Explaining how I design

[Matt Snyder]

How do you design?

I wrote an essay, How the sausage is made, on how I actually design on Heads or Tales, my blog for Chimera Creative. On the same day, I watched and participated in an interesting thread here on the Forge. The connection between the two was revealing.

In the thread, A wild and an untamed thing - how literature refuses gaming, I argued that waxing poetically about how a fiction author writes, specifically by claiming that the characters compel the writer to make choices, is baloney. In fact, the author (and maybe other influencers, like editors) is the only person deciding what happens in the story. The character "doesn't exist" and can't decide or force the writer to do anything.

But, in my blog post, I described a single day as I worked to design my next game. In the post, I provide a lot of colorful details about the restaurant I was in when I worked. Those details have nothing at all to do with game design; they merely attempt to color my place and state of mind as I did design. I could easily have written the explanation of my design without the details.

In essence, I was waxing poetically. I turned the essay into a piece of creative non-fiction. Contained within it are specific, nitty gritty details about how I actually design. But those are wrapped within colorful details, show-not-tell writing, and other tricks of the writing trade. I turned my explanation of how I design into an aesthetic in and of itself. That's exactly what I argued against in the thread here on the Forge.

How do I rectify those apparently contradictory positions? How do I live with myself?!?

Why did I include the details? Because I think it's better writing. Because I think my point is made uniquely this way, rather than simply describing things without the details. My message changes with the details, for better or worse. I chose to go with them.

But, at the same time, I really did make an effort to explain, very plainly and non-poetically, the process I go through to design a game. I think it's there. I talk about the question-and-answer process I put myself through, writing in my notebooks.

So, I'm curious, for those of you who might bother to read How the sausage is made -- do you learn anything? Do you care? Is the pizza parlour stuff nonsense? Or, does it shed light on the process somehow?

It's meant to shed light. It's meant to de-mystify the creative process. To show how relatively boring and mundane it is. My goal in writing this piece was to actually remove any notion that "divine inspiration" is part of design, that instantaneous inspiration only comes after some serious thinking and work.

What do you think?

[Ben Lehman]

This is wildly different from my creative process.  It sounds slightly closer to how I write fiction, but wow.

A fascinating read.  Thanks.

yrs--
---Ben

[TonyLB]

Okay, first off, I don't think these two ways of expressing yourself are contradictory.  I think they just have different purposes.

You don't think that waxing poetical is going to get across the technical tools that one needs to design games.  Neither do I.  I didn't get much in the way of technical tools from the article.  Sorry.

But I did get a good, warm sense of solidarity with another creative mind.  And that's another kind of support.  It shows me that there are many ways to do things, neither more nor less acceptable in the eyes of the almight God of Creating Stuff.  You're giving people the emotional tools to deal with the rigors of creative work.  And you can't do that without personalizing it.

So that's what I got from it.  Oh, and the beautiful, spectacular, mind-opening typo ("love of fear" when you meant "love or fear") which I firmly intend to base a scenario and possibly a game design around some day.  It's on my list.  My long, long, incredibly long list.

[Matt Snyder]

Tony, it is indeed a typo, but a serendipitous one, apparently. Thanks for the comments!

[madelf]

I'm not sure it's possible to really lay out the tools of the trade for this kind of thing. The process is too personal. So I suspect explaining how the process effects you on a personal level is as close as you're likely to get. It's rather a poetic process in its own way, how better to describe it than by waxing poetic? It's certainly more informative than a dry disertation about how you write questions and answers in notebooks during lunch, without any insight into how that works for you.

And yes, I think it is very similar to what you were arguing against in the other thread. The way I see it, you asking a question about your game system, which inspires the answer to that question (an answer you didn't know until you wrote the question that triggered it) is all but identical to creating a fictional character who's "personality" has an influence or inspirational effect on the flow of a story. Your description of the process is just less flowery than Le Guin's.

But... after reading the rest of that other thread, I also got the impression that you were taking issue not so much with the process, or even the description of the process, so much as the idea of assuming that the poetic description should be taken literally.

So I'm not sure there's really a conflict between your position there, and your "How the sausage is made" essay.

And for what it's worth, I think your process is great.
It's almost exactly the approach I take with my half-assed attempts at writing. I've got piles of paper & notes floating around my desk, where I've been talking to myself trying to figure things out. I really should use the notebook approach to help things stay more organized.

[Michael S. Miller]

Hi, Matt.

