Building Frames First
You know how some people thrive(d) in school while others struggle(d)? I was one of the former. I graduated near the top of my class in high school and graduated Summa Cum Laude for my Bachelor's Degree.
Post-graduation was where I struggled, suddenly finding myself standing amidst the collapsed walls where structure had once existed and not eager to rack up even more student debt by aiming for Master's or Doctorate degrees. Certainly, such pursuits would have given me the structure I sought, but I was burnt out.
So, for a couple of years, I worked a few different part-time jobs, growing increasingly frustrated and feeling more and more stuck because I had no idea what to do. Structure I took for granted was now an open field, and it was far too open for me to even know where to begin walking.
University
What's funny is that I experienced this exact feeling throughout my undergrad years, too. It was just easier to distract myself with all of the other schoolwork I had to complete, because when you're double majoring in music composition and Japanese and minoring in creative writing, taking over 18 hours with 12+ classes per semester because your theory and other classes are only 1 credit hour each — some 0! — while still meeting 3x a week, you don't have time to fret about your struggles.
The area where I experienced this listlessness, this lack of direction, this uncertainty? My private music composition lessons. The core of my degree is where I struggled, and I know why.
Here's what would happen. One week I would bring in a piece of music I was working on, something that was maybe 8-16 measures, usually of a melody, sometimes with harmony beneath it. The piece would be something that I wasn't in love with, but it was functional.
I would go into my private lesson and play the sound byte for my professor, who would listen, and then he would provide suggestions for fixing the harmony if I had some or ways to harmonize, which I, admittedly, pretended to understand.
I would leave the lesson and go about my business with my other classes, maybe trying to work on the piece throughout the week and struggling. Either the day before or the day of my next lesson, I would lock myself in the practice room and crank out another couple of measures.
Sheepishly, I would go to my lesson, and my professor would listen to the piece again and provide some more suggestions.
I would give up on that piece because I just couldn't imagine where it was going, and I would start writing a different one, and the cycle would continue.
I finished maybe a piece a year. Not semester. Year.
It was torture. I felt like a fraud. I didn't have my first real actual music composition class outside of theory until...my 2nd to last year? At the time I was taking another semester or year of poetry, and while listening to rhythms of poems and comparing meter to meter, it clicked for me what kind of structure I needed.
Poetry created structural constraints. The story within the poems created the story constraints. The music had to fit within the constraints of the poetic meter while simultaneously matching the characters or scenes.
Whereas before I had maybe 2-3 completed pieces, in a single year I expanded that by another 7-8, and those 11 pieces became a part of my recital.
Post-Japan
I could talk about my writing woes from while I was in Japan, but it's a very similar story to my University one, except with a more depressing ending, because I only ever finished one novel for the 6-book storyline that was (and still is to some extent) bouncing around in my head.
Teaching in and of itself provided some of my beloved structure, but it was an illusion because I was needing to create the structure for how to teach English. So, I had to learn how to create structure in order to structure, and thinking back on it now, it was a rather meta experience. Still, once I managed it, the structure was mine, and I thrived...until I was asked to do soul-sucking work that left me physically ill. After Covid, I quit and returned to the States, where I started once more from square one: no structure.
The past 5 years have been me learning how to build my own structure. Sometimes, since I value financial independence, I've been tempted to cave and find a job or career elsewhere instead of trying out this whole...whatever it is I'm doing. Indeed, there are times still where I feel like I'm contributing absolutely nothing worthwhile to anything that is. I have friends who are doctors or happy with their lot in life while my analytical brain continues to budget and build and adjust and —
My planner system illustrates my mode of thinking most clearly, but the May 7th Vault Wipe showed me just how deeply I need structure. The process of restoring all these files and taking that opportunity to make the Vault better than it was before, bolstering the foundation for all that would come after showed me how my mind thrives when I can see the full drafts and iterate from there.
The irony is that, to iterate, you need to have something already made upon which to iterate, but to have something to iterate, you need to create it first, and it's the creation part that trips me up. Layer that with needing to create the structure within which to iterate on top of the thing I'm planning to iterate, and voila, suddenly I have two left feet and wearing right-foot shoes.
