Meet Ben Kidd

We were lucky to catch up with Ben Kidd recently and have shared our conversation below.

Ben, so happy to have you with us today. You are such a creative person, but have you ever had any sort of creativity block along the way? If so, can you talk to us about how you overcame or beat it?

Being a YouTube creator requires a steady stream of ideas for videos, and for ‘video essay’-style YouTubers like myself a bout of writers block can be devastating. As I script out videos I end up writing about 5,000 words a month (the equivalent of writing one novel a year, which would be much more impressive), so over the last 8 years I’ve had to come up with some strategies to keep the word count climbing even when it feels like the creative well has dried up.

The first and most helpful piece of advice I’ve incorporated into my writing process is to separate yourself into EITHER ‘creative mode’ or ‘critical mode’, but never both at the same time. It’s incredibly hard to produce anything creative if you’re thinking critically about your output. The reason for this is simply that it is very unlikely that whatever you produce is going to be any good. The best writers need an editor for their work to be polished and presentable, and your first draft is not going to be worth reading. Accept this fact and expect it; my first drafts are always purely about seeing if I can put my ideas onto paper in full, coherent sentences, with no thought spared to the quality of each sentence or how well they flow together.

Even in ‘creative mode’, focusing solely on pumping out words, it can be easy to get derailed. It’s hard to find a writing device that doesn’t also offer access to an infinite sea of distractions, and there’s nothing more painful than staring at the screen when you don’t know what to write next. When you find yourself stuck in the middle of a script, it’s almost impossible to resist the allure of opening Another Tab. I’ve learned to lean into this instinct, and have found a system for writing that speeds up the process of finishing a first draft while also feeling like I’m not doing any work.

When working on a first draft I’ll sit down on the couch with my laptop and start playing a very hard video game on my TV. Dark Souls, or anything trying to be Dark Souls, works perfectly, but it just has to be the kind of game where you’re constantly dying and retrying. Every time I get killed in the game, I don’t let myself try again until I’ve added 100 words to my script. Once I’ve added 100 words, I can give the game another go.

This creates this mentality where the script is an obstacle to my having fun, rather than a task that needs to get done so that I can make my mortgage payment this month. It puts me right into the mindset of pumping out words without worrying about the quality of the writing, which is exactly what ‘creative mode’ is all about. Oftentimes I’ll find myself on a roll, pumping out 3-400 words rather than the required 100 before I dive back into the game, but the second I hit a block and can’t think of what to write next, there’s an alluring and sanctioned distraction waiting for me. I don’t find myself on an endlessly scrolling page or falling down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos for 15, 20, 30 minutes at a time anymore – playing a video game is more fun than either of those things anyway, and after a few minutes my character in the game inevitably gets his head cut off and I get forced back into my work.

Once a draft is finished, that’s when you can turn off the creative faucet and enter ‘critical mode’. Your inevitably awful first draft does have a good script hidden inside it, you just need to ruthlessly hack away all of the unnecessary details to get to it. Fix each sentence so that it doesn’t just contain the relevant information, but also sounds good and flows well, too. Pull out the thesaurus and take out all of the instances of the word “vibe” (this might not be relatable to anyone but me). It is much, much easier to turn a bad draft into a good script than to write a good script from scratch.

I’m constantly reevaluating and trying to improve on my process for writing and video creation, but these are strategies that I expect to continue using for a long time and would recommend to anybody struggling with writer’s block.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

I create videos under the 8-bit Music Theory YouTube channel, where I dissect music from video games. Using technical music theory analysis, I identify exactly what makes our favourite game music sound the way it does. In spite of my willingness to dive in deep with music theory jargon, these videos have found a dedicated fanbase and the channel has amassed over half a million subscribers. I never knew there were so many people out there who are the exact kind of nerd I am.

As part of this project I’ve also started a band that performs high energy arrangements of classic game music, called “8-bit & The Single Players”. We’ve released one album so far, titled “Let’s Play”, which I’m really proud of.

