A Creative Retrospective

 

A Creative Retrospective

A very many years ago, I was hyper focused on fiction writing. I wrote a lot of short stories and shopped them around. A few were published, which was always exciting. Life came along, though, and I had to focus my time on other efforts. If you've read about my life as a gamer, you know that it was only a couple of years ago that I got back into role-playing games. (If you've braved my Off the Dice interview on Time2Tabletop, you know even more about me.)

Lately, I've been thinking it's time to get back into writing as well.

To that end, I recently did a little ego-surfing to see if I could track down my older works. I was pleased to see Bewildering Stories, a site that had shown me a lot of love and encouragement back in the day, is still alive and publishing. My bio for that site is still active. It lists all my short stories published there. Other markets that published my work no longer exist, such as Planet Magazine (an online magazine that published two of my short stories about a rat anthropologist named Thomas Grayweed), and Dreamforge WebZine, which published a short story called Genetic Popularity. To be fair regarding DreamForge, there does appear to still be a DreamForge Magazine but I do not know whether it is the Dreamforge that published me back in 2003.

But whether a magazine is still active is not the point of my conversation.

What I found most interesting was my perceptions and attitudes toward my old work now that I'm looking at it some 15 years later. I think every artist looks at their work no matter where it lies on their personal space-time continuum with a mixture of accomplishment and disappointment. The sense of accomplishment comes from simply completing the creative endeavor and maybe, if one's talent and hard work aligns with the stars, even achieving what one set out to do The disappointment is the curse of every creative--the critical eye that sees only the mistakes, the shortcomings, the areas that should have been done better. This battle is, of course, all wrapped up in ego and feels particularly powerful immediately after a work is completed. It's the most miserable part of being a creative.

In this case, however, I was looking back on work from 15 years ago. I discovered that I felt no particular attachment to it. In fact, I was able to come to it just as any other reader might come to it. I could consume it just as any other reader might. I could critique it just as any other reader would too. It was an interesting experience.

In that context, I can safely say that some of my old work isn't half bad. I still feel particularly happy about one short story called "Developer No." Other work, though, is a bit rough. I can certainly see where there is room for improvement. I can see missed opportunities where I could have made a much richer story. I can also see the fails where before I had been blind to them.

Ultimately, I find this exercise helpful because it can, and hopefully will, improve my storytelling. That sort of growth will benefit my players as I apply what I learn to my current Dungeons and Dragons campaign. It will help me tell stories in other role-playing games. It will help if I return to trying my hand at writing short stories. We'll see, I suppose. 

In the meantime, I'll be re-posting some of my older works here (the ones that were published in markets that no longer exist). I might even post the original work and a current re-write. That would be a fun, and even educational, exercise I think. You should also wander over to Bewildering Stories and see what I published in that market.

To all of you creative folks out there, I want to close with what I hope are hopeful words.

Don't get discouraged.

Continuously improve your craft no matter the nature of your creativity, from being a dungeon master, to a painter, to a song writer, a crafter, a builder, a YouTuber, or anything else.

Accept constructive criticism and reject haters. Yes, sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference. But if you do a little soul-searching, and are honest with yourself, I think deep down inside you'll know one from the other.

Above all, keep on creating!

Cheers.

Note: The header picture is from Pixabay.

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• Epic Gnomish Inventing
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  Collection of gnome-related backgrounds, feats, magic items, and more.
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• The WhatNot Shop's Common Curiosities and Trivial Trinkets
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