Welcome Bonnie Burton to WWdN! They’re sharing this special guest post with us while Wil Wheaton is at sea. Find more of her work at CNET and GRRL. They’re the genuine (wait for it) best.
Pssst…. you… yeah you! Come closer. I have a super-secret secret to tell you about writers. Not only are we really good at taking a tiny idea like a time-traveling barista or a dog who can solve murders into a novel or a screenplay, we’re even better at taking a very long time getting those precious ideas onto paper.
One of the things we hate to do most is sit in front of a computer as it mocks us with a blinking cursor on a blank screen. Long before social media came to our rescue by distracting us from deadlines for hours, we would sit and have a staring fight with our screen saver. I’ve aced every game that came with my computer. You’re looking at the Queen of Solitaire.
Procrastination is the worst kind of frenemy. It makes you believe that you’re a super writer with mutant typing abilities. You can binge watch all of “The Walking Dead” and “Murder She Wrote” and still make your deadline. Sure, ya can.
That’s the problem. You want to believe that you’re are the master of your own destiny as the next Dorothy Parker or F. Scott Fitzgerald. But what you really are is an expert in zombie combat and ‘80s murder mystery TV shows.
But why do we give into the sweet seduction of doing anything but writing? Could it be our constant fears that the Fraud Police will show up at our front doors demanding that we finally admit we’re hacks and turn over our laptops?
Is the risk of failing worse than not trying at all? I know that it can be easier to believe you don’t suck as a writer, if you don’t write. But that’s not an option for me. If I don’t write regularly I get antsy. I start talking to myself in the grocery store. I begin to think I can telepathically communicate with my dog. So for all our sakes, I write.
Maybe we’re just worried about non-stop rejection from editors, publishers, producers and other writers. Or perhaps we’re still traumatized by those YouTube comments (the ones you’re never suppose to read) left on our last video post. Personally, it’s all the above.
I’ve published books and comics. I’ve written endless articles and columns. But when a deadline looms instead of tackling the project head-on, I often wait until the last possible moment — usually 3am — to write that commentary about sex robots or to finish up that half-written novel about a ghost who only haunts donut shops.
Eventually, I sit down, write my tome and then go to bed angry that I didn’t spend endless hours writing draft after draft, honing my skills like a real artist. But here’s the big secret. ALL writers procrastinate. It’s what we do; it’s part of the process. And even super-successful novelists can’t keep up with their own deadlines.
Just look at George R.R. Martin who just missed a deadline for his latest book. Sure that comedy skit on “Conan” last week wasn’t actually Martin himself shopping for a new bed or robbing banks instead of writing but honestly, I wouldn’t doubt it for a minute. It’s one thing to take forever to write another installment to a beloved book series, but it’s quite another when your fans never let you forget that your next book better kick ass.
In fact, I bet some of you are reading this guest blog instead of getting stuff done. So instead of feeling guilty for googling exes, reading obscure Wikipedia entries or checking your Twitter every 5 minutes, cut yourself some slack. Us writers find ideas from the weirdest places and sometimes from procrastination itself.
Knowing every single episode of “Magnum P.I.” by heart will really pay off for me when I finally write Tom Selleck’s unauthorized biography. Maybe giggling at all those Tumblr cat memes will motivate me to write the next cat comic to rival Garfield and Bill the Cat.
Welcome Brad Willis to WWdN! He’s sharing this special guest post with us while Wil Wheaton is at sea. Find more of his work at BradWillis.net and Rapid Eye Reality. He’s the genuine (guy-you-probably-haven’t-heard-of) best.
Along the path I walk my dogs, there is a place in the sidewalk where someone once saw an opportunity. On that day so many years ago, a contractor poured the wet concrete into its frame, took care to smooth it and make it level, and departed with hope the work would be left undisturbed.
On that same day, someone else crept up. That person knelt at the curb and, with no apparent concern for straight lines, scrawled a message for future walkers. It was a snapshot–a hot take, if you will–of whatever was happening in that vandal’s mind, a one-word ode to future generations of wide-eyed children and world-weary dog walkers:
BITCH
I see it every time I walk by, and I wonder just what was happening that day. I picture some kid with a stick in his hand. I see him looking over his shoulder as he drags the stick through the gravel and cement. I imagine him impressed with his ability to forever make his mark. That kid could’ve written anything.
That kid wrote: BITCH.
