It was a lot easier to write when I was unemployed.

As much as I try to get some writing in on a regular basis, I am constantly struggling with my “mood” to write, those almost epiphanous moments where my fingers yearn to stroke the keys and Voltron words together into a mechanical powerhouse of wonderful prose, and the reality of having to do work instead. While most of my jobs have afforded moments of free time where I am able to open a Google doc and put some thoughts down, that energetic moment, that thrilling electricity that zaps through my mind in just the right way to create the most wonderful to read content, has long since vanished.

When I can, I still try and force myself to write. I try to build sentences and paragraphs that flow like stream, or a silver marble that rolls down a path predetermined by a masterfully engineered erector set. Or even dominoes falling into a beautiful cascade of shining onyx figures, separating upon different tracks that meet each other perfectly at the end.

Rarely does it ever turn out in such a manner. Instead it’s much more like a marble bouncing and dropping off of the right-angled towers of LEGO bricks. They are placed at proper heights that the marble may follow downward, but they are blocky and lack a proper slope. Instead the marble simply plunks onto the surface, likely to drop by the side, clattering to the hardwood floor only to roll off into the distance.

I am convinced that using one side of your brain over the other throughout the day will make it harder to shift in and use the other. There is no scientific explanation for this, nor do I have any works cited. I don’t even know what I’d look for. But if I spend all morning problem-solving and working with code, I find it that much more difficult to open a Google doc and properly write anything worth reading.

Instead, it’s more like extensive note-taking. An idea I had in the morning is jabbed into a document, ideas and thoughts listed down and connected together, but without any proper flow. It’s disjointed, blocky, and full of right-angles and pointy edges. Nothing rolls off the tongue, it merely drops out and makes a wet smack! upon the floor.

Merely notes, but lacking the brevity and efficiency that good notes require.

I cannot purely blame full-time employment for this problem, however. I have not properly been exercising my art-sided brain for some time. I’ve been watching film, television, and playing games, but I haven’t been reading much outside of the occasional article on video games or the posts upon forums. Theoretically, any sort of reading is good reading, but only in an effort to learn basic forms of communication. In order to develop the skills to be a good, nay, exceptional writer, one must read exceptional writing, and there is very little of that to be had on the Internet.

I did not play any video games last week, I shall confess. Fire Emblem: Awakening is frozen in time within my Nintendo 3DS, cradled upon my desk where it can continue to absorb power for its already full battery. My WiiU has been used for Netflix or Amazon Video, with Super Mario 3D World and The Wind Waker HD left unchanged, with Mario and Link slumbering in the cryostasis of saved games.

Instead I have taken myself back to reading once more, and what a joy it has been for me. Two books occupy my time, very different not only in their contents, but in their writing styles. At home I’ve been rereading The Game by Neil Strauss, a controversial title misplaced in the Barnes & Nobles in the self-help section when it belongs in non-fiction. It is not designed to be a self-help title, even though the ideas and “secrets” hidden within are most certainly fascinating to a professionally single male. What draws me instead to the book repeatedly, this being my fourth time reading through it, are the people within. Reading about men that are not bad, per se, but who have been driven to selfish desires to commit selfish acts. I am reminded of a quote in the film Fight Club, where Brad Pitt comments that “our fathers have failed us”, a statement intended to call into question the modern and frail state of so-called masculinity and what it means to be a man.

Neil Strauss is neither damning nor condemning of anyone within his book, at least, not too much, but he certainly paints a fascinating picture. Desperate for love and acceptance, these men are broken. Their life has become a facade. They feel as if they have mastered the mind of woman, the art of becoming the alpha male in a modern society where the hunter has become obsolete. Yet just as they provide women with the sexual fantasies they never knew they had, or even denied that they had, these men are merely living out fantasies themselves. They are not happy, nor are they fulfilled.

On the train to and from work in the city, however, I read a very different book. The Darkness That Comes Before, a book by R. Scott Bakker (whose blog Three Pound Brain I have linked to on the right of this page), was almost impenetrable at first. None of the names or descriptions of locations are familiar. They do not carry the sound of a Western European continent, but instead remind me more of the Middle East. For the first time I’ve found myself needing to flip over to the glossary, keeping track of characters and studying the map to remember just what place we’re talking about. Unlike Tolkien, Martin, or Williams, this is not a fantastical recreation of Anglo-Saxon Europe. This is a recreation of a different world with different values in a different time, and as such it was difficult to penetrate.

Yet once I began studying the glossary, flipping to it mid-chapter to make sure I was following along, it began to open up. I began to follow the politics, the factions, to understand the different cultures and values being presented. Indeed, it is perhaps one of the best fantasy novels to be constructed in a long time. Political and philosophical, I believe R. Scott Bakker has the potential to be the next Frank Herbert, whose writings open the mind well beyond the fantasy worlds they take place in.

Each of these books has reminded me that, just as video games exercise the mind and enthrall the spirit in their own unique way, so too does a properly written tome. There are few ways to convey thought more effectively, and combining intellectual concepts with the cool spring streams of proper prose all give the mind something to constantly chew on, absorb, and digest. Books are a feast for the mind, and it turns out that I’ve been starving myself.

I thought what I needed in order to write was merely more time. To be able to sit down after a shower, where my brain had begun its exercise of forming words together and illustrating ideas as if with a paint brush rather than a cudgel-like stamp, and begin looming the colorful tapestry of my thoughts was the morning exercise I yearned for. Yet it was not enough. Good books, feeding excellent prose and writing, was also a necessity.

Time is tragically limited, but if I am to write, then I must always have time to read. The importance of playing video games as a games writer is, in many ways, over-rated. My desired profession, after all, is to write, not to play. One must therefore prioritize everything that improves their ability to craft an article, a story, even a script, before they tend to the content within.