Writing

NaNoWriMo: A Pep Talk and a Warning

Merlin — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:20:48 -0500

I honor any project to write something — especially to write a long piece of ﬁction. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do but, like most people, I have always been too scared to attempt it.

So, kudos.

But, here’s the thing: it’s hard to start writing, and it’s almost as hard to keep writing. Believe me, I know. And, there will be times every day when you get discouraged or you want to throw in the towel because you feel lost or depressed or useless or just plain tired. Empty. That’s the word. Empty.

All I want to say is, keep at it. You can do this.

Every time you sit down to write represents a new chance, and I really encourage you to make yourself see it that way. That means set aside the time (with a beginning and end, if possible), take it seriously, and, most importantly, try not to think. Thinking is not writing; thinking is thinking. Thinking does not make books.

So, keep your hands moving [PDF], don’t self-edit, and above all, don’t let past failures (or successes) have any place at your desk during the time you’ve set aside to do your work. There’s no good that can come out of trying to see the present, creative moment through the overly emotional, shaded lenses of either the past or the future. Just be in the room with yourself and, as my pal Andy says, keep moving the cursor to the right.

And, the warning? Don’t read too many blog posts like this.

The hounds are out this month, guys, and they smell your fear and self-doubt. So, shovelbloggers will be offering you a tantalizing Vegas-style buffet of endless writing “help” that will range from the indispensable to the stupid to the unconscionably poisonous. And, smile though they might, those folks could care less if all those page views end up killing your word count or distracting you at the one delicate moment you were about to ﬁgure out your troubled third act. Their job is to make you stop working. Don’t let them. Okay?

Just as thinking is not writing, advice is not writing. Got it? So, don’t blow your day on metajunk.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t treat yourself to the best advice about becoming a better writer (see below), but it does mean you sure as shooting better not be reading blog posts about “surprising writing tips” during your Special Writing Time. Personally, I love books about writing, writing advice, and just plain talking about writing. But, I also know (all too well) that something that seems or feels helpful can quickly turn into an anti-pattern. Especially when it does anything to stop that cursor from moving rightward.

Seriously. Read the next sentence out loud to yourself three times. No, do it:

When I’m reading about writing, I’m not writing.

And, of course, the irony is, nearly every (good) book on writing will eventually end up telling you – or leading you to see – the same handful of things.

Set reasonable goals and honor them
Draft with complete abandon; edit with surgical precision
When you sit down to write, focus without distraction; when you’re not writing, keep it off your mind
Read great books (actual big books, not blogs or magazines) as often as you can
Just write, and just keep writing, and just keep writing, writing, writing. Then write more.

Good luck with your novel, and have fun. For what it’s worth, here’s a few of my favorite books on writing (alphabetically, by author). Just remember: if you read them during Writing Time, you must smack yourself. Hard.

Bolker, Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day; Sounds like a BS title, but it’s not. Again: process. How to think and when. How to approach a daunting project sensibly by “parking on a downhill slope.”
Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones; Shut off your monkey mind, get past discursive thinking, and keep that hand in motion. Like meditation, writing is a practice. You do it because you do it, that is why you do it.
Hart, A Writer’s Coach; Failures in non-ﬁction writing are almost always failures of process (especially during pre-writing). A must-buy for journalists (and serious bloggers).
King, On Writing; Writing is a craft, and it’s difﬁcult, and it matters. If you don’t believe it, get hit by a goddamned van. (N.B.: If you need to pick just one of these, get On Writing. No question. It’s the best.)
Lamott, Bird By Bird; Just so very, very wonderful. Heartfelt, funny, and desperately useful, if only for learning “The Shitty First Draft.”
Zinsser, On Writing Well; The Grandaddy of writing-as-craft books. Learn how making prose is like building furniture. You’re an engineer of words. Friend, you’ll close this book with a new obsession for tight and precise prose writing. I don’t pull it off every day (let alone every sentence), but it’s damned sure on my mind all the time.

”NaNoWriMo: A Pep Talk and a Warning” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 02, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now)

Merlin — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:17:46 -0400

Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now) - Vimeo [NSFW]

Here’s a video I made about a video I made. Consequently, it’s also about writing a book, fake self-help, the long road to developing expertise, and the ups and downs of repeatedly asking the world to tell you who you are.

The video is long. As usual. This is how it works.

