Kill it, kill it now.
Abandoning the very thing that was meant to have been the point. On killing your darlings and emerging little souls.
For no less than 10 newsletters, I have meant to include a passage about the process of acquiring new skills. Every time, however, it ends up on the cutting room floor. As a mercy to it, I present it now.
British video game journalist Mark Brown of Game Maker’s Tool Kit once broke down the process of acquiring a new skill as learning the fundamentals, repetition, and experimentation.
For example, if you’re learning to dress better, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with concepts like statement pieces, color theory, or dressing for the occasion. You intentionally think of the basics, until they become an unconscious part of the process. You live them daily, realize what rules you care about, and start breaking them selectively. For years you slowly build your wardrobe in a thoughtful and non-fast fashiony kind of way, and bing, bang, boom: skill acquired.
I have started letters with the sole intention of discussing this fundamentals-repetition-experimentation process. But by the end of the drafting stage, I make the call that it is no longer relevant to what the idea has morphed into.
As sorry as I have felt for it, I don’t regret cutting it each time. I’ve learned as a writer not to get too caught up in what I think I am writing. In the past, I often found myself ignoring the emergent ideas that were, by most respects, better than what I had originally intended to explore. I’d gum up stories for weeks just for the sake of keeping a joke or passage from the first draft that no longer served the larger story. All the while, new ideas would surface that could potentially resonate far more (both with myself and the audience) if they were given the proper attention.
In game design, there’s a concept called following the fun. The previously mentioned Mark Brown did a breakdown of this concept by detailing the development of the indie game Ape Out. Designer Gabe Cuzillo set out to make a stealth game where you’d use push-and-grab mechanics to move along the walls. As development continued, he added the ability to grab and throw guards. This proved to be the most fun aspect of the game, so he designed everything else with that in mind. He removed the stealth element and replaced the original protagonist with a giant gorilla. The result was a unique and charming experience that barely resembled the initial concept.
Every creative work has a soul that’s trying to emerge, and often that soul is not at all what you thought it would be. People often take the common writing advice to “kill your darlings” as a harsh way of saying you have to cut out sections of your story that you love but don’t fit well. While that’s true, it’s less of an execution and more of an exercise in appreciating what you actually have. Like every revenge story where the hero forsakes what they still have to pursue their target relentlessly, locking into an idea too rigidly can have you not realize the strength of what you’ve been building around it.
“It’s less of an execution and more of an exercise in appreciating what you actually have. “
Each story where I originally intended to include the fundamentals-repetition-experimentation passage became something worthwhile in its own right. And while I’m glad to have it mentioned here, I must admit — I considered cutting it again as the soul of this story took shape.
I swear… EVER. Y. TIME. you publish, it’s so relevant to me. I have a blog post that I was planning to use to restart and it’s just sitting there because I guess I’m, as you say, in development. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about it and I wrote it on January 15th. Love you and your thoughts. ❤️
Not too relevant to the point of this post, but Ape Out seems like a really fun game. Thanks for the perhaps unintended recommendation. And as always, for the thoughtful advice. I especially loved this passage: “I’ve learned as a writer not to get too caught up in what I think I am writing”, and I shall be adding it to my budding list of quotes.