Whether you’re a reader, a writer, a gamer, or a game designer, pretty much everyone in this sphere is fascinated with figuring out how creativity works. Where do ideas come from? How did this turn up? What’s the secret interplay of ideas, how do creatives blend themes just right to create the desired intellectual or emotional impact? Hell if I know how it works for anyone else. But, I do suspect my process overlaps with that of many others.
Today, we’re going to talk about fucking around.
In my experience the creative process is best illustrated through metaphors of play and exploration. This isn’t exactly the same as the writing process. For me, the creative process is the time spent skimming inspirational material, plucking up ideas and then mingling them together. It’s a bit like when I’d mess with LEGOs as a kid. You get some sets, and they’re cool, and you build them and play with them, and then you get a little bored and all the pieces go into a plastic bin. And you do it again. And again. Now suddenly you have this bin filled with disparate LEGO bricks. You could grab the instruction manuals and probably muddle the sets back together, sure. They wouldn’t be exactly the same—there’s always a piece lost to an air vent, or under the bed—but you could reconstruct them well enough. Or you can use all those bricks to build your own stuff.
Playing with the bricks is the “fucking around” stage. Sometimes this is coherent, and other times it is not. Coherent brainstorming reflects when I’m intentionally messing around with concepts and ideas in my scribble journal. On the page this often resembles chaotic outlining, though in practice these notes only loosely correlate to the writing project’s outline.
Incoherent brainstorming describes the process by which an idea suddenly pops into my mind. It’s taken me a while to identify, but that experience is actually an illusion. There’s no “suddenly.” Rather, what I experience as revelation is much closer to a subconscious churning of the plastic bricks. Toying with them without much focus, until four or five connected together make an evocative shape. At that stage my brain recognizes and seizes on the idea. Depending on my memory or energy level at a given day, this leads to pen and journal, or looseleaf, or the idea wandering back off into my brain somewhere.
These two methods of fucking around intersect. Sometimes this play is conscious as I hunt for how new bricks fit with old ones, and then I leave my notes aside as I return to work on another project or freelance work. Often, I find that my brain will continue fucking around in the back of my mind until something coalesces again. Then more gets added to the notes, or occasionally I sink into a hyperfixated frenzy of building until I’m a little bit delirious and mentally exhausted.
The incoherent percolation happens most often while I’m reading. I’ll give a few examples based on recent reading material.
As an example of conscious idea generation, while reading Frazer’s The Golden Bough earlier this year my brain latched on to the notion of a scapegoat king as part of an adventure. This intersected his Nemi grove with the forest on Eurmal’s Hill in the RuneQuest Starter Set. One of the questions I have about Jonstown is “what’s on that hill?” Given the role of tricksters in Glorantha as scapegoats, this led me to an adventure idea in which the local Trickster Priest dethrones the City Rex (he’s like a mayor, basically) and is King of the Wood until inevitably someone kills him. Okay, cool narrative—but how can that become playable?
Trying to make the idea playable is when it hits pen and paper. After all, a cool story is a dogshit adventure if it doesn’t give the players agency to act, react, and possibly change the outcome. Success is always possible, but never guaranteed.
Lately I’ve been reading Roy Rappaport’s Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, and my thought process while reading is pretty reflective of less coherent, subconscious creativity. Some major themes in Rappaport’s book are how humans use ritual to structure their world. In particular, this helps organize broad concepts such as time, cause and effect, eternity, and so on. My brain’s started associating and digesting Rappaport’s arguments, and looking for how this type of structural element can be presented more strongly within my work. I’ve wanted to mess with explicit festivals and specified rites for some time in my fiction and my game design, but I’ve never quite figured out how to make this more than just “random lore description.” I’m not quite there yet, but I can feel the wheels churning in the back of my head. Concepts of space, and extension, and geometry, intersecting with the role of magic as a social element in fantasy.
The difference is that I know I’m thinking, but I don’t exactly know what I’m thinking. It’s only in the last couple years that I’ve learned to recognize this sensation. Eventually I’ll probably have a thunderbolt moment while reading, and it’ll all coalesce into an instruction manual.