I’d had this fancy idea that I’d do a DFW-style dump of annotations about what I talk about over these 40 minutes, and I might add that later, but for now here’s all you need to know:

Dish soap cleans dishes; Stuart Brown says everybody needs Play; Rands has a cave where he doesn’t multitask; The Dreyfus Model has ﬁve stages; Andy Hunt wants you to Think & Learn Pragmatically; my pal, Sean Hussey helped me ﬁgure some of this stuff out.

And, oh, what the heck. Here’s how to supercharge your zen turbocharger with “5 Surprising House Hacks!” [even more NSFW]

[Index Card Photo: Inbox Zero Tumblr]

”Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now)” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 22, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Fake Rocks, Salami Commanders, and Just Enough to Start

Merlin — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 09:36:47 -0400

MaxFunCon: Merlin Mann on Doing Creative Work (via TSoYA)

Here’s the audio from a short talk I presented a few weeks ago at Jesse Thorn’s awesome1 MaxFunCon in Lake Arrowhead, CA. The talk is subtitled, “With All Due Respect to the Seduction Community”2, and it contains my typically NSFW use of, well, words, I guess.

It’s about how to get started—just started—with any project that really matters to you.

Listen above
- Embedded audio starts at 4:00 (where my talk begins)
Download MP3 of this episode
Subscribe to The Sound of Young America via iTunes or vanilla RSS

Foam Barriers (and Granite Fears)

It’s difficult to talk about how to get started with a project without addressing why it can feel so difficult to get started in the first place. And, as I said in the talk, I think this often comes down to perceived barriers. Barriers to even the most modest kind of starting. Barriers that seem entirely real, external, and immovable.

But, why “perceived?”

Thing is, when you really put your back into it, and push against your barriers a bit harder, they often turn out to be nothing very substantial at all. More like fake foam boulders that just look lifelike because they’re illuminated by the unreliable light of fear. See, fear’s the really hard part.

Yes, the barriers give you a theoretically dignified toupee for carpeting over your neuroses, but the underlying fears are still unspeakably real. And, you totally know it.

So, just humor me. Think about something you’ve been really excited to make or do.3 Maybe something you’ve been thinking about starting for weeks, months, or even years. Dance lessons? Short story? Web comic? MAME cabinet? Tree house? Doomsday laser? Excel spreadsheet?4 What stops you?

Remember now, we’re not talking about finishing a project or even making something that you know will be the greatest thing ever made. Just starting. What’s the barrier for you?

Well, at least in my experience, if you’re honest enough to push past those sensible, well-worn consolations of generalized procrastination and unrelenting “busy-ness,” you’ll discover how many hang-ups trace back to some dumb, shameful fear. Yeah, I know. Crazy hippie talk, right? Still.

Any of these sound familiar?

Fear of Apathy. “I can’t start this until I’m positive the work will never become dull or difficult.”5
Fear of Ambiguity. “I can’t start this until I know exactly how it will turn out (as well as the precise method by which I’ll do it).”
Fear of Disconnection. “I can’t start this until I’m totally up-to-date and current on everything.”
Fear of Imperfection. “I can’t start this until I know the end product will be flawless.”
Fear of Incompletion. “I can’t start this until I’m already done with it.”
Fear of Isolation. “I can’t start this until I know making it will never be lonely.”
Fear of Sucking. “I can’t start this until I’m already awesome at it (and know that even horrible people whom I dislike will hail me as a genius).”
Fear of Fear itself. “I can’t start this until I’m guaranteed that making it will never be scary.”

There are probably a lot more, but these represent a few of the greatest hits spinning on my own particular jukebox.6

And, sure, there’s a lot of overlap, or if you prefer, design redundancies. Because once you let one fear hang out with you, it starts bringing all its buddies along to the party. And The Fears are a tightly-knit, mean-spirited posse who egg each other on and love nothing more than trashing your house while you sob in the guest bathroom. Fears are total dicks.

Then, There’s That Talking Lizard

To make matters worse, when it comes to strictly creative endeavors like making art7, your regular, old, garden-variety fears find an enthusiastic ally in the entirely rational, if philistine, voice of your Lizard Brain.8

Listen for it, because that voice speaks so often and with such consistency and unquestioned authority that it can begin to sound like common sense—even intuition. It’s the voice that sees you thinking about making something, then calmly, firmly reminds you where you’re going wrong, wrong, wrong:

Grow up. “You already have plenty of things to do with your Real-Life Obligations without wasting time dicking around with some doofy ‘art’ project. That’s for kids and people with sandals in California.
So, stop being childish.”
Eat your vegetables. “Even if you cannot be talked out of making something, remember that those Real-Life Obligations all need to be completely taken care of before you even consider trotting off to pretend you’re David Foster Wallace.9
So, stop having fun.”
No one notices and no one cares. “Why bother? Even if you were talented and interesting (which you’re not), you know no one will notice if you never make anything at all. Because no one really cares. Including you.
So, stop trying.”
Your time’s passed, Li’l DaVinci. “Seriously, look at yourself. If you were ever going to be anything other than what you are or make anything other than what you’ve already made, you would have done it years ago. It’s too late now.
So, stop evolving.”

