Warring Halves
Creativity's tough. Fighting to make it your friend is tougher. Isn't it well worth it though?
Part I: A troubling conflict
It was always a conflict. One that I think will last until I die.
It’s funny how one can want to create so badly and be terrified of it at the same time, so full of dread even. It took me years, more than a decade, to overcome such simple and innocent ideas as writing a short story or composing a song.
It took all of my twenties, actually, and part of my thirties – a waning but fruitful eight years now – to partially overcome the beautiful burden of creation, and by that I really mean that paralysing, agonizing absence of trust in myself that condemned me to think and think and overthink instead of acting, leaving me with a deeper and crustier certitude that I was less than what I am, and would never be able to make it no matter how many awesome songs and wild stories my brain mass-produced every single day.
And for a time that was ok. I had all the time in the world, right? I could be somewhat satisfied with a freelance job as a video game journalist who liked to drink beer and play the guitar at night.
Until I started going straight to the booze part as I became increasingly infuriated against “that shitty sound” that came out of my amp, or the “shitty setup” on my PC that prevented me from recording anything.
The truth is, I was giving up constantly. My anger and impatience got the best of me, and I thought my time was best spent daydreaming about all the things that I could do, later. When the time was right, when I’d amass enough money to buy better gear and make these horrendous sounds go away.
I must have known already that the quality of my sound had little to do with the quality of my gear. But I didn’t dare invest in myself, and the wheel kept turning.
But I make it sound way too dark right now. I still stuck to playing guitar, but I lacked discipline, and I lacked a companion with whom I could feel confident enough to just go for it and jam it out without worrying about what I looked like, what I sounded like, and what the other might be thinking.
Someone I could admire but not envy.
I realized after a couple of years that solo playing was a blocking issue for me. If I was the only one playing the guitar, the one person carrying the burden of “sounding good”, then I became an absolute, and everything around me was a sucking void that sounded way too loud.
There was no rhythm to what I was doing, nothing to hold on to, no background bells that could focus my ears on anything other than myself and my own performance.
More noise than my own, simply said!
Part II: “Could’ve guessed it…”
Now that I think on it, I kind of still want to slap myself for not thinking of that sooner.
A colleague of mine at the time – an excellent programmer, musician and human called François – gave me a simple trick one day as I was rambling about my awful sound and about not taking as much pleasure playing the guitar as I should, and as I did back when I was much younger and jammed with a friend of mine.
He told me that I should just play over some backing tracks.
I remember I must have looked confounded and not just a bit slow to grasp the meaning of what he’d just revealed to me.
I’m picturing a drooling creature sleeping on the floor, slowing waking up to the sound of fresh maple-coated pancakes, eyes crossing each other, looking a bit idiotic and confused.
It felt like waking up.
And it was such an easy thing to do, made even easier when François handed over a USB key containing just under one thousand backing tracks of all genres and tempo, from known and less-known bands, or collections of chord progressions I could solo over.
I went home and played like never before. I was literally in a trance.
I could jam with myself and improvise over drums beats and rhythms and strings and not give a damn about the squeaks, quacks and clunks of false notes and other miscellaneous signal noises. All those things that overwhelmed me before.
I think I played for most of the night with my headphones on to keep the neighbours and my two roommates happy, although I really wanted the whole town to taste and feel my heavy distortion in their bones as they slept.
I stopped when I felt wetness around the fingernails of my right hand and sure enough, I had played my fingers bloody – I didn’t use picks that much at the time – as I jammed on Metallica’s Sanitarium.
It wasn’t the first time, but it usually happened when I played and sang Radiohead’s Creep on my acoustic guitar, drunk as hell.
Needless to say, I had a very good rest-of-the-night.
Part III: Troubled times, and Good enough
While I busied my evenings with that new-found music-playing process I had missed all my life without really knowing it, I still spend my days (well…. afternoons) writing articles for a video game magazine.
THE video game magazine for me, as I was a fan years before joining its small team of writers.
There were several reasons for my reverence toward that controversial, low-distribution paper: its irreverent tone, its provocative and charismatic editor in chief, and its uncompromising long articles that focused on the narrative and lore behind our favorite games, most often RPGs (role playing games).
