There’s a popular strategy video game called Civilization that I love to play. It’s almost more of a board game–but a board game so complex that it takes a computer to track all the numbers.
Civilization is a slow, ponderous game. It’s turn-based, so you have as much time as you need to make each decision. There are even stories out there of people who used to play multiplayer by mail. They would start a new game, take 1 turn, and then save it to a floppy disk (this was the 1990s), and mail it to their friend. He’d take 1 turn, save it, and mail it back.
Sometimes these games ran for years. Which sounds awful.
But if you think about it, that’s not so very different from what we writers are doing. We come up with a premise or a character, and dream about them for a while. Then we finally put fingers to the keyboard, but half the time attempt #1 is terrible and gets dumped. We push through iteration after iteration. The completion of our first draft is a major milestone–but it’s only the beginning. Rewrites, then revisions, then line edits. Then querying. Rejection, failure, disillusionment, more rewrites, more querying. Finally, acceptance. But then: more rewrites. More line edits. Copy edits.
Years later, the first readers pick up our book.
And that’s when we finally know if it worked.
A single-player game of Civilization takes me around 13 hours to finish. In some ways, the principle is similar to writing: imagination, trial and error, hope and disappointment, ending with victory or defeat. To reach that point, you have to endure 13+ hours of game. It’s a long time to wait in order to know if your strategy worked.
It’s a 13-hour feedback loop. Which feels like a long time, and yet it’s orders of magnitude faster than the feedback loop of a novel.
What does this mean? It means that novels aren’t just the confluence of skill and talent and hard work. They also require patience.
And not just patience, but blind patience. Every great writer has invested years of their life into story ideas that didn’t pan out in the end. Sometimes the problems are obvious in hindsight, but just as often they remain mysterious even after we’ve analyzed and debated and come to the heartbreaking decision that it will never work.
Not knowing for that long is aggravating. It’s tense and uncomfortable. But it’s just part of the process.
Feedback loops are inherently tied to feelings of reward. It’s difficult to enjoy an activity if you have no conception of how well you’re doing. Reaching the end of a feedback loop gives you an opportunity to observe and adjust. A chance to improve.
Burned the toast? Next time pull it out sooner.
Missed a spot mowing the lawn? You’ll have another chance in a week.
Dropped a few words in the fast part of the Hamilton soundtrack? Repeat the song, and you’re back there in under 5 minutes.
But what if you bought the wrong house? Joined the wrong profession? Married the wrong person? Those are loops you couldn’t see the end of when you started. You made the best choice at the time, but now–decades later–you finally know what you didn’t know back then.
The problem with long feedback loops is that they cast us into uncertain waters. With something as complex as a novel, there’s no perfect way to chart a course while standing on the shore. That means writing, and not knowing. Writing and not knowing. Writing without knowing.
That’s what writing is.
I read somewhere that Civilization V is designed to give the player a burst of dopamine every 90 seconds. That means every minute and a half you have a new choice to make, an attack to plan, or the conclusion of past choices to witness. The game is filled with 90-second feedback loops the whole way through, for 13 hours straight.
This is what makes video games both wonderful and perilous. They key into our brain chemistry in remarkably adroit ways, giving us little splashes of happiness at regular intervals. It’s also what makes them addictive, because they turn the reward frequency up much higher than other hobbies. Why learn guitar when you can play Guitar Hero and have guaranteed, predictable shots of dopamine ad nauseum? Video games are wonderful in that they let us express creativity, enjoy social interaction, or even learn new skills. But the fundamental lie they tell us is that “This is what life should feel like.”
I often think this lie is perpetuated by TV, social media, and perhaps just the internet in general. Make no mistake: These activities are the anomaly. Most other skills have much slower feedback loops, requiring a longer application of willpower before they’ll even tell us if we’re making progress.
A few choice examples:
Cooking: You can tell pretty quickly if you burned the chicken. But how long does it take before you know if you’re growing as a cook? Weeks, months, years?
Language learning: Most people require years to reach any measure of fluency
Hanging paintings on the wall without them being crooked: Is just terrible and no one should do it
Most skills require time and dedication. More than that, they require faith: Faith that we are learning and growing; faith that we are making progress toward our goals; faith that we can get there.
So if you feel like you’re in the dark, keep going. If you’re afraid you’ll make mistakes, keep writing. Don’t worry about heading in the wrong direction, because even mistakes teach you something. That means there is no wrong direction.
The pride and despair of writing is partially caused by long feedback loops. The only advice I would have for you is this: Get used to life at this speed. This is what it means to be one of us.
And remember that just because you can’t yet see the finish line doesn’t mean it will be any less glorious.