https://johnaugust.com/2018/true-confessions-of-a-knife-juggling-bear

I don’t second-guess whether it’s a good idea, or get fixated on what might go wrong. I don’t ask permission. I just assume I’m not any worse than someone else, and I’ll figure it out. That’s how I started writing my first script, my first musical and my first novel. But I also leave a lot of projects half-finished. Sometimes they finally come into being years later (Writer Emergency Pack), yet often they don’t (an animated short; a new stage musical; my next directing project). Giving yourself permission to move on to a better idea is tough. You’re always wondering if you’re one draft away. This will be the one that does it. But as I look back over the past 20 years, most of my successes — both creatively and commercially — have come from the projects I was excited to do rather than the projects I felt an obligation to start or finish. I’ve also had things I love fail. It’s heartbreaking. But the projects I never really cared about? They’re worse in a way, because it was just wasted time.

In a Dungeons & Dragons campaign August is currently entangled in with some friends, he plays as a character called a Kenku, a bird-like humanoid creature. On the outside, it looks like a crow wearing a brown cloak; underneath it carries tools and weapons. Its alignment? Chaotic neutral. "John's stroke of brilliance was to decide his particular Kenku was more like a parrot, so he's incapable of saying anything out loud unless he's heard someone else say it," Craig Mazin writes to me in an email, issuing an all-caps "DEEP NERD WARNING." "And he has to say it exactly like they do. Seriously. The dude keeps a list. His character is smart, but limited by circumstance (and the bizarre random phrases he happens to hear our characters saying), and the result has been the funniest, most creative ongoing performance I think we've ever had in our game. I don't think any of us would have ever thought to do that in a million years." After a dozen sessions, his Kenku has created its own lexicon of phrases, a language picked up through resilience and savvy. It's an apt metaphor for the way August has navigated an industry that remains in a state of flux. Keep moving. Glean what you can from others. Struggle. Persevere. Grow. It's a simple formula, but it allows him to approach the perceived genius of more brand-name Hollywood figures.