For me writing is one of the most enjoyable, but frustrating and anxiety causing things in my life. I've published dozens of educational and training books and a ton of articles and tutorials and scripts over the course of my life, as well as a secret cache of creative writing that usually I just keep for myself. But when I set out to write for somebody else, whether it's a creative project or not, I have to find that special place in my mind where I allow myself to move on and actually be productive. Maybe some of you will resonate along with this feeling, but I really am, my own worst enemy, and I put myself through a neurotic hell, before even the first words hit my keyboard. Writing this course alone, I went through dozens of drafts and edits. The entire time, I chewed myself up on the inside. Writing and communicating your honest ideas to the world, it can be as daunting and traumatizing as dancing naked in front of a giant audience. It's just not a pretty thought to think about. You have to find your comfort zone, and you have to allow yourself the room to be creative, and think beyond the simple mechanics of your game, and get into the creative guts of why these things happen the way they do. Explore the emotions of the game and, in doing so, you're going to bring a lot of yourself into it. To do that, I want to tell you about the single best advice I've gotten from a writing teacher. A teacher I only had for a short period of time, a guy named Michael McCarthy. Michael laid out a great creative process that helped me get over this nausea I have about writing and and when I follow it, it works really well. First dedicate a routine for yourself. Set aside a number of minutes per day, where you do nothing but prepare and write. When you're on a project like a game you wanna create, take a week and everyday of that week, set aside 60 minutes. Find a place where it's quiet and no one is gonna bother you. And your not gonna distract yourself with emails or calls or games or anything. That sixty minutes and in that place your spending your time purely on your story. Set a timer, and spend the first 15 minutes reading. Read anything. Read the paper, read a magazine, read a letter, read a book. Just don't read what you've written before. It gets you all judgey about your own stuff, and definitely do not get on the internet. The Internet's a black-hole of time with Facebook and Twitter and Google and all that. Those 15 minutes are going to turn into an hour easy, before you even know it. The next 15 minutes, spend writing out those single line ideas. Pepper that sheet of paper with scribbles and thoughts about that single subject. Like the sheet of ideas on why the heroes goal in your game is so important. If you get to the end of that sheet and you still have some of that 15 minutes left, start a new sheet, but stay on that same idea. With some practice, don't be surprised you're gonna wind up with multiple sheets of paper in just 15 minutes, where you've got 50 or 60 ideas scribbled out. And that's great. Then take a one or two minute break and don't do anything. Sit there and just stare at something. Stare at the wall. Stare at the ceiling. Stare at the cockroaches in your kitchen. Just clear your mind. Don't let the idea of dancing naked in front of that audience come into your head. There's just under 30 minutes left of your hour, and in that time, take a look and review the idea sheet you just wrote. And start making the connections that we talked about in the last lecture. Write that out in a paragraph form on a new sheet of paper, on those six to ten ideas and how they correlate to each other, and how they build on top of each other to craft a richer description of your starting idea. When 60 minutes is up, stop and walk away, and get on with the rest of your day. Now it's okay to maybe go a minute over here or there, but don't run wild at this point. Keep it to an hour. But the deal is, commit to that hour fully, every single day for that week. By the end of that week you should have some pretty good, fleshed-out ideas for your goals and your settings and your characters. You can easily build on this every week. Slowly increase this sacred time you spend writing on your game. Maybe week two, you spend 75 minutes a day, instead of 60. But you have to stay consistent with it. This is key. Don't let anything pull you away before that time is up. And don't let it keep you there longer than that time. That discipline, when I use it, really helps me get over my own fears, and regiments me into writing so many things that I've been most proud of. Some of these things I actually share with people, and I don't feel like I'm dancing naked in front of an audience. Try it out. Maybe it's gonna work for you too.