This was a fun read. I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who scribbles in little notebooks in pizza parlors. (The With Great Power card mechanic was born in a little deli near my workplace and scribbled in a hardcover digest-sized unlined artist notebook.)

The sentence that brought a smile to my face, in light of the other thread, was:

The "gambit" mechanic I had been killing myself over finally revealed itself.

[insert tongue in cheek] The game mechanic revealed itself to you? [/remove tongue]

I think that turn of phrase, as well as Le Guin's are pointing to the same phenomenon. Our training can lead us to ask the questions, but where do the answers really come from? One minute you didn't understand the gambit mechanic. The next moment you did. What changed?

Call in the unconscious, the creative impulse, the figure inside the block of marble, the game revealing itself to you. Robert Pirsig calls it "Dynamic Quality." It's all trying to put words on this thing beyond words.

Anyway, very cool. Thanks.

[Christopher Kubasik]

Dear Matt,

I think you're horribly misguided in your crusade. That's what I think.

I've been off these boards for quite a while because, well, I wanted to get back to writing.  Writing stories. Which is what I wanted to do all my life. And which I did for a big chunk of my life.  And then I stopped.  And now it's time to get back to work.

And so I left. Because I couldn't afford anymore to keep thinking about the process of writing.  All the discussion of CA and Egri's premise and more had turned me into the caterpillar looking at its legs as it walked.  I couldn't go anywhere because I was so busy trying to get all my legs to walk "right."

And this isn't just something that happened because of the Forge.  Blocked, I started reading a lot of books on writing, taking classes -- all of which looked at the process of writing from the "outside" to explain how its "really" done -- much like your agenda, Matt.

And so, I spent all my time trying to get my natural storytelling instincts to work "right," objectively and productively, and ended up tripping over myself and starting one draft of a script after another.

Interestingly, just before stopping here for a visit, I started a fresh draft of a script that's been hounding me.  I thought, "You know how to write a story.  No more Premise. No more carefully constructed character arcs.  Just trust the characters will carry the day."

And it's been going gangbusters.  The scenes are full of conflict. The story is moving forward.  Everyone's got an agenda.  The story arc is getting clear.  And all that Premise stuff is taking care of itself.  It's there -- but I don't need to think about it.  (Ron pretty much nailed this issue in his last post.)

I think you're misguided in your comically rigid rational assumptions about the creative process.  The way you spit out the word "poetic" in your posts -- as if you might as well be saying "peeing on the third rail, for all the good it will do you," is, to my mind, peculiar.  Because it misses how many people -- actors, writers, directors -- actually work.  Actually get good work done.  Actually are productive.

Game design is a creative act. But like outlining or designing a marketing campaign, it's not the act of creation that anyone's shooting for.  The purpose of game design is to design a tool that let's the vital act of creation happen.  After all, you don't know if the game design is working until players experience it and report back.  What they make, their pleasure in the process of the game is what says "Yes," or "No."  

One can't really design everything from the outside in.  I believe these days, when it comes to the private acts of creation -- like writing, acting, directing (shared activities, yes, but not anything I have to ship to strangers and make them understand it on the fly) -- that working from the outside is death to the act.  (Others may work differently.  Others have sex differently than I do.  I don't think differences in practice nullify my point.)  

Designing a game, I think, might well require this objectivity of the construction -- because it's an instruction book on building a process.  But it is not the process itself. That's up to the players to do.  And that may well be a very inspired event for them indeed.

You seem to think little of "divine inspiration".  We can, of course, go around this all day long. When has "enough" work been done to have "earned" the inspiration.  And so on.  What can one say.  Jung perceived an "oceanic feeling" that connected all of us. Freud mocked him for it.  Jung was a weirdo.  Okay.  So he was a weirdo.  Does this mean he didn't feel what he said he felt?  And Freud was no straight shooter either.  His muscular claim on rational thinking didn't necessarily make his thinking more muscular or rational.  In other words, how do you know you're right about how Le Guin works?  Who are you to say?  The fact that you are standing on the side of right thinking rationality?  Really? And you know that how?  Because you've made sure to partition off the proper ways of thinking from those bad ways that you know are already bad?

Here's my observation of people over the last five years: People are really weird.  All of us.  And the person who knows he knows how things "really" work is the guy I'm going to most calmly nod to, much like a crazy homeless guy out at the beach in Santa Monica raging at the government.  Because, after all, what am I going to say?

