I have a long-standing fascination with Peter Molyneux and the works associated with him. To some extent, leading others in making a new thing is about selling the dream, making it a mythology as you go. Molyneux was famous for talking big. His studios and the teams he led made some extraordinary works. The ideas were always a little bigger than the products. In my mind, this benefitted them before, during, and after.

Eventually, most people didn't see it that way. When the games he and his teams made stopped seeming extraordinary in any quality, and when the public lost all patience with him and his visionary style - these seemed to happen at the same time - the backlash was severe, downright mean-spirited, and frankly vicious and hateful. It was so brutal, and the difficulties of half-failed projects on top of that, that he declared he was going to stop talking up his games. Generally, that's what he's done for the last 5-7 years.

Curiously, his company has released one minor game in that time. It's so uninteresting - I played it for a couple hours - that Wikipedia doesn't have an entry on it after 4 years.

The message implied - almost expressed directly - is that in some sense this is his unique way of working (that's basically what he says) and a gift (it is, though I haven't heard him say it) and somehow related to the creativity of the games (it is, and that should be obvious). People focus on the pragmatic question of whether the released product delivers on the promises in some bullet-by-bullet feature sense. They get disappointed. They believed the talk. They wanted to believe it. The dream was a beautiful one. Then their disappointment affects their impression of what did release.

I've noticed the gaming public - the vocal complainers about things not working - going beyond mere complaint and into insult and derogation and contempt - can be quite spoiled. Nobody who knows how a game is made, who has any idea how much work that takes and from how many people - and this is true about software in general, or anything very involved, with long development cycles - should feel justified in being so bratty and mean about the failures. Fortunately, most who know aren't bratty and mean about it. Knowing is enough.

Games are always about more than meets the eye. A board game involves - what, little plastic tokens? Slips of cardboard? A video game involves - what, changing the colors of dots on a screen? A few buttons to press? These things are incredibly insubstantial. The substance almost all happens up here, in the mind.

Games associated with Peter Molyneux are hit and miss. This is true of any creative person or group. The most pedigreed ones learn how to hide away their least interesting work. They go on and focus on the next great big idea, and realizing it through a thousand and one great little ideas. The first Fable was groundbreaking. It was a watershed in the development of RPGs as a form. The sequels? Well, I didn't play them. But they weren't quite so groundbreaking, and in the span of a decade or more working on all this, the team, and its outspoken lead, certainly had time to make a bunch of promises that never materialized. But that's what you do - you give it everything you've got, and the spaghetti that doesn't stick on the wall, you don't cry about it.

What the naysayers and wisecrackers and haters of Peter Molyneux fail to recognize is that games from his studios have often enough been cutting-edge. They've introduced new ideas and forms. Some of the fallout of that is that they may not be as fully realized as the products of teams who rely more heavily on existing tropes, grinding on the next shipping. All game development is hard, in fact it's very hard, but when you take bigger risks, you face bigger unknowns. A lower proportion of what you propose will pan out.

If you look at Elon Musk, you see a similar pattern. How many of us drive a Tesla? Are we using his batteries daily? Has anyone gone to Mars, or even the Moon, lately? Yet we realize - many of us - that the hype and the machine are not entirely separable. No one is accusing Elon Musk of not working hard. No one is accusing him of lacking vision, or not bothering to communicate it. A few people think he's a dumb figurehead, but they're either ignorant or high on themselves.

Success is the result of a dream that carries on, outlasting countless failures.

(These were my thoughts while reading the beginning of a newer interview with the dude in question, here.)

Breakfast Breaks

If you want to figure out and apply truth in complicated situations, there's a technique. There are two parts, and everyone can improve at both.

First, seek out evidence. Focus as closely as possible on what are especially more likely to be facts - the "facts" that have the best chance to be factual. When you get a few, you will find that many of these are quite boring. It's easy to overlook them.

The secret is to find the most certain (ie, least uncertain) of relevant facts. You know belief is all a gamble, but you are playing the long game and looking for the best gambles. How? So, do you really want to identify the best facts? The trick is extreme sensitivity and openness to the possibility that a "true fact" isn't precise, accurate, or true. That's the only way you can find the really good bets.

