Friday 7th August 2020

I’ve often likened my creativity to a Mana bar, like you get in videogames.  As I work on creative enterprises, I pull from that Mana bar.  If I’m not careful, I will drain it dry.

To recharge it, I need to consume.  I’m not talking actual food but books, TV, videogames.  I need to live for a time in other people’s worlds before I’m ready to work on my own once again.

I have to acknowledge that I’ve worked extremely hard these last couple of months.  On a day to day basis, I certainly haven’t felt productive, but looking back, I can see myself level up my skills around theme, producing an outline and a bunch of synopsises.  I’ve worked on new ideas.  I’ve even done a rewrite.  Whatever I thought on a day to day basis (and you can read The Climb and find out), I’m starting to look back on Lockdown as an incredibly productive period.

I don’t feel like I NEED to recharge right now, which is probably where some of my guilt comes from.  I’m ready to jump into another project.  Only facts that are stopping me are that I want to keep my next few weeks free before starting anything major, as well as not knowing what I should be working on.

The Xbox is a reward to myself for those months of work… although now I have just received Shadowlands Beta I have even more to keep me occupied.  It’s a chance to recharge; a way to unwind; something to divert my attention whilst I wait.

I suppose I should take the fact that I don’t feel creatively exhausted right now as a good sign.  But there’s part of me that feels like I should be doing… something:  reading up on some writing technique, or practising some other media form.

What I have to tell myself is that I can do those things:  all the work I did on theme back in April was a result of watching a load of youtube videos on Christopher Nolan and spinning it out from there.  I certainly wasn’t spending every waking moment working on them.

I guess, just like any human, I get impatient and frustrated from time to time.  I have so much I want to do and I have to stop myself sometimes and ease off the gas.  The goal is to reach the end destination, not burn the engine out trying to break records for getting there.  It’s a marathon not a sprint.

And so it’s good to take times like these and recharge.  Most importantly, I need to start to realise that immersing myself in story whether it be a book, a videogame or a TV series, is work.  Fortnite is chilling out.  It’s purely letting off steam.  Warcraft on the other hand is something much more linked to my creative cycle.  It’s still fun and relaxing (well, most of the time) but it serves a secondary purpose that a game like Fortnite doesn’t.

I need to recognise the difference.

Right now, I could do with a bit of both.  I’ve got a natural break between projects to goof off for a while.  And whilst my mana bar isn’t drained, a top up could never hurt.

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