Do What You Want: A Hobbyist Mantra

I Think You Should Leave is a very quotable show. A lot of the bits have entered my vocabulary, to the joy and annoyance of the people around me. One of those was "Do what you want." from the Save Corncob TV episode. Eventually, I started saying it out of context as ironic advice. Then it stopped being ironic.

I think it's really good advice. For life, for writing, for creative work of any kind.

Writing Advice

I see great advice all the time. The kind that makes you want to write it down somewhere so you never forget it. I am, obviously, a big fan of great advice.

I also see people ignore great advice all the time. They plan their first D&D game as a ten-year campaign in a vast original fantasy world. They prep pages of bland backstory for each NPC instead of the dungeon that's coming up next session. They write modules where the PCs are literal Nazis, insisting that they'll get the optics right where others have failed. It's infuriating as a veteran of the hobby to watch people make the same mistakes over and over again. You just want to shake them and scream "keep it simple stupid!" until they listen.

If you're new to the hobby, hear this: fuck us old-timers. Do what you want.

Will that ten-year campaign fall apart within three months? Probably. But who cares? This is a hobby that you're doing for fun. Don't treat creative work like a grind, where every hour spent on an idea that never reached the table is an hour wasted. That was time spent where the creative juices were flowing and the creative muscles were building, where the endless daydreaming finally lead to something written on the page. 

Those NPCs may be generic and way too detailed in all the wrong ways, but they're yours. Have none of us ever enjoyed playing the edgy half-elf ranger with a fallen noble past, who's a tenth as compelling as Aragorn? It feels different to play it yourself, and with the passion you feel for them, it will probably work far greater at your table than it does on the page. And so what if you end up underprepared for the next session. Doesn't that describe most sessions anyways?

Will you finally succeed at writing a good module where the PCs are Nazis? No, god damnit, and why do you people keep trying? It's lefties that do it too! It drives me crazy! But why should you care what I think? If that's the project you really want to work on, I'm going to hate it, and I sincerely hope you eventually realize why, but you should do it if that's what it takes to get your creative gears turning. It's good to make mistakes. You learn a lot more from experience than you ever do from a lecture.

Reject Negativity

A lot of the sentiment around giving advice turns negative quick, by which I mean, it punishes bad form rather than encouraging good form. And while that punishment leads some people to better design, it leads others to avoid designing at all, for fear of failure or shame. My point here is not that any of this advice is bad, but that if following it would lead you to not create, then don't follow it.

Some people will say that's okay, and that constraints encourage creativity, and that they'd rather see quality over quantity. That's all good advice that I agree with. But feel free to ignore it! They can't stop you! Do what you want!

Even when the original advice isn't negative, it will find a way to morph and form dogma which gets followed beyond the original advice it's trying to convey. "I see lots of newbies spend too much time making their scenario pretty, when that time would be better spent writing a better scenario" morphs into "don't make your scenarios pretty" which morphs into "pretty scenarios are bad." And that last sentence is the one that gets stuck in people's heads, not the good advice that spawned it.

Ignore that negative advice outright. And treat that good starting advice like a suggestion that you should follow if you can, but discard if it gets in your way.

A Hobbyist Mantra

There is a sea of great advice out there, and you should swim through it, but you need precisely none of it to start creating. Focus on doing what you want to do right now, today, this very minute, and cook it up while the iron is hot.

Do what you want!