ideas guy

Recently, I've been really stuck on the thought of "I HAVE GOT TO MAKE SOMETHING THAT OTHER PEOPLE CAN SEE OR ELSE I WILL GO INSANE" -- not to say that I haven't thought like this for literal years, but as I've been getting older, it's been becoming an increasingly louder nagging thought in my mind. As a single person who's not really skilled at writing prose and has no other real creative skill outside of drawing, that has always limited me on how exactly I could tell my stories. When I was much younger, I had lots of grandiose ideas of what I could make Some Far Away Day In The Future with my (frankly awful) stories -- something a lot of people could probably relate to.

As I've gotten older, obviously, I've come to realize that making anything is hard, especially when you're just one little guy. In high school, I started to really get back into reading and I thought, "I like reading, why don't I write my stories out like this? I could make a book!" which quickly blew up on itself as I realized, as much as I enjoy reading, and as much as I enjoy the physical act of writing (both on paper and typing), actually thinking about what words I would use is hard. I would say I'm someone who's not very good with flowery, pretty language and I really prefer to write dialog over actions, and when I DO write actions, I find it easier describing them as-is, versus using nicer language to dress up the descriptions. All that to say, my writing was incredibly boring to read, and if I could've written everything in a more screenplay script style and called it a day, I would've (Not really though, as that version of events was extremely outdated and I would've been extremely embarrassed if I had ever put it out into the world like that!).

With writing out the window, that really left me in a weird limbo spot for a few years. Everything else seemed just too far out of reach for me to do alone; I dabbled with the idea of making a game using RPGMaker for a while before ultimately canning that since I've never known how to do pixel art nor was it something I enjoyed making (even though I have such a love for RPGMaker games!), I tried to learn 3D modeling as I had always enjoyed 3D animation and learned it in my early teens through MMD (MikuMikuDance) but found myself extremely frustrated with 3D modeling and, of course, ultimately not enjoying it as much as I enjoyed animating. There was also 2D animation, which I've dabbled in only a little bit compared to 3D, but was much more time consuming and ultimately something that, while fun for a bit, was something I did not want to be doing for ages.

I felt awful, I kept making excuses with myself that it was actually okay I was letting time fly past while I made nothing, because I kept changing things over and over and over again, for years, unhappy with the stories I was trying to make, that I kind of accepted that I would never make anything worthwhile in my life, and that, oh my god, I'm the "ideas guy" who has ideas but can't/won't make anything..!!

As I mentioned earlier, this has been something that's been gnawing at me a lot more recently. I've allowed myself to sit down and really think on this, if I truly do want to make something, would I be okay with allowing myself to make something bad, and struggle with making it? Because, no matter what, whatever I chose to do, it would probably come out pretty bad. But it would exist. And I really, really need something to exist, something that I made.

I won't say here what I've been thinking of doing, as I don't want to put it out there into the world until I'm truly 100% committed to it, but what I HAVE been doing is finally writing everything out. I already did a (not so brief) events summary overview thing of everything, beginning to almost end, and now I'm doing the "real" "first rough draft" of it all, to then work off of later after polishing it, and I've been actually really enjoying it. The first part, the summary of everything took me about a month on and off to finish, and now every day since finishing I've been working on that first draft, whenever I have free time and I'm bored, and it's been really therapeutic almost to be working on it, rather than spending that time doing something else, like sitting on my ass and scrolling on my phone. That, and, being able to take everything out of my head and put it down onto something (solely for future me to work off of, since this thing won't ever be seen by anyone else but me and maybe a few friends) that I can then look at and reread has been so... Wonderfully strange. Being able to write it all down while telling myself that it can be messy and a bit clunky, as long as I know what is meant by everything, has been very freeing. I also just really enjoy writing on paper, as a bonus, though I plan to type it all up once I finish, to edit it.

All this to say, I'm feeling giddy, I'm having a gay old time, and I just really wanted to write something about all of this. I fear it'll take me a long while to finish this first part of it all, so who knows when I'll actually be able to make The Thing ... I don't know, but that's okay.