Hello! I’ve decided to start this substack to somewhat regularly post thoughts, essays, and maybe a short story or two. If you enjoy this essay at a

Why am I so bad at being bad at things? - by Rishab Hegde

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2024-11-26 00:30:39

Hello! I’ve decided to start this substack to somewhat regularly post thoughts, essays, and maybe a short story or two. If you enjoy this essay at all, consider subscribing (always free) and sharing with a friend or two!

I didn’t used to be. When I was 16, I was obsessed with video games like so many other teenage boys who were alive during the golden era of LAN parties and Halo 3 customs. But I didn’t just want to play them, I wanted to create them. So that summer, I spent most of my time learning the absolute basics of C - literally just how to take text input, print text output, and if-else statements - and then used that to create something that met the barest definition of video game. It was one of those old-school text based games that started with “You’re in a cavern with a torch and you see a passage leading to the north and another passage leading to the west. What do you do?” At most points, you couldn’t do anything but choose to go in one of the allowed directions, the narrative was non-existent (eventually all paths led to death by a dragon or goblin or some other fantasy foe), and it lasted for less than 5 minutes no matter what you did. It had taken me days to create - since I only knew about if-else statements, I had written thousands of lines of codes because each branching direction required another set of possibilities built from scratch, similar to writing a choose your own adventure book. The code was bad, the game was bad, it had basically no redeeming qualities. I knew all of that and yet I was still bizarrely proud of it. “Look, I made this” I said to every one of my friends and family as I forced them to sit through 5 minutes of “Go west, go south, turn back, get killed by a Gru.” It didn’t matter how terrible it was, I had actually created a video game, and that was all that mattered.

Recently, I’ve been trying to get into creative writing as it’s been a lifelong dream to eventually write a fantasy/sci-fi novel. But learning and creating something new now feels… different. I have the characters and the story in my head and I can imagine what’s going to happen in the first chapter in vivid detail. But I start writing and the sentences are just awful. What’s crystal clear in my head becomes a muddled mess on paper. And after the first paragraph, I feel embarrassed and ashamed. I wrote that? The sentences are run-ons, the main character Raine comes across as whiny instead of brave, and my description of the fantastical city of Nel-Ra makes it seem about as interesting as Reno. Rationally, I know that I’m learning something new, I can’t expect my first attempt to be amazing, and I’ll get better over time. I also know that first drafts of anything look very different than even a rough draft that people show their friends, let alone what actually gets published. But for some reason, even though logically I know all of those things, it doesn’t matter. Emotionally, I can’t get over the fact that I can only create something that I feel is terrible.

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