Addiction or Why The Writing Habit Is Losing

Any writer will tell you that writing is a kind of discipline. Any fool with a pen can scribble out a few lines, even a few pages, when they’re feeling especially passionate. This is your epiphany on world politics or your treatise on “Why My Ex, Jane, Is Such a Cunt.” The true mark of the writer is the one who can do it the way every nine-to-fiver does whatever they do: hungover, exhausted, depressed, hungry, sad, bored, or just plain lazy. But what the writer has to face that the nine-to-fiver doesn’t is one key element. Home. They’re home. Pick your poison for the lazy bug. What’s your distraction? Today, mine is video games.

It seems like it would help to think of this as your standard, “Short Term Value versus Long Term Value.” The idea where people often choose what’s good for them now instead of what’s good for them in the long term. This is your cupcake for the fat, heroine for the junky, television for the student. Video games are obviously a short-term gain. Writing is obviously a long term gain. But is it so obvious? Maybe I should compare.

I can’t argue much for long term gains of video-game playing. In five years, will I look back and feel a lot of pride in assassinating that duke in Assassin’s Creed? Maybe a little, but only if I were telling the story with other nerds over a beer, and only if I had a woman who still considered me attractive after the story and would still agree to sleep with me later.

Writing as a long-term gain? This has two parts. Writing’s essence is it’s recording. Years from now, I can see what I thought, way back when. Compound this idea with writing as a talent, as something honed for style, as well as record, and maybe there’s a small chance that, years from now, what I write today, other people will care about later. I might even have fans who eat all these little-ol’ sentences up. By contrast, nobody cares what I and my character accomplished when I was eleven playing “The Seventh Saga,” except this kid Evan Johnson, who no doubt stays up nights rocking with guilt over erasing my game.

But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Nobody reads old material. Even Idon’t go back through a whole lot of the hundreds or thousands of pages I’ve written. How should I imagine that someone else will care for my writing that much in years to come? I’d have to reach Salinger status, part legend, part mystery. And forget years. I barely have people reading what I wrote last week, except a few loyal fans who do me the honor of playing catch-up when they’ve been away from the ol’ Sophist for too long. A few people might throw out that writing is good practice for future writing. Sure, I’ll take that, but for today, am I really learning a lot about my prose stylings from blogging about the muppets?

How about short term? Video games win, clearly. It’s way more fun to race across roof-tops in a cape and cowl, dodging archers and leaping forward with my duel blades, or shooting the avatar of some pre-teen in Kentucky. Fucking clearly and double duh.

Short term writing? I stretch my creative fingers, and generally feel lighter on my brain’s feet all day. That’s pretty good. A few people read me, and sometimes, very occasionally, a little dialogue is sparked. Perhaps in some minute, insubstantial way, the overall average of thought and involvement in the world raises. I’ve done my part. Bravo. More or less, my biggest short-term benifit is the same as if I’d gone to the gym on a day I hate. I feel good about me. Look what I’ve done! I’ve worked a little. Hoorah! I get to feel pretty smug and satisfied all day, because I wrote something. String a few of those days – not too many, maybe three at most, because we don’t want to encroach on anything long-term here – and I get to call myself a “writer” without having to avoid the question of ,” Oh yeah? What have you written for me lately.”

Of course, there’s the medium term, and here, it gets a little murky: A little work in the game today means a better character tomorrow. I mean, you’re not going to get a level eighteen mage overnight. You’ve got to put some effort into that. And, as I hinted, a few days of writing in a row means, for now, I get to feel comfortable with my evidence of having a craft, I get to not feel like such a lazy asshole.

So maybe that’s the balance. Forget this one-day-at-a-time crap. I need to focus on the mid-range term. Write for a few days, play for a few days. Some rare days, accomplish both.

Meanwhile, I’ve tricked myself nicely: I got myself excited about how shitty I am at writing when there’s a game to play and, suspiciously, I’ve chosen to write about it instead of actually starting the game. I’d like to think most addictions are solved this way: breaking the addiction through purpose of stopping the addiction. Of course there is the sad inevitability that that one will be trapped, unable to eventually, actually live. How funny. The moral of all this isn’t to write, or to play, but to know that all of my reflection becomes quite silly when you realize that talking about a problem isn’t the same as being free from it.

So, new goal: Some day, wake up, and write, and don’t even think about the games or (pick your poison).