See? What’d I say? The lizard’s a dick, too.

But, honestly, do you ever hear yourself providing a running commentary on how much you suck? Giving yourself a spirited anti-pep talk? Sure you do. I do. Everybody does—including people who produce unbelievably, unexpectedly successful work.

It’s not that successful and productive people don’t see those same barriers or feel that same fear—it’s just that most of the good ones have figured out how to either accept the fears as a natural part of the process, or they just choose to ignore each fakey barrier the second it appears.

And, that is precisely what this starting business is all about. Putting aside every “reason,” and announcing to your Lizard Brain that it can either evolve or suck a nut.

Not that this is easy. But, you know that, right? Exactly.

The Switch Flips

Think about the times you’ve tried to get started, but things just weren’t happening for you. What wasn’t right? What were you feeling?

Could be lots of things,10 but I’ll postulate one theory on how a lot of us knowledge-worker types get derailed at the point right before we really get started. At the point when we’re most susceptible to an attractive nuisance.

So, imagine the place where you go to make whatever you make. Could be a studio, a library, an office, a cafe, living room, or what have you. You’re sitting there. And, of course, you’re not doing Real Work for your Real-Life Obligations. You’re trying to make something new and perhaps wonderfully unnecessary. “Something useless,” the Lizard Brain whispers, “That no one will care about. That you won’t finish anyway. That you’re too busy to do….”

You’re now shamefully staring at your blank page or an empty canvas or a fresh Compass install or that unpopulated Excel spreadsheet. And your poor mind is already feeling like a lost duckling. You’re desperately casting about for something to save it—if not a big idea or the muse of “inspiration,” at least something that you really know. Something that you can get the hook into. Something that’s…important.

That? That right there? That is the enemy, my friend. That fear of your own inability and of the triviality of your non-work is so toxic. Because it opens you up to insane anxieties about what’s happening outside the studio or the library or office or the cafe or the living room or the what-have-you.

It’s all those fears tearing ass like a colony of E.O. Wilson’s ants. In growing numbers, they’re on to the scent of your anxiety, so now they can build new and customized barriers in record time.

Then, in what can amount to a split second, a switch flips. The Lizard Voice has gotten too loud to be ignored. You’ve come to what you believe are your senses, and you feel compelled to escape this Elysian dream world of nonsense and feelings and unfinished thoughts and “what the hell was I thinking?” After all. You’ve got real shit to do, right?

Ah. Those three horseman of the maker’s apocalypse have come to your rescue: the unknown, the ambiguous, and the incomplete.

Better go check email. Might be something “important.”

The Opposite of That Thing

So, are you getting the perverse irony at work here?

Given that your fears know you too well, they can capitalize on any uncertainty that they know you’d find intolerable. So, even a surprisingly trivial matter—so long as that matter might represent items unknown, ambiguous, or incomplete to you—can suddenly seem extremely important and will swiftly divert your attention from the cool stuff you’d like to be doing onto….oh, whatever that other stuff might be. Better find out.

And, yes, I’m waving at you here, email inbox.11 J’accuse, you horrible little troll.

But, you’re getting it, right? How the Lizard Brain lies and you believe it because it’s easy to believe?

When your resolve melts—when that switch flips and you’re pulled away from a generative kind of anxiety to be thrust into the more caustic and strangely addictive anxities of “real life”—you’re giving up a precious part of your real “real life” in exchange for security of the familiar. Problems you understand. Anxieties you’re comfortable being anxious about. Busy, busy, busy.

Problem is, all of this becomes like chugging saltwater.

Drinking saltwater is a terrible idea. Because it makes you thirstier than you were before you started drinking it. So, you have to drink more saltwater. Then, that makes you thirstier still, so you end up drinking more saltwater. Which makes you also drink more saltwater. And so on. Until you die. Still thirsty.