We talked science, history, music, mysticism (yeah, a lot of games have very varied topics) and spent hours talking about what made a game deep, rich and emotionally investing.
I hadn’t written short stories or fiction before - in you exclude a sci-fi school fiction work, ironically based on a video game I’d recently played – but writing articles in that magazine was as close as it got.
I’d write about Schroedinger’s cat and the use of demonology symbols in Shadow Hearts II, I’d ramble about the neurological disorders the Silent Hill series tackled and the alienation and deep-seated fear it made players feel.
I’d always had a love for the arts and sciences, from astrophysics to history to neurology and languages. That magazine was the first true major outlet for both my creative mind AND my scientific inclinations. It was a strange, troubled time too, ridden with substance abuse, instability and heartaches. I would drink and play guitar and wake up much to late and go to the paper’s offices around five PM and stay there until the early hours of the morning. I’d pick an angle for my articles, do the research, make the plan, and when I started writing, few things could stop me.
I remember that near-unbreakable, deep focus and how confident and strong it made me feel. I didn’t really know I had it in me. I never thought I’d use that expression, but I really did pour my heart into that magazine. I was also very in love with my editor in chief, which is a whole other story, but it bled into my work sometimes, and our readers felt it. We always were dramatic people. They excepted nothing less.
It was a small magazine, like I said, very specialized, with a tone that no other read had.
But it had a cult following and to this day, readers sometimes poke me and ask if I really am the Moutrave from Gameplay RPG magazine. Even game developer friends of mine know about it and remember my articles, and our entire diverse and dysfunctional crew. That’s a good feeling.
I did write my first fiction on the last issue of the magazine I ever worked on, in the music section I was in charge of. It was basically an end-of-the-world Holidays tale about a young guy who contemplates the coming of the apocalypse from his one-bedroom apartment while listening to his favorites bands and taking all the drugs he hadn’t dare try before.
Each paragraph was song’s name and corresponded to a certain mood induced by a certain drug and by a certain music style, and yes, I’m still proud of it. I finished it over a single evening, I didn’t overthink it – I rarely due, and you can probably feel it if you’re still reading this – and our corrector pretty much it sent it to print as is. And I knew it was just the first of many, but the many still had to wait.
Part IV: A turning point?
You’d think I’d be on a roll, that I would crap out stories and original songs by the dozen from this point on, back around year 2004. It didn’t really happen.
I was barely scrapping a living as a writer for another video game publishing house (like I said, in love with my editor in chief, didn’t end well!). I still had the same confidence deficits, not helped by my almost continuous drinking, most often methodically executed in my tiny and dirty Paris back-alley dump of an apartment.
I still played a bit of guitar, getting painstakingly and slowly better, but I didn’t write anything, and I still didn’t really make my own songs. Well, I did have a band, not really worth mentioning. Ironically, playing with these guys impacted my confidence for the worst, and when I quit, I was more scared to play in front of people than I ever was before. Still It was fun at the start, and having a drummer cover your mistake as you play live is pretty sweet!
Then I moved on from the crabhole and focused on putting myself together. I found a stable job as a video game developer – another great creative outlet I still enjoy today – and moved to Montreal, Canada with my boyfriend at the time. Two years later, I wrote a short story. Not a schoolwork, not for a magazine, for myself, plain and simple. I was 30 something at the time. The story was written in French and is basically about two friends dreaming of reaching Iran in order to be sent to space as dead bodies.
Sounds weird, but it’s an idea that had been circling in my head for a while.
What if your world was so stagnant, decrepit and full of despair, that the only hopes some people still carried in their weathered hearts, was to be catapulted from Earth in tiny, sealed space coffins, condemned to drift through the stars for aeons, their cold bodies awaiting resurrection, should they ever be found by a faraway, advanced civilisation.
That story didn’t win any prize, but now, I was actually on a roll. A slow one – I only wrote six short stories and one novel that I’m still editing – but one that stuck. I just started writing one night after work.
It was a harsh time there for me and a lot of my ideas didn’t stick or were rejected, and I felt isolated for a whole lot of irrelevant reasons.