You can get a good measure of a man by putting him in reaching distance of some wet concrete.
Today, we all have a stick. We call it Twitter, Facebook, or whatever new thing gets angel-funded tomorrow. Every new day gives us a fresh square of wet concrete. Someone kills a police officer? Get out the stick. A police officer kills an unarmed person? Get out the stick. Politician says something terrible? Stick.
Though I was an early adopter in world of social media, it wasn’t until late 2012 that it started to give me pause. On the day Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 children and six members of the Sandy Hook Elementary staff, my immediate gut reaction was impossible sadness and confusion. Within hours, I saw this post from a guy with whom I went to high school.
I screen-capped it and put it in a folder on my desktop to remind me of the first time I thought, “This is what we’ve become. We don’t go back from this.”
It’s since been said a hundred times over: if the murder of 20 children doesn’t bring America together in change, nothing will.
“Get off your heals (sic),” that guy wrote on the day of the Sandy Hook massacre. What should’ve been a cringe-worthy and laughable misspelling looked more like prophecy to me.
No matter what happened—maybe ever again—the time for healing was done.
Welcome Angela Melick to WWdN! She’s sharing this special guest post with us while Wil Wheaton is at sea. Find more of her work at Wasted Talent and follow her on Twitter. She’s the genuine (Canadian) best.
When I was sixteen, I’d spend weekends with my dad at the driving range. Unlike most fathers, mine didn’t particularly enjoy golf. But, he was a career man, and he thought that lowering his score would make the many business-related golf outings he was made to attend run much smoother. Since I aspired to the same profession (engineering), I went along, and dad hoped that this head start would afford me an advantage he had lacked.
I’ve been in the field for almost a decade now, and I’ve never once been asked to a golf game in a business context. It seems to me like things are changing in business, especially in the world of High Tech. Sports was once a critical way to bond with a stranger. You could chat with anyone about last night’s game, and some of the biggest business deals were brokered on the putting green. These days, most of my coworkers will wave away discussions of the Local Sports Team with a disinterested shrug. High Tech is the realm of geeks, and while there are lots of geeks who love football and golf, such an interest can no longer be assumed.
What’s interesting to me is what’s replacing it, and I think that the new social bond between strangers could become geek culture. Sports metaphors still litter business discussions, but lately I’m just as likely to hear a Star Trek metaphor. The most heated debates in the office centre around the relative merits of different Sci-Fi franchises, or the latest superhero films. We bond over the many hours lost in Azeroth. We’ve had office LAN parties and onesie anime nights. I’ve successfully used the word “tsundere” in a business context. (Although, I once joked to a client that we could implement self-destruct into their product as a security feature and that fell flat – exercise your geekdom with caution.)
Okay, so I work for an unusual company. I would consider us on the fringe In a lot of ways, but I can also see this as a sign of things to come.
I was surprised to hear this year at CES that the CEO of Intel had hired a League of Legends coach. When I thought more about it, I realized how often I never get to meet my colleagues or clients in real life. Many of my projects are coordinated remotely, and my team is spread all over the world. There is no “local” sport my whole team can share. But there’s only one League.
Geekdom is attractive because of its accessibility. Anyone can be a gamer, anywhere on planet earth. Local terrain and climate are irrelevant. You don’t need to be tall, strong or a fast runner. You can start a match with your teammates instantly, globally. We work with our wits, so should we bond with them. Will I be brokering my future business deals in some auction house of some future MMO? I couldn’t say, and I can’t imagine it will be for awhile. But I do know I’d rather live in a world where my geek cred will do more for my business prospects than my golf swing.
Welcome Mikey Neumann to WWdN! He’s sharing this special guest post with us while Wil Wheaton is at sea. Check out more of Mikey’s work on his YouTube show, Movies with Mikey, his podcast with Wil Wheaton, TV Crimes, or just play any of the Borderlands games. He’s the genuine, shiningest best.
I like the word ‘hustle’ quite a lot. Even given the cheery, soft, non-committal nature of the consonants in the word, I like everything it represents about life. I have a lot of hustle. You may even remember me from an article I wrote on The Mary Sue not too long ago, in which I came out as an asexual, and how that pertains to the amount of work I generate. While I wouldn’t classify myself as aromantic (a word my spellcheck wants to change to aromatic,) so, regardless of my lingering musk, I pretty much stay out of the dating pool. Whether time or meeting the right person will change that remains to be seen. But for the current future, my relationships are to my friends and to my work, and all things being equal, oftentimes I create relationships that are one in the same. I create friendships that inevitably lead to working together down the line.