Since 2019 most of my creative work has been for RuneQuest. To some extent, I think Glorantha makes idea generation easy because it has plastic bricks built right into the architecture—the Runes. Each Rune tends to have multiple aspects, giving them conceptual complexity. For example, the Death Rune represents, of course, the cessation of life, but also Separation more generally, and to some extent the state of being inanimate. This last overlaps with Stasis but isn’t wholly identical, since Stasis can be “remaining the same” while motion is one of those preserved properties. As the page above shows, this leads to use of the Runes as shorthand for ideas, concepts, themes in my RuneQuest work. The results tend to be conceptually fluid and dense when I return to them weeks or months later, giving my brain inspiration to continue experimenting and reinterpreting the material.
After two to five iterations, my creative process tends to shift into a writing process. As most writers know, writing processes are popularly described as “planning” or “pantsing.” My familiarity with the term comes from NaNoWriMo, but I’ve seen it used all over, in a variety of forms. Basically, writing along a constructed outline, or writing as discovery. My experience is that this is a spectrum along which most people tend to land. Personally, I’m pretty thoroughly a planner. I build outlines, and am most comfortable when I follow them closely. There’s often tweaks and side-paths along the way, but I know my beginnings, I know my ends, and I have images for the middle.
However, the creative process is very much discovery, for me. My writing process is fairly structured because my creative process is unstructured. Around the third outline my brain shifts gears from discovery to structure on a manuscript. The transition is often subtle, and I sometimes miss it. I also often misread when I’m ready to transition to structure; my worse outlines look like partial manuscripts, but they look that way because I wasn’t ready for structure. I was still generating ideas.
Essentially, once I can write an outline without adding actual new ideas to a project, then I know I’m pretty much ready to write it. There’s always new details and oddities, but if I can get to that stage I’ve finished fucking around.
The casual, low-stakes notion of “fucking around” is important to this description of the creative process. There’s a reason I use play as my central metaphor. The heart of this creativity, in my experience, is a lack of formal structural needs. It results in a chaotic blend of concept and language, annotated atop itself multiple times, that even I sometimes struggle to figure out.
Formal structure, for me, is extremely helpful as a writing tool. It channels my mental energies on effective paths. I wouldn’t exactly say structure throttles the creative process, but it is anathema. I don’t really see how the fuck-around fluidity exists while in a structural framework. It can be poured into a framework—honestly, the Hrunda cult is a fantastic example of that—but generating that raw conceptual energy in the first place for me is very nearly totally structureless. It’s like playing with blocks, or word-association games, or charades with my brain when I’m feeling especially dense.
There really is a beauty to this process. That beauty isn’t transcendent. It isn’t lofty. It’s fun. This is also why, I think, why I find tabletop games fun. They encapsulate much of this same creative fluidity as an intersection between multiple people. Pushing for an idea is difficult for the same reasons why fucking around with ideas is fun. When I’m pushing, I’m trying to initiate that structural element into my thought, rather than letting it channel itself. Fucking around is unstructured, but it’s usually not illogical. A square brick can only attach to certain bricks, in certain ways. But within its natural bounds are still numerous options such that if you gave ten people the same set of concepts and ideas, you’ll end up with ten (or more) variations.
The messiness of creativity is also why, I believe, many writers and other creatives are reluctant to give advice or to answer questions about where ideas come from. The process either feels wholly uncontrolled, or feels suspiciously boring. Saying “I fucked around a bit” doesn’t sound good if someone asks “wow, I loved that story, where’d it come from?”
That’s also the brilliance of fucking around—anyone can do it. You don’t need training, you don’t need practice, you don’t need a special star on your sticker-sheet. I do think that writing is very much a practicable craft. You can learn to write. You can be taught, and you can practice. Same with story structure, plot, characterization, and all those other elements. Some people think that all sentences are made equal. I am not one of them. But I do think that our ability to generate ideas is equal. My proof?
Watch kids play imagination games.
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