The Whole is Greater without Some of the Parts

In this week's column about Magic design, Mark Rosewater has a great piece of advice about writing that I want to remember. And since it directly relates to a comment I gave Mike on one of his short stories, I thought I'd put an excerpt here.

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"Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction."

My major in college was broadcast & film (aka TV and movies) with an emphasis in screenwriting. As such, I took quite a number of screenwriting courses. Of all the things I learned in those classes the following quotation was one of the lessons that most stuck with me and I believe has greatly influenced how I both wrote and do card design. Here's the quote:

No scene is worth a line; no movie is worth a scene.

Now let me translate. What my teacher was saying was this. When you are writing a movie (or a television show or a play or any story-telling endeavor), the importance of the whole is more important than any one piece. Often writers fall in love with a line of dialogue or with a particular scene so much so that they force it in even when it is not in the best interest of the script. Every inch of a good script has to be moving the story forward. If the writer wastes time catering to the whim of some element that he enjoys but which doesn't accomplish this task, he is lessening the quality of his work.

This lesson is a crucial one and as I will explain in the next section at the heart of what makes good trading card game design. Artists by the nature of creation tend to fall in love with their own works. This isn't a bad thing. In fact, I believe it is essential for good art for the artist to be completely committed to what he is doing. But part of art is learning to self-evaluate and self-edit. Every idea, every word, every ounce of your creation has to be subject to scrutiny. Yes, the line might be the cleverest thing you have ever thought of but if it doesn't fit it doesn't mater how clever it is.

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I completely understand what he's saying, but I've never quite heard it put that way. To be honest, as I think about examples from my creative life, it's easiest to think about how it applies to building Magic decks -- I get so enamored with a specific card or combo that I force it into the deck, and then decide later I have to remove it because it actually doesn't work with the rest of the deck.

However, I also recognize the point in preparing for presentations I have to give, as well as other pieces of writing I've done.

Mike had a really clever line at the end of one of his short stories, but when I read it, I felt like he tried too hard to fit it in -- it seemed like the story had grown to be something bigger, something more serious, something that would be better served if didn't end in a "clever" line.

I haven't seen the final revision, so I suspect that, if the line is still there, it fits much better than it did before -- that's one great thing about Mike's writing -- he accepts comments really well and has a great knack for revision. However, I don't think I rally made the point well when I gave him the comments. Having read this advice from Mark Rosewater's column, I'd have a better way of stating it, I think.

It's always fun to learn something.