Or destroy said friendships. You know, it’s all a matter of perspective.
That sounds entirely too callous, but hopefully you understand my meaning. I love to entertain people. I’ve been doing it my entire life.
A lot of people ask me in their gentlest hypothetical-person-way, “Michael, how the hell do you find time to make so much stuff with a full-time job?” It’s really quite simple: you either make the time, or you don’t. I’m not attempting to nuzzle the very cockles of the frigid prison I call a heart, but I am illustrating my point as a means to say: you’re good the way you are and I’m good the way I am. I have no pets, no spouse, no children, and ostensibly, I come home every day to an empty house. I really don’t know anyone else that lives their life in such a way. I mean, most people in my position at least get a cat (the lowest maintenance of the pet world, though, certainly the dickishiest /dik-ish-ee-ust/ adj. 1. The categorically-highest level of being a dick one can achieve).
It also doesn’t hurt that I go to work every day to make videogames, many of which people run to as a means to escape when they come home from a job they find less fulfilling by a factor of ten or more. I make videogames. My heart is effulgent when I come home on most days. And yes, before you say it, I am the luckiest motherfucker this side of the [geographical landmark of your choosing that illustrates your point].
This is the turning into the longest not-humble brag of all time.
Sigh.
Okay.
Let’s start over.
Hello, my name is Mikey. All I care about in the world is spreading joy and making your day better than it was before I came into it. It’s an imperfect, and oftentimes, lonely existence that is not unlike “chasing the dragon,” so to speak. I am in a constant state of finding the next high, making the next thing, and pushing myself to the next good enough piece of art, whether music, video, game, or written medium.
And that’s my secret.
Do not be perfect. Perfect will kill you.
One-hundred-percent of my success can be attributed to knowing when to say, “this is good enough,” and move on. Randy Pitchford, my boss, confidant, and friend, taught me about this thing called, “The Asymptote of ‘Good Enough’.” It imagines a graph where the x-axis is time spent and the y-axis is entertainment you can offer an audience (this isn’t exactly his words, I’m paraphrasing in my own.) In the beginning, the effort you put in has an almost sky-rocketing effect on the entertainment you can offer an audience, but as you begin to approach a rough level of polish, the amount an audience can pull from it begins to slow. You can apply this to anything. If I write a joke, there are a non-binary amount of laughs I can pull from a given audience, but there is also a point where I should probably just write more jokes. Do you want to see a standup comic tell The Greatest Joke Ever Told™ or do you want to see ten-to-twenty really funny jokes? And with one very important twist, I think that’s the crux of everything I do. When writing these ten-to-twenty jokes, come at it from an angle no one will ever expect.
If you’re offering something fresh, you don’t have to be perfect.
I remember the first time I ever made a videogame trailer. It was for Borderlands 1. Now, bear in mind, I had never made a videogame trailer before and, all things being equal, I was incredibly naïve. But, at this time, Borderlands was the underdog. We were this plucky, weird little thing that no one was really talking about. Which was in my (and our) favor. In what I recall was four to five days, I had what you see here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdBFWti6mkg
That is just one of the places that trailer exists, and it has a million views. Hell, I found a Youtube video that was just “borderlands trailer song no heaven” and it had 700,000 views. Looking back at that trailer, all I see is imperfection. That trailer is the asymptote of Hot. Garbage. But so many of the things in that trailer came to define the brand, however inadvertently. The splattered paint, the messaging joking along with an audience, dancing Claptrap, the “Bazillions of guns” thing—it’s sort of amazing how much of this has survived through time.
And, though, it was not the next trailer I made, the Borderlands 2 “Doomsday” trailer was the natural evolution of all of this imperfection. Take everything I learned and crank it up to a bazillion (I see what I did there). The Doomsday trailer was a high watermark for my career as a filmmaker, and yeah, I mean that as it sounds. Part of what I was doing with the Borderlands marketing in my purview in charge of was pretty simple: make a piece of entertainment, don’t just sell the game. If you look out over the grand collection of Borderlands marketing on the internet, our goal was to entertain you, not market your face off. Some people are fans of Borderlands because all they’ve ever seen is the trailers and they got enough entertainment out of them to cosplay the characters, having never played the games. To some, this might somewhat ludicrous, but I think it’s a justification for how much leeway we had as a relatively small independent studio to be creative in how we approached communicating with the customer (thanks in large part to our publisher 2K Games being awesome and entirely too patient with me and how I work). This extended into the Claptrap webshow and various other things, and literally none of this would have been possible without the neck-breaking work from my cherished colleagues Richard Jessup, Brian Thomas, and Mark Petty.