Ditto empty email checking. Ditto anxiety about anxieties. Ditto every other Lizard Brain impulse to solve a perceived problem by amplifying the thing that’s actually causing the problem.

Tolerance: Bulwark Against Fakey Barriers

If making anything substantial really matters to you, you’re going to need to take the cure. And, the antidote is nasty, difficult, and tastes way worse than saltwater. The answer? You do the hard thing. No matter what it takes. You stick with it at the time you’re most tempted to run away.

Like I said in the talk, developing those invaluable tolerances (the tolerance for ambiguity and the tolerance for sucking) requires the exercise of some very small muscles. The muscles are super-hard to locate, and once you do find them, they hurt like a bitch to exercise. But, doing that exercise repeatedly will pay you back ten-fold.

Because that next time you’re in the studio or the library or office or the cafe or the living room or the what-have-you, and you start to feel the fears building barriers, you’ll know what to do. And you’ll know how to do it. Because you’ve done it before.

There’s no trick here, guys. No system. No diagram. No hack. No tips, no webinars, and no Digg-able bulleted lists. It’s simply work.

You sit, you work, you tolerate. Then you do it again.

Enough. Just for Now.

I’m not sure whether this is precisely relevant, but as I’ve been working on the “Large Writing Project” I’d mentioned in the talk (more on that soon), a particular phrase keeps going through my head:

How do I know what I need to know…for now?

Not, “I can’t start this until I know everything about everything,” or “I can’t start this until I’m 100% up-to-date on every aspect of my life” or “I can’t start this until my skills, tools, expertise, and experience are flawless.”

Just really asking yourself how you know whether you have enough of anything—be it information, tools, skills, or coffee—just to literally start. Just start. Not forever. Just for now. Start.

So, how about instead of waiting for the perfect conditions, maybe try thinking about this stuff in a kooky, opposite way:

Assume there will will always be tools that are better than the ones you have now.
Assume that events in the world will continue to happen or not happen regardless of whether you learn about them immediately.
Assume that you understand and control an embarrassingly minute percentage of the universe.
Assume that none of this matters if you’re determined to make something you care about today.

You already have everything you need. It’s all there. And it doesn’t take sandals, or perfect pitch, or iPhone 4.0, or full-screen mode, or a ★★★★-star reputation on the seduction community forum to get started. Or re-started. Or re-re-re-re-started.

Seconds Away

Your Lizard Brain is absolutely right when it tells you that most people won’t notice if you don’t make something, and that a lot of people won’t particularly care if you do. But, how you choose to respond to that existential kōan will say a lot about your potential as both an artist and as an engaged human.

Because, if you’re relieved that universal apathy provides legitimate cover for eight blissful hours of “managing email,” then you’re in luck. Every day for the rest of your life. Punch out.

But, if you’re like me, you may find you’re invigorated—even challenged—by all that bigger ambiguity. By knowing that, at any time, you might be seconds away from starting something amazing that seemed impossible a minute ago. Even oddly prepared to drop the lizard crap whenever the need arises.

Weird to think how insanely different your day could be today. Purely depending on what you do in the next 10 or 15 seconds. If that switch gets flipped in the right direction, then stays there.

What can you tolerate? What will you start? Now.

See? You’ve got enough of everything you need. You’ve already started. Now just keep going.

MaxFunCon. Seriously. This was the best conference I’ve ever attended. Don’t have the space here to say everything I’d like to say, so I’ll just say I agree with Adam, Matt, and some other enthusiastic folks. ↩
The Seduction Community. How to trick ladies into having intercourse with you. ↩
Make or do. On that index card with the “notes” for my talk on it, you’ll see the spanish word, “Hacer,” which can mean either “to make” or “to do.” I’ve always liked the idea that making and doing are very closely linked, especially for creative types. Plus, I enjoy an irregular verb with a silent “h.” ↩
Excel spreadsheet. I have no idea why poor Excel is my default array item whenever I have to mention something that’s not a fruity art project. What I really mean is “something practical that’s not all arty.” I actually like Excel a lot. Well. I like Numbers a lot anyway. Starting is interest-agnostic. ↩
Fear of Apathy. This is one of the central, giant themes in Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow theory—that we do our best work (or, as he puts it, “live optimally”) when we are highly challenged by work in which we’re highly skilled. Apathy, on the other hand, is what we get from the dreadful combination of low skills and low challenge. Check out this cool diagram. ↩
Jukebox. In (7, Bird by Bird), the wonderful Anne Lamott talks about having a jukebox in her head that plays all the greatest hits of her past failures. As it happens, I have the same model. ↩
Making art. Yeah, I know. We’re not supposed to talk about making art. It upsets people because it sounds all fancy. Screw that. I think one definition could describe art is anything you make and care about that nobody but you really needs. Which necessarily makes it important. ↩
Lizard brain. Nah, I don’t precisely mean the amygdala, and I’m not (neurologically) talking about the actual reptile brain. But, I do suspect that a lot of dumb self-talk has roots in whatever parts of your mind are diligently trying to protect you from bear attacks. ↩
Footnote note. You know who loved him a footnote? Yep. David Foster Wallace. ↩
Lots of reasons. Lordy, there are so many reasons you might have trouble here. Including wrong timing, wrong modality, wrong mood, wrong setting, wrong “focal length”, wrong expectations, wrong preparation. But, be careful that you not use that as a checklist for not getting started. ↩
What’s an Inbox, anyway? Y’know, increasingly, I believe those three adjectives (unknown, ambiguous, and incomplete) tell us much of what we need to know about understanding why inboxes can be so difficult to keep away from. Much [*cough*] more on this coming soon. Ellipsis. ↩

