The hard graft of inspiration-on-demand (RPG Blog Carnival)

Vulcan Stev's Database gives us this months prompt Inspiration! Where Does Yours Come From? for the RPG Blog Carnival. This post is mostly about turning the inspiration you will surely have into whatever you actually want at the end or as Edison put it "Genius is 1% Inspiration, 99% Perspiration".

My suggestions to anyone trying to reliably 'create on demand':
1. Have your tools ready to catch the sparks
2. Get from zero to something, because you can work with something.
3. Stand on something
4. Sketch out your structure if you risk interruption
5. Save all your ideas

I lay this out for blogging but so too for adventures.

First - have your tools ready

I follow the Egan doctrine, a kind of 'hair-trigger pomodoro' - which is being ready to seize any free 20 mins to just push something along. Small progress, made often, adds to a sizeable movement in the end. To get specific, I put together this list of d20 small viable blogging tasks to illustrate what I mean.

Practically this means being ready to fill in the blanks around the spark of inspiration you have had elsewhere - hitting your slush-list, finding that quote, linking to the survey, jam or challenge that is relevant. You can hack out the *tasks* around putting a post together in chunks once you have the core idea in place.

When I am completely dry, I set up reviews - the block-and-tackle numbers work like counting the section sizes, or block-out weekly link posts. Something from the pile of background tasks I continuously run on the blog that allow me to make progress when I'm not having a moment of inspiration.

Second - getting from zero to something

This blog has always been an advocate of "don't get it right, get it written". Of late, one of my handier tools has been voice transcription - used as for this post while doing laundry. My key learning is that this voice log will be trash. Far more hassle to try and whip it into shape than to just re-read, steal the ideas and re-write. For getting from nothing to something, perfectly adequate.

On getting stuff written, I can point back to one of my ancient blogposts on lessons learned from NaNoWriMo - back before it collapsed in disgrace, I participated often and there were a couple of useful tricks for getting drafts done I learned. Key from the point of view of inspiration was to try and stop in the middle of a thought, so when you came back to the work, you could reread your last bit, finish out that thought and presto, you had a bit of momentum already.

Third - stand on something - use jams and challenges

Question sets, prompt lists and blogwagons help to jump start a post. Just writing down whatever you are participating in or joining gets you that first start. The more structured the challenge, the easier it is to get something done. Working down a question list is usually easier than answering an unstructured, wide-open question.

Campaign retrospectives, session reports and other "factual" write ups can help - one might say those sidestep the idea of "inspiration" entirely since you are documenting what actually happened. However one feels on that question I think those reporting type posts are good for building the muscles of drafting posts and talking about your gaming to make that part easier when you are trying to capture some fickle spark of an idea.

Fourth - sketch out your structure to guard against interruption.

I have of late started this, blocking out my section headers where once I would have just got cracking, Ian Fleming style. Having the key ideas noted down - make your points without justification, enough to remind you what you planned to say. This gets you off zero and gives you a structure you can then build out when time presents itself. It also prevents and untimely interruption causing some chunk of your great idea to be lost before you could commit it to ink.

At this point do no research, do not tab away from the page or change focus until you have the whole outline down. This is not so much about inducing inspiration but about capturing the sparks you do get. Inspiration strikes at the most unlikely places, but then you walk through a doorway or get out of the shower and it is gone. Here my point is to jot down the outline of your whole idea before someone interrupts you and it is all gone like the back three quarters of Kubla Khan. Once you have that view from 50,000ft then you can weather fate trying to mess with you a touch more robustly.

Fifth - Save all your ideas

Then where does inspiration come in and of itself? This can be the hardest - d4 caltrops wrote a good piece on this worth reading. I find frequently rereading the prompt and going away and focussing on something else is helpful, If an idea does not immediately come, nor arrive after a few minutes pondering, then put it down. Tab away to something else and let your subconscious chew on it.

There is a difference between "I have no idea" and "I am not sure how to articulate my point" that warrants slightly different treatment. Above is for "no idea" but if you can feel something nagging you, the classic splinter-in-the-mind, then blocking out the points you do have, leaving a gap for what you are missing can help. I feel this as clearing out mental capacity of the stuff that is solved to give more room for the things remaining unclear. The content of the blank bits sometimes becomes apparent once you have formed the shape of them by putting down what goes around them.

For "no idea" instances - you are going to capture many ideas while out walking around - so have means to capture them. Write yourself a WhatsApp, leave a voicenote, email something to yourself, whatever, just capture the idea, get it down. Once down, it gets soaked into your workflow and feeds into step one.

I have a giant slush pile of blog article headers. One cell in Excel, maybe with a comment and the inspirational link or thought. Typical would be somebodys blog plus my thoughts on a comment or response.

And if you are still stuck try d4 Caltrops great "brainfood for burgeoning blogs" d100 list.

Putting it all together

Moments of inspiration rarely happen when you are sitting down at your desk ready to go - they can, but are typically not so convenient. For me time at desk is processing the ideas list into something useful. Taking those three words on a post-it note and expanding that up to the skeleton sketch, the headers. Then when there is time, fill in each of those headers. Then go back over the whole thing, make sure it's coherent. Then up it goes.

Those are my general tips for inspiration. As you will have no doubt noticed, very little of that is actually about inspiration. Inspiration will happen to you. The key thing is making sure to capture that inspiration, nail it down and turn it into something useful.

do As for blogging, so for adventures

All of the above can replace blog post with D&D adventures and the principles still stand. Capture your ideas when you are out and about. Hack out the outline of the adventure when you get a chance, but skip detail like monster stats or rule lookup or anything like that. Then once you are happy you have the whole idea, go back around and put in the detail to make it table-ready.