And apologies if any of that felt like I was trying to market Borderlands to you. That was not my intent. I just thought that the trailer illustrated what I’m talking about.
Be creative.
Be valuable.
Spread joy for no other reason than to spread it.
Leave the world a better place than the one you woke up into this morning.
You can see this in every aspect of my work, in every medium, in every step I take in my walk through life. Be joyous and bring joy to others because, I’m gonna be honest here, I too struggle with depression a lot. Like, a lot a lot. I think it’s pretty common among creatives and for me, making stuff really gets me out of that funk.
When I started the podcast with Wil (in between hyperventilating that this was a real thing,) it was a step in a different direction. In a lot of ways, it’s kind of the opposite of my movie show, because a) we are tearing things down and b) it’s so much less constructed than what I’m used to making. So I did the obvious thing: when editing it, I put the construction back into it, I put the me back into it, and the negativity in the show was at the expense of ourselves, not the shows. We’re actually big fans of (the majority) of the shows we’re talking about (the Family Ties episode was mostly just a discussion about how great the show is,) and if you can’t hear the sheer joy we have in talking and joking with other, you should pencil in an appointment with the ear doctor. Every little thing that didn’t quite sit comfortable with me, I found a way to turn into a strength for the podcast. There’s no secret that Wil Wheaton is a man who loves his swear words. Being totally honest, sometimes that felt like we were punching down a little bit, so I did what any logical human being would do: I bought the entire Hannah Barbara sound effects library and I started to bleep him with zonks, sproings, and bloops from Magilla Gorilla, Wacky Races, Sealab 2020, Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm, etc. Suddenly, everything was beautiful. Suddenly, every thing was stupid and hilarious. Suddenly, I started swearing like a sailor, because every time we did, it was an engorged disaster of aural pleasure.
After we did the last episode, something kind of clicked for me. Obviously, we’re both busy so it’s not as frequent as both of us would like, but I realized, we make the show when we need it. It’s a crutch I rely on in my life if I’m feeling a little down, or he’s feeling a little down. One of us will post on Basecamp, like, hey, it’s about time for another episode, isn’t it? Wil told me early on, “I don’t care if the only people listening to this show are you and me,” and I remember being like, “I hope that’s not the case.” I only just last month understood what that really meant. If there’s a weight on my shoulders that I just can’t shake, I tell you what, taking a big frosty dump on Baywatch Nights will clear that right up. I’m making this show to give joy to me. Now, obviously not everyone can take care of themselves mentally by making a podcast with Wil, but I think everyone has the capacity to love themselves by making something they care about and not giving a single iota of a shit if anyone else loves it too.
Isn’t that what, deep down, what we all want: the capacity to be self-reliant and poised stringently enough to afford ourselves the mental stability to carry on?
That’s why I hustle.
That’s why I am always moving forward, creating things just good enough to move on to the next thing and keep going; keep fighting, keep conquering the hills in the battles that plague us on a daily basis. You, person reading this right now, are mightier than you think. You, friend that I may not have met yet, are good enough.
Welcome our guest authors to WWdN! They’re sharing special guest posts with us while Wil Wheaton is at sea. They’re the genuine best.
The bad news, for those of us not on a boat — a specific, particular boat — is that Wil Wheaton is on a specific, particular boat for the next week and we are not.
The good news, for those of here within sight and reach of Wil Wheaton dot Net (WWdN), is that Wil Wheaton saw it fit to name a sterling roster of guest writers to share unique material with us all this week. I won’t spoil who’s coming by and when, but trust me: We’re in a for a whole slew of treats.
My name is Will (note the second L) Hindmarch. I’m around just to help this week as an array of great artists and authors share their works with us. Please welcome these guests with the generous camaraderie that WWdN is known for and maybe click a few links in their intros when the time comes? You’re going to find a lot to like through the magic technology of hyperlinks, methinks.
We — you, me, all of us — here in Wil Wheaton’s lingering aura, have one, prime directive this week: Don’t be a dick.