My broader goal as an online personality is to bridge the gap between thoughtful instrumental music and the broader music-listening public. It wasn’t so long ago that instrumental music could be a radio hit, or a best-selling album, and I think it’s a big loss that most people nowadays don’t ever listen to or appreciate instrumental works. Whether it’s by breaking down what makes music so powerful on the 8-bit Music Theory YouTube channel or by writing engaging and accessible instrumental arrangements with the Single Players, I want to get more people interested in exploring what instrumental music has to offer.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

While music theory education is not considered traditionally “entertaining”, my job is fundamentally entertainment. The success of my channel is decided by whether people will pull my videos up on their phones while they sit on the toilet (I would love if YouTube analytics could include that particular statistic). In my journey to becoming a successful entertainer, the 3 qualities that I believe to be the most important are 1) having something of value to contribute, 2) Showmanship, or the awareness of the audience’s experience, and 3) a dogged pursuit of improvement in one’s field.

There’s a generation of kids for whom the collective ‘dream job’ has shifted from Rock Star to YouTuber. Only there’s a problem with this: to want to be a rock star implies a certain skill set, and with it, a path forward. Aspiring rockers don’t need to know much about the music industry to know they should be practicing their guitar and trying to write songs if they ever want to ‘make it’. But there is no consistency to the career of a YouTuber, and no one particular skill set that can guarantee success. So the first problem for any aspiring content creator is to figure out what they can do that is uniquely entertaining. For me, I found I have a perspective on music theory that is unique, and an ability to explain it in a way that people find more engaging than your average textbook. This was something of value I could contribute that people couldn’t easily find elsewhere.

In presenting your unique and valuable contribution to the internet, whatever your particular contribution may be, it’s important to consider at every step how the audience will experience your work. Put yourself in the shoes of someone engaging with your work for the first time. What do they want? What do they expect? How can you set their expectations to maximize their enjoyment of your work? For me, this usually means cutting the introduction off of each of my scripts. When writing, it’s easy to feel like you need to justify why you’re writing about what you’re writing about with a lengthy introduction. But these are YouTube videos, and anyone watching them has seen a title and thumbnail explaining what the video is going to be about and decided to click on it. They’ve already bought in, so get straight to the point!

Finally, it’s important to always be trying to improve whatever your uniquely entertaining quality is. For me, I’m constantly trying to deepen my knowledge of music. I never tread old ground when making videos, every video I make features something new I learned in the process of making it. This keeps the work interesting and fresh for me, and I believe that excitement translates to the viewers’ side of the screen.

All the wisdom you’ve shared today is sincerely appreciated. Before we go, can you tell us about the main challenge you are currently facing?

Being self-employed, time management is something I constantly have to focus on. When there’s no limit to how much you can work and see results from, it’s easy to push yourself too hard and set up an unsustainable work schedule. At the same time, if you don’t push yourself hard enough, it’s easy to become complacent. You want to strike the perfect balance of working enough to feel like you’re working hard and doing a good job, but not so much that it starts to burn you out. The hardest part is that everyone has a different personality and a different balance that works for them, so it’s a problem that you have to solve alone.

For the last year or so I’ve started arranging my schedule to build in specific times to ‘crunch’ and times to pull back. I’ll work on YouTube videos for two months straight, filling up my schedule as full as I can, and then take a month off to work on side projects and passion projects. This 3-month pattern separates my work year into distinct seasons, and also gives a nice arc to each season of pushing myself, hitting a deadline, and then getting to relax.

I’ve been really enjoying this structure so far but I’m sure I’ll reevaluate and change my work schedule at some point in the future. The ideal work schedule changes based on what phase of life you’re in, and requires constant fine-tuning.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://patreon.com/8bitmusictheory
• Twitter: @8bitmusictheory
• Youtube: https://YouTube.com/8bitmusictheory