What's in a Name?

Ever since I can remember I have “danced”. Not dance to a beat or follow a pattern with my feet—I’m pretty terrible at that, but have learned as an adult to let go. No, I call this particular thing “dancing” because that’s what everyone else called it when I was growing up.

There are many variations, but the purest form came at around age nine or ten, before I learned to be ashamed or even conscious of it. On my tiptoes, calves tense, head down, eyes wide open, arms stretched way out behind me, and fingers flicking out towards the sky. Around this time a classmate said I looked like I was riding a motorcycle backwards. Not a bicycle, mind you: not cheery or whimsical. But tense, purposeful, rushing. He signed my yearbook with the words, “backwards motorcycle” with a stick drawing of me in position. It was as if he had seen who I really was.

I still do the backwards motorcycle when I am in my head, imagining myself in another world. Today, the backwards motorcycle is more confined: I can do it while driving or walking or sitting with my back against a tree, usually with a slight tension in my neck and hands. But it’s the same impulse, and the same inward journey. Sometimes the world is mine, sometimes it’s that of a film or book, and sometimes it’s an amalgam. But always I lose this reality and find myself in another. I never chose to swing the hands behind my back. I am not conscious of the motions. I can’t repeat it on command.

As a writer, I have known for years that my best work lies not just in accessing the vast worlds I build while on the reverse bike, but in actually going there to write. In combining writing with imagining and doing both at once.

And ever since I can remember, I have played video games. I don't know if the backwards motorcycle and my boyhood gaming habits are linked deeply or just coincidentally. But when I am playing a game, I am creating the game at the same time: imagining the world simultaneously. When I play a city-building or empire-building game, I get the most pleasure out of just organizing my world as it grows, both on the screen and in my mind. When I pause playing something, I am stuck in a loop imagining it: foreseeing the next steps and opportunities, and scaling out the interaction between me and a screen and a vast world in between: a dance of me and the designer, much like that of reader and author.

In other words, I have imagined stories and characters and worlds in the form of interactive games for as long as I have been “dancing” in the wrong direction on a motorbike.

This first newsletter is an explanation of the name, because I know it’s an odd one. Maybe it strikes you as unnecessarily opaque and inaccessible. But unlike all the other options I banged my head against for weeks, it is resolutely me. And it is always the “me” in creative pursuits of which I am most frightened, and which are therefore the most fertile.