But when you do, the really good bets will (usually) look to others like any other statement. Often they are boring. The difference is that on careful examination, you could find no cracks. You strove to break these eggs, began to make an omelette over and over, but you couldn't break one or two. Those may be qualitatively different, more resilient. From a distance, without careful examination, such pleasant tints of nothingness usually don't appear. All the statements will seem like eggs, and most of the time, eggs aren't breaking. Most of the time, eggs are eggs. Most of the time, you can break them and make an omelette if you want. Most of the time, facts are facts. Here, though, you want to make a non-omelette with the rare eggs that don't break.

Second, find the most basic possible logic. The simpler the better. This, too, will seem boring. Like the egg-sorting, it will seem meaningless to the uninitiated, or to those who aren't applying the technique in this context. Simple logic isn't impressive. Simple logic may make you look naive.

So you have to stop to ask yourself. Are you trying to impress people, or do you want to make a non-omelette with the rare eggs that don't break? Making an omelette - impressing others - is a different pastime with different demands, sometimes quite opposed to what's needed for the non-omelette - ie, for finding and applying truth as well as possible. You have to decide what you're trying to do, discern/predict or persuade, and remember not to forget that decision.

It's easy to make an assumption for today and then misplace the memo-to-self that this was an assumption. Everyone does this. Not doing this is very difficult, and you need to choose your battles. In trying to persuade others, we often wind up forgetting about the things we didn't really know. We believe we know them. It's inefficient to consider all the ways we don't know what we're taking about when we're trying to push someone else to decide right now. And on the other side, it's inefficient to worry how others will take things when we're trying to discern and predict as accurately/precisely as possible.

Logic is brittle. It's both fragile and immensely strong. Your best bet with logic is to use the simplest logic. Just as you did for the facts that feed logic, you want to put aside how boring or clever or hurtful or nice or impressive or awkward this is, and look for the ordinary eggs (or ordinary cardboard egg cartons now, if you like) that turn out to be extraordinary by not cracking. The unambiguity of logic can make this logic-soundness egg-carton-sorting much easier than in the preceding "true or false facts" step. Just keep the logic ultra-simple, and if the facts it's working with really don't break, then the result of the logic is guaranteed. The trick is to make sure the logic is correct. It is not sophistication. It is correctness. Nature does not award bonus points or put stickers on more complicated solutions: logic that works works. Humans are not good at complex logical chains. We can only manage this by breaking it all down and using the simplest pieces.

(I can hear some of you thinking, as I am, that this is really my own limitation, which I'm trying to impose on others. Maybe. But I'll bet heavily that it applies no less if you have the highest IQ in the world, and if you do, I bet you already know it.)

This approach to expanding what you know runs against the social intuition that says objectivity and prediction are sophisticated and should involve impressive facts and mind-boggling reasoning. Good technique turns out, very often, to demand quite the opposite.

Let's recap:

- One, the "facts" must be unassailable or as close to that as possible (which means they often won't be surprising or appear any different from other statements that most people take as givens).

- Two, the logic must be unassailable (which means that every piece of logic must be made as simple as humanly possible).

This level of care over certainty is crucial in math, science, engineering, etc. It's how you make sure Mars orbiters don't crash into Mars after assuming the wrong measurement unit in some software recess. It's a lot of what's implied by "rocket science," yet it's accessible to everyone with a bit of practice.

It won't tell you everything. But it will give your perspective on a topic a solid skeleton. With the best skeleton you can get, you'll find a lot else works better. Muscles can do a lot with a skeleton. The sequoia of intuition begins to grow in fertile mud; speculation, while often fun, may not be so idle now, thanks to all the homework. And you may find yourself understanding more of what people tell you, and remembering it better.

We tend to separate "rocket science" and "mathematical proof" from everyday life. In complex real-life scenarios, it doesn't get any less important to find the core, most probable facts. And avoiding logical errors by keeping logic extremely simple doesn't get any less important. It's just that humans need initial training and continual practice to manage that. And most of us, at best, get that training in one or two areas, and don't apply it in other scenarios where we don't recognize it's needed.

What are the core, least fallible facts? What is the simplest, least fallible logic? Start there, if you can. Then take all the feedback you can get.

