Art And Fear

Some years back, I read the book The Artist's Way, which is a program for creativity through writing discipline.  It was useful to me a couple run throughs, and one of the key points is that creativity comes from the discipline of just writing... good or bad... every day.

I read Art and Fear more recently, and the authors related a story about a college art class in which the professor split the students into two groups.  The first he would grade on one project alone for the whole semester, but it had to be completely perfect in every way.  The other group he graded solely on quantity; they had to produce something every day, even if it turned out terrible.  What the professor found is that even though the second group produced a lot of crap, they also produced as a group, the best work by the end of the semester, even though the other group was expected to.

That is something that I find helpful if I can hold on to it.

I am going to try to set a challenge for myself with that idea in mind.

It is October.

For this month, my goal is to try to write a mini game every day.  I will give myself the leeway to go back to previous games or previous ideas and re-skin them, or re-imagine them if something really interesting comes to mind, but the point is to try by virtue of quantity, to find something good in the lot... to capture creative inspiration hiding in the clutter.

We'll see how this goes!