PLAY YOUR CARDS...

I only recently started playing Magic, the Gathering with my family. Back when it came out I had a visceral reaction to the art, no patience for each card having its own rules & the weird, nerdy, soccer-kid competitiveness that the game seemed to engender.

Playing a game like Magic makes obvious that a one-card focus is a poor strategic maneuver. The game plays off of the synthesis that happens between cards, the building of an engine out of the different mechanics presented. Out of a deck of one-hundred cards, focussing on one is foolish.

Each game starts with a 7 card hand. Each deck has a hundred cards. You can generate almost fifteen million different hands with that. So, if you go with the idea that the synergy between the cards is the way to go, you have plenty of options.

Before I had the stroke I drew for eight or so hours a day every day. Sometimes more, sometimes less. 

I remember being twenty-one & reading the 10,000 hours of practice leads to expertise quote (popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers book, but I read it first in Dave Sim’s  Cerebus Guide to Self Publishing in 1997) & thinking about how that amount of time was incomprehensible, insurmountable at that age.

The progression of time just happens. You can’t do anything to speed up time or slow it down.

Fast forward to 2019. After the stroke I found myself lacking the motor control on my left side to draw the way I wanted to. I could still draw, but worse than I could ever remember.

The lack of control in my hand & the block in the communication between my brain & my hand made drawing laborious, frustrating & wrong. After the stroke, I tried drawing for years, filling sketchbooks with daily drawings & daily writing exercises. 

Over that time I developed a tremor in my left hand that would be amplified the more I tried to grip the pen harder. Luckily, after a year or so the tremor dissipated & some smoothness & flavor returned to my execution.

However, the drawing never proceeded past a certain level, like the amount of control I had when I was four. So I stopped the daily practice, after putting years in. It wasn’t a hard decision to make.

It’s hard to comprehend how much drawing that I did from 2000-2018. So much. Enough finished drawings to fill another 20 art books probably.

A lot of people saw drawing as “the thing” I did, but it was just one of the things I did. I would always become bored with doing one thing as a kid. Growing up, I thought this was a problem. I wanted to excel at one thing. 

Instead, I started writing a little after I started drawing. I started graphic designing a little after I started writing. I started researching & curating a little after I started writing.

Over the years I did cooking, pottery, collage, painting, drumming, playing keyboards, film, printmaking, web design, social media, sales, marketing, fashion design, game design & more! 

Yes, drawing was the thing I concentrated on & figured out how to monetize but it was just one card that I was holding. It took me a moment after losing my previous ability to remember the crazy number of cards I was holding.

Even though I had spent decades practicing these other creative vehicles & even found my inability to concentrate on one of them frustrating, it took me a few years to fully understand the number of cards I still could play.

At some point I realized how many art classes, art books & museums I had absorbed over time - I had never done that for business or writing. I had just done them, learning as I went along. 

I started to create new disciplines for myself - just as I did when I decided that I was going to be an artist. I first started to look at marketing & business. Then after I started to hear the same advice repeated, I moved to writing.

Reading books “on writing” was revelatory. I had already easily put in my 10,000 hours, but I hadn’t approached it as a craft, in the way that so many had done before me.

I’ve taken to reading books I’ve read many times in an attempt to see them as a writer, not just as a reader absorbing ideas.

Even though I’ve designed many games over the years, I never read a book on game design let alone thought of myself as a game designer. I started doing that, I read lots of books, & listened to countless podcasts. 

This game designer mentality opened up because I got over my issue with Magic, the Gathering & decided that a set of rules on each card was a great way for me to think about the mechanics that go into making a game.

Over time I have seen that I have access to more cards than I can master. These abilities keep on making themselves apparent. I am sure that there are more waiting in the wings.