Creative Laureate: Chris Bissette
Meet Chris Bissette, 2021 Storytelling Collective Creative Laureate.
It’s not uncommon to log on to Twitter to see another awesome Chris Bissette project appear in your feed. It’s fair to say Chris is a bit of modern Renaissance person: they’re a musician, game designer, and fiction writer, among other creative pursuits. We asked Chris about their creative background and career, and their plans for 2021.
What kind of creative work do you do?
Primarily my work is in writing tabletop roleplaying games, either through monthly Patreon releases or doing freelance writing. Alongside that I'm also a composer and musician — I've written and released original soundtracks for a few of my games, and I'm working on music for a number of recent Kickstarter campaigns (Dreadful Realms: Caverns of the Wise Minister and the upcoming Orbital Blues, along with a couple of other projects I can't talk about yet!). In addition to writing music for tabletop games, I'm also the vocalist in my band DEADTHRONE, though with everything going on in the past year that project has been on something of a hiatus for the past 12 months.
What is your creative background?
Chris is a musician, composer, and a member of the band DEADTHRONE.
It's something of a cliché for people doing creative work to say that they've been writing/playing music/drawing/etc for as long as they can remember, but that's generally because for many of us it's the truth. I can't remember a time in my life when I haven't wanted to make either writing or music my life, and the career I have today is the result of nearly 30 years of learning, creating, and failing. I've spent a long time trying new things and trying to find my niche. I studied creative writing at degree and postgraduate level, and I tried for many, many years to make a career of writing fiction (which is something I still come back to regularly). It's only in the past few years — and, specifically, in 2020 - that I've started to have real success with writing tabletop games.
What would you consider to be your "creative process" when starting > working on > completing a project?
This really differs for every project, but one thing that's always true for me is that I have to be really passionate about something to see it through to completion. This frustrated me for a long time and led to a huge amount of half-finished and abandoned projects (and is probably why I never made it as a novelist!) A recent diagnosis of ADHD has helped me to understand that this is just how my brain works, though, and that's been revelatory in helping me to figure out more sustainable ways of working and led to me spending the last year or so consistently finishing projects in a way that I've never managed to do before. I've learned that I need to have multiple small projects running at once in order to help sustain my interest in creative work while working on a big project, so that when my attention wanes from the larger thing I have something equally as fulfilling and interesting to work on while I recharge for the bigger thing. From the outside it looks like I have a lot of plates spinning at all times, and that's true, but it's actually a lot more manageable for me to work on several things at once than to focus all my energy on one project and risk burning out.
What is a must-have tool in your creative arsenal?
I read a lot, and widely, and that's honestly my most valuable tool. Most of the things I make come from a juxtaposition of ideas, where my mind takes a few things I've been reading (or playing, or listening to, etc) recently and then asks "what happens if we smash these things together in this specific way?" I'd also be lost without carrying a notepad and pen around with me at all times. It's that old cliché that ideas tend to strike when you're least expecting them, and that you need to be ready to get them down on paper before they fizzle out and are lost forever.
Your creative work spans several mediums: music, fiction, game design. How does your creative process change between these? Are there similarities?
Chris has developed numerous independent games, including The Wretched.
The main similarity is that I need to be working on something that I'm really invested in and passionate about to be able to make any progress, which can sometimes be a hindrance — especially with music, where it's much more rare that I'll have several projects brewing at once. My process for fiction and game writing is very similar, where I'll scope out a project first (either by building a table of contents for a game, or by making a skeleton structure of scenes/story beats for fiction). With music it's much more a process of discovery, where I'll spend a long time playing with sounds and textures and trying out different chord progressions and melodies before something finally clicks into place and I'm able to make progress. It's often an exercise in trying to find something that triggers my ADHD hyperfocus (which I used to refer to as a "flow state" before I got my diagnosis and didn't understand what was actually happening). When I get to that point I sort of lose track of any idea of process and just create without really thinking about it, and there are many times where I'll look back at a piece of work and wonder how I did it!
You've tackled more than one ambitious project, like running successful Kickstarters and releasing an album with your band. As an independent creator, how do you handle the pressure that comes with putting a big project out into the world?
This is something I used to struggle with a lot more when I was producing work much less frequently than I do now. Each release would be a big deal, I'd spend a lot of time trying to drum up hype for things, and I'd put a huge amount of pressure on myself to get things perfect and have a big, successful release. That led to me burning out a couple of times over the past few years and being completely unable to produce anything at all for months at a time. One thing I've done this year is given myself permission to fail, and permission for things to not be entirely perfect, and that's been a huge help in terms of reducing the amount of pressure that I place on myself. In addition, because I release so many things (at least one project a month), there isn't time to focus on perceived failures or worry about if something hasn't done well. By the time you know if a project is a flop or a success, you're already halfway through working on the next thing or even the thing after that.
In hindsight, this is a lesson I should have learned a long time ago when I was focusing solely on fiction. The best way to not worry about rejections when you have stories or novels out on submission is to always be working on something new and to always have multiple things out on submission, because that lessens the impact of an individual rejection. That's basically the philosophy I take now, except I no longer submit things to editors - I just put them on sale in my store and move on to the next thing!
Can you tell us about any cool 2021 projects you have on the horizon?
The d36 zine Kickstarter begins soon.
Absolutely! The first quarter of 2021 is already pretty full for me. Later this month I'm releasing a new game called The Assassin, a solo journaling game inspired by early Assassin's Creed games based on the same game engine as The Wretched. In February I'm releasing a two-player dungeon crawling game called Dice Souls (no prizes for guessing what that's based on!) as well as launching a Kickstarter campaign for a quarterly RPG zine called d36. The plan is for this to be something like the McSweeney's Quarterly Concern of RPG zines. The first issue is already written and contains work by amazing creators like Samuel Mui, Oliver Darkshire, and Cat Evans. If that campaign goes well then I'll be releasing four issues of the zine throughout the rest of 2021! I've also got plans to produce a Choose Your Own Adventure-style book later in the year and, hopefully, to start work on the second DEADTHRONE album.
What is a piece of advice you have for aspiring storytellers?
Lots of people will tell you to pursue your passions, and there's truth in that, but what very few people tell you is that first you have to figure out what your passions are. I've spent the best part of 3 decades trying and failing at new things. I've made music videos, done motion graphics, made video games, pursued a career in academia, and all sorts of other things. I always came back to music and to writing, and even then it took me time to figure out that the writing that really gets me excited is writing games. Once I made that my focus my career took off in a way I wasn't expecting at all. And even though it's work — the idea that if you “do what you love you'll never work a day in your life” is a pernicious myth — it's sustainable work because I love doing it.
Other than that, the piece of advice that's been most valuable to me is to have hobbies that you don't try to monetise, or even share publicly all that much. Do things that are just for you as often as possible.
Chris Bissette is an ENnie-nominated musician and designer of over 20 games. Their journaling RPG The Wretched was one of Tabletop Gaming Magazine's "Best Games of 2020," spawning hundreds of games based on its Wretched & Alone engine. Freelance writing includes The Gauntlet and Onyx Path Publishing, among others. Learn more at LootTheRoom.io.