You are, by the way, arguing against a straw man when you disparage Le Guin's comments.  You keep twisting them around to make it sound like she's saying the character in her imagination is forcing her to do things against her will. She's never said that, I've never come across a quote from a writer who said such a thing.  Such a person -- whether an actor or a writer claiming such a thing (meaning they were doing things they had no control over) would be psychotic.  Which is not what the creative act is about.

What she said was that Ged, independent of her own expectations or desires ("I really need this chapter to wrap up," "Really, this speech is going on too long,") kept providing options of behavior that she would rather not be dealing with, didn't expect, didn't match her idea of what would be happening, are inconvenient for her needs to wrapping up the book. Whatever.  He didn't make her do anything.  

But he did, in the moment of writing -- which again, is completely different than the moment of organizing material, plotting, determining theme from a rational point of view or whatnot -- provide unexpected choices, actions, words that she could never have seen coming.  Because she was following the character.

Now, does Ged exist outside her brain? That's a rabbit hole I have no desire to go down. It doesn't matter to me.

What does matter to me that in the creative act -- writing, acting, directing -- if you're on your game, you will discover or find things if you follow the characters and the situations.  This is the creative mind at work.  There is an element of following the "dream" and writing it down.  (Nobokov and others notwithstanding. Again, I'm speaking of the writers and actors who work this way -- not those that don't.)

All she's saying is that she imagines in her mind's eye a character, Ged, and transcribes what he's doing.

A lot of people who I really like and respect around here truly believe that writing is the stringing together of the words.  Like instructive game text: making prose clear.  The art of fiction, whether on the page or in the bodies of actors is a mix of clarity and following that strange inspiration.  

Now, again, Le Guin might have all those elements of Ged inside her that make Ged do what Ged does (and she probably does) -- but if she's not aware of all that inside her, when Ged does something surprising she's still surprised.

She's not waxing poetic when she's saying this.  She's stating the facts.

And this has everything to do with the process of writing.  Her process, at least.  And mine, too, apparently. And that process is getting the hell out of your own way and following the events as your strange little writer/actor/director brain tosses them up as you go.

Later on you (or your editor) can go back and make cuts, rephrase things, add a scene of connective tissue to make the plot whole. Whatever.  But in that moment, to really trust these things, these characters, with a life of their own, and see what they/your imagination/the muses/random electrical sparks in the brain/God offers up is really the discipline of the creative act.

And I want to really repeat this. For many, but not all, this is the DISCIPLINE.  To hold in one's mind the various fictional constructs, let them interact with each other, follow their lead, and transcribe or enact the results through their feelings, passions, thoughts and deeds.

It is not an easy thing to do -- in that it's easy to get caught up with trying to get it "right," to avoid "wasting time," and not produce anything that "doesn't make sense" or "isn't clear."  To trust in the moment, to leave the editing for later, is the tough call.  And not everyone can do it.  And some of us can forget out to do it and need to hit that discipline again.

You can, and might well, re-jigger everything I'm saying with all sorts of rational arguments and whatnot.

But does the character "exist".  It depends on what you mean be exist.  As a construct within the writer's mind, it certainly does. As a professional actor I can assure you that I have gone through the process of building and finding 'the character' and when the cameras rolled or the audience was in front of me, I did things as the character, not as I would do them.  And I did them not with a beat by beat plan, but by simply responding to the stimulae.  Was I the character?  No.  (See psychosis above.)  But was there a character out there for me to find and build.  Apparently yes.  I mean, I'm the guy who did it. I'm the guy describing what it felt like to me.

You might -- and others on this board do -- seem to disparage this element of feeling and suggest it's really not what's "going on."  Well, my friend. To that I must say, "Baloney."

That element of the experience is what lets me know I'm on track.  It's the feedback let's me know I'm doing my job right.  It may not make any sense to you, but all I can say ask is, "Do you need to do it?"  That is, what in your actions requires you to be open to this process?  How do you know that this discipline, this strange, nonsensical experience isn't exactly what happens as part of the creative process.  

For Ron and others who suggest that Egri's got it right because he's looking at it from the outside -- wrong.  Yes, he's recording an element of the artifact after it's made.  But does that really tell us what the writer is doing? For some writers yes, perhaps.  But others, like Le Guin, with a solid body of work behind her, no.  Her experience is to record the fictional constructs as she watches them in her minds eye.  Yes premise and all is happening whether she's aware of it or not (as Ron noted), but her process is following the character.  Too bad for you if you don't know how that's possible. But that's what the woman's said.  

