Earlier today, I played a Super Mario Brothers game with my daughter, one of our favorite mother/daughter activities. We’d spent so much time trying to find all the hidden stars on a particular level that the timer was running out, which is why I turned to my daughter and told her, “This is no time to play around.”
She immediately responded with, “Yes it is.”
Four-year-olds can be so smart sometimes.
Three Lessons Video Games Teach Us About Writing
June 26, 2016
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Of course it was time to play around. That’s what video games are all about. If we weren’t playing and having fun, why were we even wasting our time with the game? I was so focused on the objectives of the game—find all the stars; complete the level before time runs out—I wasn’t even really enjoying it anymore.
My daughter doesn’t have that problem. She can meander around a level avoiding all of the preset objectives of the game, and it doesn’t bother her in the least. For her, it’s not about objectives. It’s about having fun, and she does—way more than I do when I play.
It occurred to me that this is what writing should be like, too. I get so caught up in end goals, sometimes I forget to enjoy the actual act of writing. I think about publication, about my CV, about winning awards and landing a coveted tenure-track creative writing teaching job, and as you can imagine, my writing suffers as a result. I rush through drafts and begin sending things out before they’re ready.
But something much more significant suffers: the pleasure of engaging in a creative act is all but gone if you focus too much on the end product. The point of writing is to enjoy it. If you’re not enjoying it, then you should stop. Period. Life is too short to waste it doing things that you don’t love, especially something like writing, which is most likely not going to earn you much money or recognition or many other real rewards outside of the internal rewards that come from the act of actually doing it.
In this way, writing is not much different from playing video games. And while we’re on the topic, there are a few lessons video gaming can teach us as writers:
1: Leveling Up is Real
In video games, you have to practice to get good. This is true both in a very literal way—the more you play, the better you get at that particular game—but also within the built-in structure of many games. You have to complete certain tasks to level up, and leveling up means you’re better; you’re now capable of taking on more difficult tasks, and you typically continue leveling up throughout a game. You have to. If you don’t, you would never be strong enough to make it through the final obstacles you must get past to beat the game.
The same is true of writing. You have to practice and do exercises and push yourself to try things that you aren’t yet very skilled at. Sure you might lose some lives along the way, but we learn much more from failure than we do success.
2: Pop That Bubble
In certain Mario Brothers games, you can put yourself inside a safety bubble, which prevents any harm from coming to you and allows you to sit back and let the other players do all the work in the level. My daughter does this sometimes, and it drives me crazy. Yes, a bubble will help you avoid trouble, but it effectively avoids actually playing the game too.
Procrastinating writing often comes from that same aversion-to-risk mentality. Sure, sometimes you may legitimately be too busy, and that’s fine. But other times you may be making excuses to avoid taking risks. You may be afraid that the idea you’re so excited about won’t seem as good on the page as it does in your head, or that things won’t just come to you when you sit down to write, or that you’ll pour your heart and soul into something and then it will get rejected.
And you may be right: some or all of these things may happen, just like if my daughter comes out of that bubble on Mario, she may accidentally fall off a cliff or walk straight into a goomba. But guess what? That’s why it’s fun. If there was no risk, there wouldn’t really be much reward. And allow me to reiterate what I said above: it is primarily through failure that we learn and grow.
3: If You Don't Like It, Don't Do It
And again, the most important lesson writers can take away from video games is that you don’t have to write if you don’t want to, just like you don’t have to play any game just because it’s popular or all your friends have played it. We have a rule in my house: if a game you’re playing starts frustrating you too much, it’s time to turn it off. It’s my self-imposed rule for all the things I do by choice. If I start feeling frustrated about a sewing project, I turn my machine off and step away. If I feel like my fingers are tying themselves in knots while I’m playing piano, I take a break and go do something else.
Your mind has to be open to what you’re forcing it to do. If you’re sitting at your computer and it’s just not coming and you’re getting panicky and spiraling into self-doubt, maybe step away for a bit; read for a while, or listen to music, or switch to another writing activity like a prompt or an exercise, something that will let you come at your writing from a different angle.
This may seem to contradict number 2 above. I don’t mean you should let the fear that it won’t come prevent you from sitting in front of your computer to begin with. You should sit down to write—preferably every day, but if not that often, at least as often as your schedule realistically permits—but if you find that, try as you might, it’s just not working out for you, it’s okay to step away and come back later. You do want to sit down to write regularly. You don’t want to lock your brain up by insisting it do something it simply isn’t ready to do at that moment.
And also, make sure you’re writing what you want to write, not what you think will get published or what you think will make you seem clever or innovative. If you’re not excited about what you’re writing, it’s probably not going to be very good. I tell my freshman composition students the same thing, but it’s twice as true for creative writers.