whole -- I can't even describe it. Well, you'll find out. Actually it'll be a different noise by the time you get teenagers. But she was around a lot, doing her own thing. She got to observe me, and hopefully that was good. She's an excellent writer. It'll be really interesting to see what she ends up doing.

Is she in high school now?

She's in college. Now we have a fur child -- a little dog. She's a great writing buddy. She keeps me warm, she sits on my lap -- she's here right now. And she just moves wherever I move.

Does she help with your writing?

Animals do. Because you don't want to disturb them too much. Anything that keeps you in the chair a little bit longer....

Is there anything else you've found helps?

You can bribe yourself. I call it "toothpaste-tube writing," which is when you just sit down and squeeze. And one would assume that toothpaste-tube writing would be terrible, the end result would be terrible, and that the days when you "feel the muse" and everything is going really, really well would be better. What I found is, there's really no difference in the writing. You just do it. So after I do a toothpaste-tube kind of session, I'll reward myself with cookies or things like that. Food's a very useful reward.

Looking back, do you think there's anything in particular that you learned about writing from your dad?

I think I learned the inevitability of being a writer. That you just are what you are.

It's not like, "Oh, I'm a writer," and you trot around as a writer. There was this kind of somber inevitability that this is who he was. And it was kind of a comfort to see someone accept a difficult way to live one's life.

And then, it was that he was very disciplined. Somebody recently asked me, "So that was when he wasn't drinking so much?" and I was like, "Oh no, let's be clear -- he always drank a great deal." You know, he wasn't drunk all the time, but that was always a present force in his life. Despite that, he really protected his writing life. So the Wind [So the Wind Won't Blow It Away, the last of Richard Brautigan's novels published in his lifetime], I think, is a gorgeous book. His writing is just beautiful even when he was not doing at all well in his personal life. I mean things were really bad.

I think observing somebody who was so dignified and disciplined and felt hope in the world and wanted to share his feelings about that, and could see life in a different way -- I think that was very, very useful. And [it gave me] a sense of the responsibility that goes with that.

You mentioned when we first got in touch that there were questions you wished you'd asked him about writing -- I wondered what they might be?

I'd have structure questions. You start from an idea, how do you structure it? There would be structural questions for his novels -- what gave him the courage to write something like Sombrero Fallout? Or Hawkline Monster or Trout Fishing -- my God, talk about a structural tour de force. How he had the courage to get an idea and then carry it through....

But I think there's another element. You know, I was listening to [the NPR radio show] This American Life and it had this great episode about a guy whose dad died. He ended up being a physicist and he spent his life working on a time machine because he wanted to go back in time and see his father again. If I had a time machine, it would just be to sit in his presence, just to be with him. That was so comforting. Just to go for a walk with him or something.

That's how I feel about my grandpa too. Whatever questions I might have about my family history and such, ultimately I'd just like to be a kid and sit on his shoulders again.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. That's it I think.

Maybe that's part of what writing the memoir was about -- being in his presence?

I think it was. I really do think it was. It was going back. Also, I just wanted to make sure that certain elements of him were remembered correctly because when you're writing a memoir, and we're talking about using fictive elements, you have a responsibility to the heart of the thing that you're trying to share. And I was trying to do a lot of things in that memoir, but one of them was sharing my dad.

Was there much fear of misrepresentation? Fear that the burden of presenting someone else might be too great? Or was that not something you had to wrestle with?

Not too badly. I would panic, like when I was working on the blue lines [a copy of the book for review before it's printed] -- this is where kids come in really handy. They were all teenagers at the time, and so I had them double-checking things for me, double-checking quotes. Because you start to have a panic about things like that -- double checking the Faulkner quote or double-checking the Ondaatje quote.

Or like in that Geary section that we were talking about earlier. I had written that the bus fare is fifteen cents. And all of a sudden you're just panicking, "Oh my God, is it fifteen cents? Have I remembered that right?" What was really interesting is that you do remember all these things correctly. It was fifteen cents.