At some point I had a very basic but visceral epiphany: “if they don’t want my ideas…well, I’ll just do them on my own”. Simple thought. Simple, yet strong. It did the job. I just needed to compartmentalize more, and my frustration at work gave me another good excuse to throw myself into the very same things that used to and still scare me brainless.
That little nothing story was one of many turning points. I wrote it over four evenings, twenty hours of works at most. I always thought I’d come back to it. Translate it, expend it, whatever, as long as I put something on “paper”, it would not get lost, it’d stay with me like foundations to a house. And it’s all that mattered. I figured that I just had to start something, anything, and of course I’d try my best to finish it, but I didn’t have to pressure myself to finish it right away. Polish it right away.
And more important, I started learning how to call it good enough to ship.
Part V: Fantasies of the wandering mind, or the reluctant yearning
I got married almost four years ago to a wonderful man. I’m the one who asked, not that it matters. I’d known him for years before we became a couple. How’s that relevant? He’s basically the tactician behind the confidence I’ve been developing and nurturing since we started sharing our lives.
He taught me a million things already, and apparently, I did the same for him (well he insists that I did!)
But the core idea behind his invaluable influence can be summed up this way: “don’t do anything that doesn’t make you feel good, but do the thing that you want to feel for”.
I’ve created more in those four years than I did in two decades of searching. Not everything is because of him of course. I’d proud of myself for not giving up and trying to become better every day, or, well, at least every other month.
But he was, and still is, the sealant gluing the scattered pieces of my confidence together. And I do realize how lucky I am.
I finally started making my own songs, overcoming my lifelong dread of coming up with ideas and messing up and just losing my nerve over some dumb technical issues. Of just doing something and committing to it, without banging my head on the walls when something goes wrong and takes longer that I think it should.
Of course, there’ll always be times when I think of doing things, but I don’t do them right away, for a lot of reasons.
Time of course, being one of them, and I blame it still for not having enough of itself for me.
I’d learn everything if I could. Really. Every. Single. Thing.
Woodworking, microbiology, whales eating habits, crochet, cricket, machine learning, driving a road train, logging, sailing, wiring, knitting, study the habitats and reproduction of turtles, deep-sea creatures, volcanoes…well I could go forever, so could you, right?
But I needed to learn with the certitude that I can’t do all these things. I can’t be everywhere, and do everything, like my wandering mind tells me to, and more often than not orders me to. And instead of giving in to despair and try to fight these conflicting thoughts from the bottom of a bottle, I’m trying hard to duel them, one at a time.
I still get these moments where I write and I set my mind on finishing a certain part, yet my eyes go places when they should just stay on the damn page. But they wander to another one of my computer screens, to my email inbox, to a random website.
My body executes an unnecessary toilet break and contemplates getting some food or go for a walk.
Sometimes I feel like my mind is trying to escape the clutches of creativity. Of completion. It wanders, yet strives to get a lock on to it, to grapple it until its muscles are sore and its bones crack.
In a way, it is a reluctant yearning. I long for it, dream of it, wait to be able to do it, talk about it.
Hell, I even write about it right here tonight. But the wandering mind is a difficult beast; it wants to graze the world’s grass, but once it’s reached it, it’s craving for that tree bark over the border all the way to the east. It’s a weird creature that just doesn’t always want to clear that field of yummy, plump grass. Maybe it’s scared it won’t grow back. Or that it won’t taste as good the more it munches on it.
At the end of the day though, whether I achieved the goal I’d set for myself in the morning or not, whether it takes me a year or three months to edit that novel of mine, to ship that song, or finish that weird 3D artwork I started tinkering on without a clue why and what I was doing, I still started it right?
I still experimented, learned, and enjoyed myself, mostly, through the staggering tides of doubt and yeah, sometime, through flat-out laziness. But as husband say: “you wanna lie on the floor and drool, or just play a game all day naked on the couch? Damn, you earned it. Why should you feel bad about that?”
I realize this story looks more like some sort of blog post with embarrassing hints of autobiography, but the subject was cool, and I just kept writing without thinking too much about it.
Thank you for reading!
About the Creator
Clemence Maurer
I'm a video games level designer from Paris, France originally. I moved to Montreal, Canada about a decade ago and live happily there with my Canadian husband and my old cat.
I love writing strange stories, play games, and make music!
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