Celtx: Powerful Free App for Script Writing, Pre-Production, and Collaboration

Merlin — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 13:27:10 -0500

celtx - Integrated Media Pre-Production

QPR - CryingStore - “Cold Tulips” by merlinmann (Celtx - Project Central)

I’ve recently returned to using the Open Source (MPL-based CePL license) Celtx app for all the script-ish stuff I write. But it does a lot more than just collect and format drafts (which, unlike a text ﬁle or MS Word, Celtx does in a way that lets you focus solely on writing, rather than ﬁddly formatting). It’s also an amazingly ﬂexible and robust app for managing all the pre-production materials for screenplays, comics, audio plays, or what have you. And, again: it’s totally free.

Celtx reminds me favorably of Scrivener, in that it takes into account that there may be much more to a very large writing project than just typing; that your ﬁnal draft only serves as the jumping-off point for another, more giant thing that you will need to make out of all your words.

To this end, you can choose to let Celtx handle as little or as much of the process as you need — anything from storyboarding and conceptualization through shooting schedules, prop management – even animal handling! (Memo to self: write more things that require animal handling.)

One neat feature I’ve just barely started playing with is the app’s ability to seamlessly share versioned drafts of your script via Celtx’s web-based Project Central. Looks like you can ﬂip a bit to make it public v. private v. members-only. And, I still haven’t touched the coolest online feature of all, which allows you to solicit criticism and notes from other users and even collaborate with colleagues, co-writers, and production staff – kinda like “SVN for Screenplays,” I’ll dub it, in a way that will probably infuriate everyone who uses either of those.

Anyhow, here’s the script for my recent public radio “CryingStore” parody as an example. Powerful app, and very ﬂexible and fun to use. And at $200+ less than the commercial gorilla, FinalDraft, it’s most deﬁnitely worth the free-as-in-everything download.

Celtx - FREE - Open Source - Application for Script Writing and “Integrated Media Pre-Production”

Celtx Links:

celtx - #1 choice for media pre-production. (Overview/Intro)
celtx - Screen Shots
Celtx Features: The Feature Tour
celtx - FAQ
Main Page - CeltxWiki
celtx - Download Version 1.0 (Dang, man: 4 platforms and up to 23 languages. Nice)

”Celtx: Powerful Free App for Script Writing, Pre-Production, and Collaboration” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on February 01, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Eric Idle, on John Cleese's Writing Process

Merlin — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 17:07:25 -0500

Eric Idle, on John Cleese’s Approach to Writing

John Cleese sweated every word — to the point of exhausting collaborators like Eric Idle.

In other places, I’ve heard Cleese himself talk about his work ethic within the Pythons, mentioning how Graham Chapman might slip out early to start drinking, while Cleese would stick around and revise a sketch for another half-hour or longer. Over time, he felt the extra effort was what made the difference in the enduring appeal of his material.

It also helps explain why a classic like the Cheese Shop still delights a word nerd like me. Speciﬁcity.

[Note: This post originally appeared on our daughter site, “43 Folders Clips,” and we liked it enough to republish it here.]

”Eric Idle, on John Cleese's Writing Process” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 01, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Louis C.K. on Starting Over; Carlin's Artful Process

Merlin — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 15:05:13 -0500

ILIS Interviews Louis C.K.- AST Forums
(cache)

In 2006, Louis C.K. didn’t know whether his HBO show would be renewed, but he didn’t want to sit on his hands for months waiting to ﬁnd out.