Yeah, we could go in with cat scans and take apart her brain while she's working.  But that wouldn't help her write better.

You've assumed that her experience of writing is actually some sort of layered poetry which actually obscures the process. Maybe not, Matt. To be blunt, maybe she's just doing something you can't, or won't, do.  We all have different skills, different ambitions.  Moreover, we all have different "delight buttons".  And, maybe just as important, we all have the places and things we feel uncomfortable with, think are wrong, think are wastes of time, think are foolish, make no sense to us, or are even scary.

She described, actually and concretely, a portion of her writing experience -- the part of the actual writing.  The part of actually writing a fictional tale  There might have been the outlining phase, the thinking about it phase, the random note phase... but when it came down to it, she had to hit the writing phase.  And that's when she did the things you simply don't believe she did.  

Why you don't believe her, I don't know? I can only ask, "What was it like when you wrote your novels?"  Not, "How would you write a novel?"  But how did it go when you created a series of fictional events?  And, how did they turn out.  Because when I've read the fiction of those around here, I always, wonderfully, see all the intelletual gear churnining, the thematic stakes laid clearly on the table.  But seldom am I caught up, seldom do I feel characters with beating hearts, never have I felt I was reading a story.  The writing is like an essay gussied up with fictional characters.  Which is a fine technique if one wants to make a point.  But the story-tellers craft is a different set of priorities -- and a different set of win condidtions. (Ie, I don't win as a storyteller because I made my point well, but because the audience stayed to the end.)

Best,

Christopher

[John Kim]

In essence, I was waxing poetically. I turned the essay into a piece of creative non-fiction. Contained within it are specific, nitty gritty details about how I actually design. But those are wrapped within colorful details, show-not-tell writing, and other tricks of the writing trade. I turned my explanation of how I design into an aesthetic in and of itself. That's exactly what I argued against in the thread here on the Forge.
...
But, at the same time, I really did make an effort to explain, very plainly and non-poetically, the process I go through to design a game. I think it's there. I talk about the question-and-answer process I put myself through, writing in my notebooks.

I'm not sure who you're arguing against.  Have you read Ursula Le Guin's essay that I quoted?  She does talk in plain terms about her writing process -- i.e. what notes she has written down beforehand, what she worked out in her head, etc.  It seems like you've made a leap from "John quoted Le Guin saying something poetic" to "Le Guin never says anything plain".  

On the other hand, when talking plainly, she does not describe a process like what, say, Egri suggests.  i.e. She doesn't decide on a Premise and then diagram out events to meet that.  She instead collects pictures in her head, has cryptic notes on the different people and places, and looks in her imagination.  You'll find a similar description if you read Stephen King's "On Writing".  He prepares what sorts of words he will use, but never plans out, say, what the theme will be or such.  

So, I'm curious, for those of you who might bother to read How the sausage is made -- do you learn anything? Do you care? Is the pizza parlour stuff nonsense? Or, does it shed light on the process somehow?

It's meant to shed light. It's meant to de-mystify the creative process.

Hm.  It didn't work as well for me as, say, Ursula Le Guin's essay -- but that is an unfair comparison, I think.  (It's comparing a selected "best-of" essay after decades of writing to a blog post.)  However, I think that the details certainly did help.  A bunch of stuff is left out, though.  How do you go from multiple notebooks to one notebook, for example?  Still, the description is definitely helpful.

[Matt Snyder]

John -- I haven't read the essay. Sounds like an interesting read. Then again, I've not read much LeGuin either.

Yes, my comments are based on your one quote of hers. I do not think LeGuin is a fool (nor are you). I used the verb. I could have said "tricked" without the name-calling connotation.

Anyway, LeGuin may indeed have much helpful to say about writing. She may not.

For my money, I much prefer John Gardner's The Art of Fiction. Great stuff within, and no bullshit. Well, some bullshit if you dont' think Gardner has anything worth saying on how to write. I think he does.

As for how I narrow notebooks, I'll explain a bit more.

I have one primary design journal. It contains any and every thought I have about gaming and game design. It's a thick, bound volume I picked up at Borders.

I also constantly use reporters notebooks. I use them at work often. When using them for design, I almost always dedicate a single notebook to one topic -- usually a particular game design. I sometimes even write the name of the game on the notebook's cover in huge letters so I can remember which one is which on my shelf.

