Friday, April 13, 2012

Off Topic - Most Useful Advice You've Ever Heard

Kind of a discussion, kind of a sharing among peers in a community, and all around a quick way to maybe help a whole bunch of others while sharing a little bit about yourself. It can be gaming related, life related, or whatever you want it to be.

For me, I have two and they're both geared towards more creative efforts. The first is simply: everything is cliche. What matters is your execution. In other words, don't worry about originality, worry about making sure your execution stands out for being interesting in how it handles what is going on. The second is: anyone willing to suck can create. This is something I tell myself when I'm bemoaning the fact that something I am preparing for game, or for my own works, sucks. Everything sucks starting off, you just got to work from there. It's part of the process.

How about you?

2 comments:

  1. That reminds me of a little saying I heard about drawing. "Everyone has 1,000 sucky pictures inside of them. Just get those out - draw them and those puppies out of your system - and you'll be good to go."

    Seems to be working for me. I think I have 750 left. ;)

    And yeah - there is nothing new under the sun - so don't worry about being original. Well, unless your job is to invent completely new quantum particles. But you probably aren't - so relax.

    :)

    - Ark

    ReplyDelete
  2. "If you get the general feel of things right, you can fudge the details" That goes for a lot of things, but I mean mostly for description of settings. Don't be overanxious to get every detail right and to describe everything. Let your players' imagination do the work for you.

    Also, if you manage to capture the feel of a period (and cliches do come in handy there), you will be allowed anachromisms and stuff because then they don't destroy that feeling. See League of Extraordinary Gentlemen for something that is very, very realistically Victorian and at the same time bombards you with impossible stuff that just fits nonetheless.

    ReplyDelete