Either that or recognize that you are not discerning truths to use in understanding how stuff works and make accurate predictions. If you want to relate to other people and perhaps convince them, it's about relating to other people. Then the thing to understand is how they feel, and how you feel, and what stories led or can lead to those feelings. Sometimes it's also about using specific persuasive techniques, either to trick people into agreeing, or to help them find an idea - one you want them to remember and then act on - to be especially memorable. There are times when all of us appreciate the latter (an illustration that hits home), and occasionally most of us also can appreciate the former (just the right push), if it's done with care and concern for our own amusement or best interests, or at least society's.

Grokking versus convincing - they're at odds, but sometimes you're lucky and they can happen half-decently at the same time. Think of both kinds of influence on others (or the world) as writing, for a moment. Writing often involves drafting "hot," without much filter, and later editing "cold," which is almost all filter and correction. We can to some extent combine these modes. It's possible to write a thing once, even creatively, and move on, because it doesn't particularly need editing, or we have more to work on.

I can't comment much on that combining. It applies in writing, and an analogous duality (synthesis of opposites) applies in debate and influence. Some people (I'm one) will find you much less convincing if you don't spend much time in the more objective mode. So to persuade them (me, often), don't be persuasive. Put objectivity and uncertainty first, for us, despite wanting and hoping to convince. (I'll give you a chance. I'll give you many. You're welcome. And thank you.) And on the other hand, sometimes intuition or inexplicable feelings guide us to truths. I'm not going to be a rules Nazi about the advice I'm giving. And I know that there's a lot I don't understand about how these two modes combine. Sometimes they can. Often that goes wrong, though.

If you want to discern truth and apply it constructively, use the two steps. They won't banish intuition or feelings. Those will wait in the periphery and will have useful or crucial things to say. But know the difference.

There are two kinds of perfectionism that are useful creatively.

One is what you could call "polishing perfectionism." That is, you care about every detail, because you know that the whole is made of parts, and anything off about one of them maybe really could negatively affect the whole. This is what most people usually mean by "perfectionism."

To counteract it, remember that in the beginning, there is nothing to polish. You can polish as you go, but that may be less than perfect as an approach. It can stop progress entirely, or short-circuit discovery. Polishing may be better - more perfect - later. (Perfectionists often like to procrastinate. Sneaky, maybe, but isn't it true?) Also, it helps to look at the words wabi-sabi and sprezzatura, and to remember that a lot of the charm of the hand-made is in the organic unity achieved from imperfect pieces. There is no such thing as every piece being perfect, only a perfect feeling of unity.

The other is what you could go all-out and describe as "creative perfectionism." That is, you are not motivated to make the kind of thing that already exists. It has to be new. (You can already see another bid for excessive procrastination, can't you?) This can work against craft, because so much of craft is learning from the masters and the skillful practitioners. Nothing is wholly new. Everything's made of quarks and bosons and spacetime, at the bottom. Everything's a pattern. All pattern is information, all information pattern. But patterns that are substantially fresh and new and exciting - this is entirely possible. Finding these can be very difficult, so creative perfectionism is about searching for what's actually new and good, not just settling for the tried and true, sometimes not even happy with "tried and true, with a twist." Like polishing perfectionism, this can block you, first because it deemphasizes craft, and second because while you are searching for the actually new, you are often not busy practicing.

To counteract this kind of perfectionism, remember that, much as polish can come later, and even better for that, inspiration, too, can come later. It's often in the middle of work that you see how to twist and turn and end up with something new. You are often very well served to begin with craft, begin with the tried and true, and keep pushing as you go for something unexpected. In other words, it is a near-constant frame of mind. It is usually not something accomplished up front, before even beginning.

You may be prone to both kinds of perfectionism, and to procrastination. I am, so I know what that's like. I have no other data, but my understanding is that these all tend to go together. One of the Achilles heels of people with perfectionism is that we know it can push what we do to a higher level. But we also know how exhausting that can be. As the saying goes, "There's the first 80%, and then the other 80%." There's an enormous difference between "maybe good enough" and "we did everything possible." Sometimes that difference is at least as much effort as it took to get to "maybe good enough." It can even become far, far more effort. But it's also true that it's absolutely necessary to finish things. People with a perfectionistic bent do not suddenly become deaf and blind when they accept that much of what they do will not be finished to their satisfaction, and that they will experiment with and practice on a lot that is hardly new at all. As long as you keep the searching instinct alive, and keep moving in one sense or another, your perfectionism is doing what it needs to do.