For Dreamspire, I had a reporter's notebook that I wrote a lot in last winter. I kept lugging it around with me, reviewing those notes, and getting no where. So, I grabbed another volume -- the one described in the essay -- sitting around that I simply grabbed and started to use. It was black and white, which I liked because of the chess color.

My hopes with the notebook was that I'd trick myself into a fresh start. It worked (often, I try that trick on myself to no avail). Note that I don't believe the notebook is some kind of goodluck charm or is the thing that made me break the designer's block. That's silly. I did it on my own; my work and thinking broke the jam -- not the notebook itself. The notebook was me trying to trick myself, jumpstart myself into some new ideas. That's all.

I also stopped carrying my satchel and other notebooks. I did that to prevent myself from being distracted. For example, I've got my HeroQuest book in there an my larger notebook with notes for my current Fields of Freedom campaign. I didn't want to carry that with me to avoid the temptation of letting Dreamspire sit idle and tinkering with HeroQuest stuff.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Christopher,

You wrote,

For Ron and others who suggest that Egri's got it right because he's looking at it from the outside -- wrong. Yes, he's recording an element of the artifact after it's made. But does that really tell us what the writer is doing? For some writers yes, perhaps. But others, like Le Guin, with a solid body of work behind her, no. Her experience is to record the fictional constructs as she watches them in her minds eye. Yes premise and all is happening whether she's aware of it or not (as Ron noted), but her process is following the character. Too bad for you if you don't know how that's possible. But that's what the woman's said.

We've been over this ground before and I don't think you've ever quite managed to parse what I've been saying.

"Egri's got it right because ..." Uh, no. I'm not saying that, because the "it" you're referring to is the experiential process. And I'm not talking about that.

I do understand the difference that you are articulating. What gripes me is that you seem to think that I'd then claim that my discussion of Premise as a cognitive principle matches the experiential process of creating art with it and about it.

Most of my dialogue and analysis remains at the rather boring and ugly bones of "story-ness" rather than the wildly diverse and most likely quite beautiful cognitive experiences that people use to work it up into actual enjoyable stories.

When I do go into the process stuff, that's when I stick with the medium I know best (role-playing) and how it's done there. Surely you'll spot me some skill in discussing that without boring ol' Premise talk? Chapter 7 in Sorcerer & Sword is a good example. Not a shred of Egri to be seen.

My only claim is that Premise is happening whether the author knows it or not. That's all. Which means, apparently that we do agree.

Best,
Ron

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Ron,

My apologies.

A long post, and I grabbed the wrong words at the start of that paragraph.

We have been over it, and I have parsed it.  

I'd stand by my statements on the phone that this distinction your making now was never so clearly made as your posts in the past -- which is why it came up in our discussions.

But you and I do already agree on this.  And I spot you a great deal -- both on RPGs and many other matters.

Best,
Christopher

[GaryTP]

This reminds me of a conversation I had a few years ago with a group of writers and artists. What came out of it was:

Everyone has something to say, and within the things they say there is always some insight to be gleened that can help, reassure, enlighten, solidify, or break out of a thought pattern in which you may find yourself trapped.

Design is personal.

As designers and writers mature, some start designing/writing for other designers and writers, and lose sight of the masses. There is nothing wrong with that, if that's what your muse is telling you to do.

Some people are born with the ability to always connect with their audience. They are just better at creating things that resonate with majority, rather than a minority, and seem to do no wrong. (Wish I was one of these people:)

Using someone else's design philosophy or rules (whether good, bad, clever, silly, and so on) can help you look at the way you creatively approach your own own problem(s).

Not knowing the full context of a (design) statement can sometimes cause it to be misunderstood. This can be bad...or good. It can lead you to a poor choice...or a personal epiphany.

When you're at a loss/standstill, just start (insert one) writing, drawing, painting, building, creating, doing.

Since coming to these boards I find can't believe the amount of mental-muscle and passion here. It reminds me of stories I hear of Parisian coffee houses during the Impressionists' era.

[Matt Snyder]

Gary,

Man o' man do I wish I had my Art of Fiction book handy; your comments remind of something Gardner says in the book. In the introduction in later editions, Gardner address the age-old argument about whether writing can be taught. He agrees that, yes, talent is a factor, but that we can teach writing. I agree with him, and I have found no reason to believe we couldn't do the same in game design.