For example, the character template I shared in last week's post. When I made the very first draft of that template however many months or years ago — and here we're talking pre-Obsidian — I had a few blank sections to fill in. It was very skeletal with a section for physical description, interesting factoids, and maybe some secrets that I the player knew but Efiál/Cael didn't, definitely a far cry from what I wanted.
Expand that to become an entire retrieval system that I've been building within Obsidian, and suddenly there are a lot of empty sections with no text to see how the template actually renders. All those Headings clumped together with no differentiation makes my eyes cross and anxiety spike in a way I never would have anticipated, and I now understand why people use the placeholder text, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit..." in their mockups.
When your focus is to build the structure you'll eventually fill, you don't want to spend time doing both simultaneously. The placeholder text becomes easy to ignore while you build your template or mockup to your desired specifications, whereupon you can then start filling them all out properly.
Once again, the frame becomes the rules becomes the container.
Beyond Creativity
Poetry became the skeleton through which I wrote my senior composition recital. Prefilled templates became the skeleton through which I started learning how to design visually through text and simple plug-in scripts.
Both of those pull from creative mediums, but creativity isn't the only place where I've struggled with problem-solving or making decisions.
Let's say I'm playing a board game. Let's say I'm playing the board game Scythe or Apiary. In those game, there are multitudes of options you can take each round in order to build your points-earning engine. I freeze during those types of games because there are too many choices, and as soon as I make one choice, it locks me out of the other choices I could have made. Yet it's up to me to make that decision by myself, because I'm competing with whoever else might be playing.
It's stressful and not a fun time, and I know I can get frustrated when I lose, so I tend to avoid those kinds of player-vs-player board games altogether.
Take another board game like Pandemic, where you're collaboratively working with others trying to figure out the best method of winning when things are just getting worse and worse. Your ability to win depends on bouncing ideas off each other and, of course, a little bit of luck.
That idea bouncing provides the same frame for me that template rendering or poetry did for my creative endeavors. Someone can present an idea, and my refiner's instincts kick in, those same instincts that tweak and iterate and build upon what came before.
Discussing a problem with another person allows me to see where I can poke holes, especially if the other person is the one to present the problem for me to solve. Hell, maybe that problem was originally mine and I just asked them to present it like it was theirs! The scope, the tools, the options become far more limited, and I can reason through why something might work or why it wouldn't.
That's why, after my first real music composition class, my professor was able to tell me, "Okay, next week bring me a piece using a pentatonic scale," and I could do it without issue.
Some people build the structure as they go. Others find the structure at the end and then rework everything to fit. And then some people, like me, thrive when we know from the get-go what the structure is but then flail helplessly when the walls come tumbling down.
That is, until we learn how to build our own.
Summary of Notable Accomplishments from 6.3 - 6.9:
Transcribed:
Session 131 (5 hours alone)
124.2 & .3
125.2 - .5
126.1 & .6
Digital character level-up sheets in Obsidian for my and my partner's characters; one version utilizing my crazy setup, another more vanilla experience for him
Spent all of Friday meal prepping
I wasn't thinking and made chicken salad using 28 oz of chicken. Using yogurt wasn't bad. The inability to freeze all that chicken salad is. I've learned my lesson...and don't want to eat chicken salad for a long time.
Created a new Mysteries & Plot Hooks ecosystem for campaign summaries using the Tasks plug-in using the following tags:
Open
Dormant
Evolving
Resolved
Abandoned
Built With Science:
Switched in a full body workout since I had to skip Friday's
Upper 1
Active Recovery x2
Added in some Pilates to begin building muscle stability
Finalizing/Iterating upon some template designs in preparation for building Skies Over Aefala summaries
Read a little more of "The Amber Spyglass" but not much
Real Talk:
Where does your mind thrive and your instincts sing? Do you experience analysis or choice paralysis, or do multitudes of options not bother you at all?
This Week's Obligatory Cat Pic: Salad
Comments