On Creativity

[thedeadparrot]

It was really great wandering around Somerville this weekend as part of Somerville Open Studios. I think part of it was just enjoying looking at art, and part of it was also getting to see artist studios, seeing the converted factories with squeaky wooden floors and exposed piping, the paints, the canvases, the woodworking tools, the messy doodles on the walls. I'm always impressed by the amount of creativity in people, the number of ways in which people chose to create new things and express themselves. Not all of the art I've seen has been got, perhaps not even most of it, but I still loved seeing it. I'm not sure I'll make this a yearly trip, but it was definitely worth doing this year. It didn't hurt that the weather was gorgeous.

I've been writing a decent amount lately. The best thing about Twine is that it tickles my writing and programming brains at the same time, which is really great. Most of the code is really simple, but I had a bug yesterday! And I fixed it! That was really fun. I still don't know if this story is going to work, if the pacing is too all over the place and video-gamey, if the worldbuilding is crap (though I have had some great conversations with people about it, which was good), if the plot is too non-sensical, if I can get the emotional builds and dips right. Still, I have a plot outline, mostly, and I have approximately 4k written and coded up. There's still a lot to get to, and there are a lot of places in those first 4k that need a lot of work (a lot a lot), but I'm still enjoying it. There's something both thrilling and frustrating about a first draft, about seeing how everything is coming together and yet how long everything takes.

I don't have many interesting or deep Iron Man 3 feelings. I guess as a series of scenes, I was very entertained, but as an overall storyline or character arc, it doesn't hold up at all. Pretty much every person I've spoken to has stronger feelings about it than I did.

I also bought KotOR 1 and 2 during this weekend's Steam sale. They actually work somewhat decently under wine, and it's hilarious how quickly computer graphics age. Still, all my adolescent feelings are still lingering, and I'm really looking forward to see what sorts of improvements the KotOR 2 restoration mod makes to the overall experience of that game.

Comments

[zulu]

What is Twine? Why does it spark you?

Yay for writing and for games! Spending time just letting world-building work out or settle into your mind can be a ton of fun. What fandom are you writing for most these days?

[thedeadparrot]

I mentioned it in an earlier post, but Twine is an interactive fiction engine that 'compiles' to HTML/CSS/Javascript. It's really easy to use since it uses a wiki underneath that to do all the work. howling dogs is considered one of the best Twine stories/games out there, and I think you might find it interesting, at least on a technical level. It's a format that's very hypertext driven, and I think that maybe in this story I'm doing it 'wrong' because it's less hypertexty and far more linear than a lot of the other Twine stories, but at the same time, I still love the way it forces me to think about the reader in my stories more explicitly than usual and about how to structure it so that it does feel interactive rather than static.

The GUI version only kind of works on Linux, so I don't get to have a lot of the cool trees that twine stories generate, but what really sparks for me is the idea of something that straddles the line between pure text, like most fic, and video games, which is one of my one-and-off consuming obsessions. The fact that it has some reasonably interesting code features (variables! if/then statements! other macros!) to make it more than "just" hypertext also has me excited, because it is great to get a chance to use the code part of my brain as I write.

I'm still writing in Glee /o\. This story was supposed to be a small thing for me to test out the framework and see about what I could do with a little bit of space, but then it turned into something with like, plot and AU worldbuilding and all kinds of awful stuff.

[zulu]

Cool cool, I'm going to check that out!