Side Quests.

The lost art of adventure.

You arrive at the harbour of a sleepy seaside town. The sun is shining and the sound of waves gently lapping against the shore blends with the low murmur of voices coming from a nearby café. The beach stretches along the seafront to the west, and to the east are various houses and shops. A large bronze statue of Poseidon stares enigmatically out to sea.

A little further along the quayside you spot a yellow kiosk selling journals, notebooks, coffee and such. As you approach, you see it’s run by a dishevelled but presentable illustrator/author. He sleepily gestures you over.

Hello. And welcome back. Time for a quick coffee and a chat? Well, first up I want to warn you all that this newsletter might contain some serious ‘old man energy’. But I am aware of it, and will do my best to keep it in check, so don’t all jump into the comments straight after. With that in mind, let’s go on an adventure!

I think I’ve mentioned this before (the repetition is not the old man bit), but one of my favourite quotes is by Sartre, when he described adventures as…

‘An event out of the ordinary, without necessarily being extraordinary.’

I was thinking the other day about the various ways life is supposedly streamlined by different apps, delivery services, AI, etc. and they’re all advertised by saying you no longer have to go the bank/store/takeaway or whatever anymore, so you can spend that time doing what you really like doing. A lot of people (myself included, although I don’t seem to have the time these days) like to play video games, and one of the interesting genres to emerge is the more admin based or repetitive task type games. People enjoy the cathartic satisfaction of a simple fetch quest executed well and ticked off.

Which is fine. If you want to save time by buying stuff online, so you can spend that time pottering around a shop in a digital world, there’s no judgment from me, but it is a different experience, because someone created that experience. It might be influenced by something the creator experienced themselves (a shop they actually went to) but more often it’s based on another fiction they have consumed, like the type of shop they’ve seen in another piece of media. Obviously this is a well documented thing, such as, ‘we based it on the feel of a spaghetti western’ rather than, ‘we went back and studied as much source material on the old west as possible’, and it’s all valid in fiction, but we can’t keep copying copies forever, can we?

I love a real life ‘side quest’. Don’t get me wrong, I have mundane chores that I’m not thrilled about doing like everyone else, and I’m not rubbing my hands together at the thought of a trip to the Post Office, but there’s definitely part of me that perks up when an errand presents itself that takes me out of my way. I might get to go to a part the city I’ve not been to before, enter a new building, meet some strange characters, and the thrill comes from the fact that however banal the errand, I don’t know exactly what the outcome will be.

Talking to a friend in the pub the other night, they remarked after a story I’d just told, that I frequently seem to get myself in odd situations. Now, I don’t think of myself as a particularly storied individual, I avoid trouble like everyone else, but there was something to what he was saying. I often find myself considering a path that has no inherent benefit to me one paper, and to some degree it might even seem like an actively ‘bad idea’, but curiosity gets the better of me.

And the reward? Well, frequently there isn’t one, and I literally end up just doing the tedious task without incident. ‘Character building’ is a fairly outdated phrase that is often used to reframe actual traumatic events, so I’m not talking about that, but I do find experiences in the real world are useful for building the characters I create. The people and places experienced on my odd little excursions are what populate the work I make, from an overheard conversations lifted word for word, to an architectural detail, or an imagined punchline triggered by a real world set up.

It’s a cliched answer to the cliched question of ‘where do you get your ideas from?’, but yeah, mostly it’s just stuff I’ve seen and heard in the world.

I think this is what people mean when they say ‘write what you know’. Everything you experience through your own viewfinder is unique to you. Alien is an incredible film, but we’ve all seen it, and we’ve all borrowed from it, and we’ve all been influenced by it. That’s okay, we’re all building on what has gone before, but if the pot is not rejuvenated with unique, new, individual experiences once in a while, the milk starts to go sour. We all know what this looks like, you see it in shows when you realise people aren’t speaking or behaving like people, they are just behaving like someone in a film would.

So, my one small (and personal) solution is to try and embrace the mundane side quests of life with the optimism that something might come from it, and hopefully at worst you have an interesting story to tell when you’re next down the pub. Or chatting to friends online in a virtual pub. Or indeed, stood outside a kiosk in a strange seaside town.

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Old Man.

As I said a the beginning, I’m aware this might all sound like some old guy saying you should get out in the real world like they did back in his day, but I’m not advocating for people to do that if they don’t want to. I’m very aware that as a six-foot, white, able-bodied, straight man, there are less obstacles in my world than there are for many, and I often have the luxury of choice as to how involved with the world I want to get.

Many years ago, in an attempt to allay my fears when I was kayaking in the open sea off the coast of New Zealand, a guy I knew once said;

‘Experience makes you safer. But getting experience is dangerous.’

I think about this a lot. And I know this sounds like I’ve made it up, but a few years later that guy sadly passed away. So please stay safe out there, and remember that Sartre quote from the start. There is beauty and interest in the small and banal things available to you, you don’t have to infiltrate a drugs cartel to get a good viewpoint.

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Okay, that’ll do us for now. Go and see what you can find.

Owen D. Pomery.

ps. If you haven’t seen Alien, you should. It’s great.