[GeekyScrawl] The Creative Writing Process

I normally post book reviews and comic book reviews on Tuesdays, but I'll change things up a bit today.

Now when I'm not blogging, writing business proposals for a multinational BPO / ITO company, watching too much television, playing console games, fiddling with this computer or that gadget, reading books, playing tabletop role-playing games, watching movies, seeing stage plays and musicals, or hanging out at O Bar, I sometimes remember that I pride myself as being a creative writer of sorts. I've written a number of odd stories over the years and attempted to write a novel more times than I can count but I've never actually tried to get any of my work published in a professional (read: revenue-generating) capacity. Boo me.

Now rewind to February of this year when a certain Kickstarter campaign launched (which I had backed) and went on to become one of the most amazing Kickstarter campaigns EVER. Totally. And beyond the fact that I'm going to be one of the first to get their "hands" on the new Tim Schafer adventure game, but as a Backer of the project I also get access to the on-going series of videos documenting the whole creative process.

I recently caught up with the second episode of the documentary series - A Promise of Infinite Possibility. Great title for an episode, right? And it was a pretty darn good episode, too.


The episode focused on Tim's creative process as he starts to come up with a new game idea. Yes, the Kickstarter project started with Tim having no idea what the game was going to be about. But because he's such an experience game designer, he knew that he had the skills needed to come up with a new idea.

Tim Schafer presents his new game Brütal Legend at the gamescom 2009 Deutsch: Tim Schafer presentiert sein neues Spiel „Brütal Legend“ auf der gamescom 2009 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The video gave us backers an interesting glimpse of his creative process. He has massive 5-subject notebooks that he uses not just to write his notes but also to do a lot of free association writing and just let his mind wander and bring him to new places. He even show us his old notes for Grim Fandango and how it took so many pages worth of various potential game titles before he came up with the final name. I swear it seemed like magic to see his various notes with the labels for all the years.

I think I want to get a new notebook now.

Coincidentally, Lifehacker seems to be kicking my butt as well by coming up with two posts of interest today.

One was a quick quote: that "Productivity is less about time management than it is about mind management." Ouchies, right? It's a fairly simple statement, but also a very good point.

On the other hand, they also started their 30 Minutes a Day project, which encourages readers to start a new project that they will initially focus on for 30 days, just like brushing your teeth. In time you can try to increase the amount of time spent as you get more and more used to this process and working on something closer to your dreams.

With Tobie already fulfilling his dreams to some extent in his role as a game designer and with Prince also pursuing his dream through establishing his own travel agency, it's more than about time that I got started on my dream - of becoming a published fiction writer. I've talked about this goal on and off over the years and that's the big problem - all I've done is talk about it. And if I start with an initial investment of 30 minutes of my time daily, well, it's harder to make excuses about everything.

No more excuses - I need to get started on this sooner rather than later. And from time to time I'll try to post updates about this project here on the Geeky Guide or on my personal blog. Wish me luck!