the hardest part of writing isn’t finding what to say, or working out how to say it. Once you’re on that level, unless you’ve already written your thing and you’re just going back through with an editor’s hand, you’re stuck.

The hardest thing is finding the mood. In preparing yourself to pour into the template that you’ve built for yourself. Actual writing — actual expression — can’t be constructed, intellectually. It’s a flow of the unconscious — of all one’s training, working out of instinct. And either it happens or it doesn’t.

In a sense, every creative process is a performance. The play is perhaps the most fundamental expressive form. Every other medium is just some sort of an adaptation. Prose is effectively a depersonalized script. Film, a cemented performance. Music, an abstracted performance. Videogames — well, they’re just theater again.

In their particapatory qualities, they are — ironically considering the gestalt nature of their literal makeup — one of the more primal, more basic forms. Or, no. I suppose that reversal — the improvisational, active interpretation element being the audience’s purview — is what makes the form postmodern.

Which is interesting. If play is the most basic form, then videogames are post-play, or play 2.0. They’re the post-structuralist theater — which may explain some of the difficulty in illustrating with them. It’s the difference between following a car from the front, as compared to the back.

I am not a natural performer. My skills of improvisation are weak, unpracticed. Yet as uncomfortable as I am, going off-script, I have very little patience for scripts. I recall in my few acting lessons, every performance became an impromptu improvisation, if for noting more than boredom. What’s been written has already been done, and probably done poorly. It”s more interesting to take the script as a thematic starting place and whittle out my own story. In retrospect, considering how hard I find it just to talk to people on the phone, I don’t know where I found that energy.

I need to get over this intellectualism.