Generally the advice when writing is to pick a topic and cleave to that topic with a vengeance.

There's another approach, though - what you might call "jumping off." Billy Collins these days is the most popular poet in America, some say the new Robert Frost in that sense (though recently Amanda Gorman's got a lot of lift). He describes the "jumping off" approach as starting with a very specific, concrete, easily-imagined thing. It could be a tiny detail. It could be anything you want, but it helps if it's firm enough to hook people and they have no trouble visualizing right off the bat. (Incidentally, "right off the bat" is easy to visualize but spoken by rote. Only rarely will someone imagine the ball. A less remarked on visual will be more actually visual. But it may suffice to take the cliche out of its usual uniform: "as the leather orb splits from a crack of wood" or whatever.)

I mean, let's call that the "diving board." You really can't bounce up and down on a diving board that isn't there. It's gotta be there. And if not, you've gotta have something to put your feet on and jump off of, regardless. Otherwise you won't be diving.

The point is, after you've bounced up and down a couple times, or done a run-and-jump, you're in the air, subject to gravity and air resistance and how you pirouette in free fall.

In this kind of writing, where you end up isn't known to you when you start. Nor do you expect to end up in a place and a fashion that could be predicted from the diving board. That's kinda the whole point.

Maybe the easiest format of all for this is the haiku. Pick two aspects of nature. Now write a few words linking one to the other.

Bippity boppit

bippity boppity boo

ty boppity boo.

With so few moving parts, it's easy to imagine that you don't know the finale when you set down the overture. You could know, of course. But you could also pick a rock and jump off. You have 17 syllables to fall at most. (All right all right, syllable count isn't that strict in traditional haiku, but you get the idea.)

The "jumping off" approach overlaps with "pantsing" (writing a story without an outline, ie, by the seat of your pants) but can differ in emphasis. The one is about starting zoomed in to a detail and discovering a larger tableau in stained glass, potentially universal - beginning and end stuck together with magical thinking or sheer voodoo. The other is about the intoxication of real life that we all feel: we don't know what's going to happen next, even though we have a hand in directing it.

In both cases, the start and the end are different, and the latter isn't quite predictable from the former, though it's connected in a way that makes sense step by step - otherwise it wouldn't be believable, compelling, moving, elevating, tragic, etc.

What's interesting about the jumping off approach is that the end can be - and should be - so radically different from the start. Billy Collins describes this in various ways, especially as "a left turn somewhere." To be sure, full narrative should have twists, too. We've got some overlap here, but there's also parallax.

Maybe that's the best way I can put it. You begin a "jumping off" piece with a super vivid hook that doesn't have to carry any import. The import is where it goes, how you zoom out. As you zoom out, you notice this slippage between where you were and where you seemed to be heading and where you are. It's like looking out the window of a moving car: the planes of distances seem to disagree on how fast you're moving - and whether you're moving at all. But when you look closely, there is a progression. The static background and the blurred foreground are interconnected, flat bead by flat bead, billboard sprite by billboard sprite. You know it's all one big block of invisible jello out there, wobbling, with those moving pieces you see stuck in it, waving about at different distances.

That's a bad metaphor. I won't defend it, but I'm too lazy to try harder. Never mind the jello. But I'll stick with the parallax. I think that can be useful. Also the diving board (probably one thing Billy Collins said, but other writers do, a useful cliche). And the relation to haiku, and storytelling in general, but the claim of at least a little distinction.

In a short story, the parallax between beginning and end is about some discrete realization, which usually is either in the character, or in you about the character. Stories without character aren't stories, and short stories are short. This may sound a little pat, but there aren't too many other options, if you think about it. (Try, though. Distrust what sounds a little pat. Even a small exception is interesting.)

In a "jumping off" poem, the parallax is the sleight of hand of a daydream. You take some perhaps mundane but vivid focal point, and then you progress by accelerating shades to daydream about something entirely different, but you leave a trail of breadcrumbs as to how you went.