I'll try to track down the quote later tonight.

[Sean]

Hi there -

If the LeGuin example is problematic, Dunsany provides a clear one. He claims that he got the name of a city in one of his stories 'wrong', where he means by that that the name he chose does not correspond to the name that the city actually had, not simply that it sounded bad.

This is of course nonsense. Let me wax uselessly Socratic for a moment: if you maintain that fictional characters are real you are, quite literally, contradicting yourself. That's why we call them fictional - to mark off their irreality.

The more interesting question, which Chris Kubasik seemed to be struggling with, is what an artist needs to believe, or do, in order to work. Granted that fictional characters don't exist: let's say that believing this rendered a LeGuin or Dunsany unable to write. Would we rather have the self-deception and the writing, or a world fuller of truth and emptier of art? Of course, we'd all like both best - that 'of course' reflects a generosity of spirit on my part - but that wasn't the question.

If you say bag the truth, let's take the art, I have a follow up question: what about Picasso beating his models and girlfriends senseless? If you don't just look at the masterpieces, if you stop by the Musee Picasso in Paris and look at the long catalogue of cubist sketches, you will see this violence embodied in the line. Picasso was a great master though - he did something with the souls he took. Was it worth it? (For the more bourgeois version of the same question, you may switch to the problem of Gauguin leaving his wife and children).

How you answer these questions about truth, beauty, and the good will tell you something about your values, as will the refusal to answer, or the desperate clinging to the belief that in the grand scheme of things you need not choose, because they all come to one and the same. The way you answer them through the actions you choose will tell you still more than the things you say when confronted with the questions abstractly, in comfort.

(By the way, Freud was a rationalist, but he was not deceived about the nature of human consciousness. On Freud's picture, it's true that the neurotic receives help by robbing the unconscious on behalf of the ego, but that process is never complete - the unconscious remains when the process of therapy is done. It's a matter of a greater degree of self-understanding, manifested in part by a greater sense of ownership of the desires motivating one's actions.)

If you value art over truth, of course the willingness to swallow any sort of insane bullshit will be present. It's not even an either-or for your whole life for that matter - you can be mostly rational and truth-loving except where the needs of your art are concerned. If you value truth over art, you may choose differently. Or you may not be able to decide which you value more, in which case you'll just keep twisting in the wind - that's my gig.

Best,

Sean

[John Kim]

If the LeGuin example is problematic, Dunsany provides a clear one. He claims that he got the name of a city in one of his stories 'wrong', where he means by that that the name he chose does not correspond to the name that the city actually had, not simply that it sounded bad.

This is of course nonsense. Let me wax uselessly Socratic for a moment: if you maintain that fictional characters are real you are, quite literally, contradicting yourself. That's why we call them fictional - to mark off their irreality.

OK, I'm not familiar with Dunsany's beliefs, but let me ask a question here.  Are you saying that Dunsany believed that the city physically existed?  i.e. That the city he wrote about existed outside of his his head somewhere and that he had some supernatural view of it?  

If, on the other hand, it was imaginary -- then no, I don't think this is nonsense.  One can speak about the qualities of an imaginary thing -- i.e. how one sees it in one's head.  Consider, for a moment, that I keep having a certain dream.  I start to describe my dream to you for a while, and get to a part where a big animal was chasing me.  "What kind of animal?" you ask.  I reply, "I dunno.  I guess a bear."  I continue on for a bit and then as I describe more about it, I say, "Wait, actually it was a lion."  

Now, at this point, triumphant in your Socratic method, you spring on me.  "Aha!  You're just contradictory.  There is no bear or lion.  Neither of these exist.  Therefore you can't say that it was either one."  I would argue back that you're quite wrong.  I can speak in fact about what I saw in my dream just as much so as anything else that I saw.  

Would we rather have the self-deception and the writing, or a world fuller of truth and emptier of art? Of course, we'd all like both best - that 'of course' reflects a generosity of spirit on my part - but that wasn't the question.

If you say bag the truth, let's take the art, I have a follow up question: what about Picasso beating his models and girlfriends senseless?

Your implication here is that belief in what you think of as truth makes people into faultless angels.  I see no evidence of this.  Plenty of people behave violently for strictly rational, materialist reasons -- i.e. someone who kills his wife for the money, or beats her to get her to do the things he wants.  Do you have any evidence that artists are more violent than artless rationalists?