We started with a diving board. Now we are escaping the Minotaur's labyrinth. What does the labyrinth mean for us as living creatures? What might it mean that isn't that, or that, or that?

I've written hundreds of poems, some really quickly, some through hundreds of revisions spanning years. One thing that's pretty consistent is that a lot of what I think about is - I'm worrying about the poem getting misread. So I'm removing interpretations I don't like, ones I didn't intend. Poetry is inherently multivalent. You're leaving stuff open. You throw open the doors. And you don't know what will walk in - or crawl in - fly in - scuttle in - from your unconscious - from sheer chance - let alone what will come in when a reader gets to the door. But you leave that door open, or it wouldn't be a poem. Sometimes it's only a crack. Sometimes you blow down the whole wall. Sometimes you leave nothing standing but a few chairs and potted plants.

But it's fairly consistent - at least for me - that I have to put in effort to remove interpretations I just don't want to be part of my poem.

The same goes when I write anything - when anyone writes anything - or says anything - whispers anything when alone in nature. It takes effort to cut out misinterpretation.

And if you try too hard at that, you wonder if you're killing everything vibrant. Sometimes you're worrying that you'll kill it all with any further effort whatsoever. Can't you just drop the words like - I don't know, flower petals in the sand at the beach on a windless afternoon, and whatever shape they make, that's the shape they make?

Sometimes you get stubborn. You know you could be misconstrued, and you think, goddamn you, I am not excising this tumor, and you're putting it here, not me. So if you want to take this gory mass through the door with you? Ok. Go ahead. That's you.

But when you invite like that, it continues to worry you. And you start to think, wait a minute, is this why psychopaths are a little more likely to be artists? No fear. Wouldn't that be nice. You just go with it. Someone wants to misinterpret? Fuck 'em. Who cares. Maybe they'll fawn on you anyway. You want them to misinterpret. You meant for them to.

A poem is simultaneously the most genuine and the most artificial expression.

Artificiality still lives fully in natural law. There is no quite unnatural sound or thought. Thoughts are the sounds of the mind, feelings the fragrances.

A poem I wrote in college, toward the last line, mixes the smell of someone taking a crap in a cafe bathroom - only hinted at, but it's there - with the taste of the coffee. That was fully intended. (I mean, it happened. It was part of the memory.) It probably doesn't strike many people as a pleasant or poetic effect, but I wanted to see if I could make it work, make it contribute. Usually I'm a bit embarrassed when I see those last lines, but I worked and reworked the poem enough that I no longer feel like changing it. If that bit sucks - or stinks, more like - or sucks while stinking - then at least I'm proud of a lot of the rest. I don't know what the detail means. But it happened, and it was weird. It means whatever the reality means.

Writing is impression management, but that doesn't mean you have to write like a corporate manager. You may not be aware that you're managing anything. Maybe you aren't. Maybe you aren't even writing when you're writing.

The question is ultimately not, as it is for many when they write, "Am I a good, likable person?" Nor is it "Will someone hire me at a good salary?" Nor "What cause shall I promote today?"

It's some other question, which is why you might leave unpleasant interpretations in, out of respect for an ear that says "But this is more interesting with than without. I am not going to knock down a nest of sparrow eggs to shake out a spider."

Please forgive the footprints and bragplaints

You know you're a writer when writing is a disease. But having the disease doesn't make you any good.

I can't stop myself from writing. Being addicted to it is a skill I chose to learn, and I took specific steps, and eventually found myself dependent on the drug. I made myself an alcoholic of words. It happened by degrees, ones I chose. But now I can't undo it.

As for what it takes to turn the disease into being any good, I don't know. I'll tell you if I'm ever any good.

Theoretically antsy

I've always found it very mysterious that when you break a glass, there are pieces on the floor a while, and then they are gone. You keep finding and stepping on little shards you've overlooked. Then suddenly there are no more and you forget it ever happened, even though, you know with the assurance of a cardinal, there's still glass on the floor. There's always just one more tiny piece. You can pick up a long trail of them until the Earth is swallowed up by the Sun. But eventually you don't, and instead you forget, and because you have forgotten, the floor is free of glass, and never bites your foot.