Instead of going conservative by gluing new treads onto old tires, he did something tantamount to suicide for a working comic; he threw out his whole set and started over.

I decided that I would spend the year dedicating my time to building a brand new hour from the ground up. I ﬁgured that if it was ready by September, then if I got another season of Lucky Louie, (I didn’t) I could shoot that hour and then go back to work. I also ﬁgured that if we got cancelled (we did) I would really need something else ready so that I wouldn’t die of depression and poverty.

So I hit the clubs hard, recorded every set I did, and started building the time. It was REALLY hard. I didn’t know that it was possible for me. Then I listened to a CD called “George on George” where he talked about his work ethic and how, rather than just compiling material in general and shooting the best of what he has at the end of the year, he spent the year developing material speciﬁcally for the special. In other words, thinking of it as writing one special, like a novel. If you write a novel, it has a form, a theme, a story, whatever, and you know you’re writing that novel the whole time, and when it’s ready you publish it and move on. Rather than just writing “things” and then when there’s enough of it you put it out.

This approach totally changed how I thought about my task….

Louis C.K.’s latest special on Showtime was a riot, but he’s probably best known right now for killing on his recent Conan appearance.

Thanks a million for the interview link, Jesse Thorn (BTW, Jesse himself interviewed Louis C.K. in September for TSOYA).

Although I haven’t been able to put my hand to a copy of George On George, I do recommend checking out the 2007 oral history George Carlin did with the Archive of American Television. Man was crazy-smart and thoughtful about what he did and how he did it.

George Carlin - Archive Interview Part 6 of 7

I’m a writer ﬁrst. […] An artist is on a journey…

So good. Don’t miss this.

”Louis C.K. on Starting Over; Carlin's Artful Process” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 26, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

The Wire: Writing Into Your Arc

Merlin — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 09:46:14 -0400

Important

While this article about The Wire deliberately contains as few actual spoilers about the show as possible, it does contain numerous links to pages with information that will tell you critical spoiler information about the stories and fates of the show’s characters. The article also contains language and links that are very much not safe for work. Please proceed with caution on all fronts.

In the time since I gallantly announced what makes a good blog, I’ve had time to think more about the qualities of work that endures.

Not thinking just of personal blogs here, or solely in terms of the ways that we can improve online publishing and social media —although clearly these are areas that could stand some improvement. I’m talking about the extent to which some of those qualities that I mentioned in that article relate to broader ideas around all creative work and the process behind how it gets made well and consistently by an auteur who’s only incidentally a merchant.

And it’s especially got me thinking about how any thing we choose to make today can contribute to, for lack of a better phrase, an arc.

So, naturally, I’ve been thinking a lot about The Wire.

First, understand that I’m an unapologetic superfan of and evangelist for The Wire, which is David Simon’s epic, 5-season HBO drama about the life and work of a lot of very ﬂawed characters in contemporary Baltimore. This is neither the ﬁrst nor last time that I’ll quote Simon’s excellent description of the show’s theme, which is taken from his DVD commentary of the very ﬁrst scene of s01e01:

[The Wire is] really about the American city, and about how we live together. It’s about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how … whether you’re a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge [or] lawyer, you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you’ve committed to.

Much has been written about the dense, literary quality of the show (read Kottke for context and great links), so it may not surprise you to learn I’m one of the many people who consider The Wire to be the best series that’s ever appeared on television; my wife and I have watched the ﬁrst (and, in my opinion, best) four seasons at least three times.

Yeah, that’s a plug for you to give The Wire a chance, but it’s not exactly my point.

Ok. So, why The Wire?

My point is that one big reason why The Wire was so good is its endlessly satisfying story arc, which is composed of many smaller, complementary arcs inside the big arc. That’s where a good story becomes a much more engrossing narrative that’s ultimately about more than itself.

Like any creative work that connects with the people who enjoy it, The Wire tells a story. And, to some extent, every story is about change.

Something happened. Or something is going to happen. Or something that everybody expected to happen hasn’t happened. But, it’s a change, and it’s having an impact on the lives of people we care about. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s basically the bones and teeth of every story from Adam & Eve through Harold & Kumar. Something changed, and now people have to deal.

How that dealing spins out over the life of a project, how the story is told, and what the story says about the world are the sorts of questions we’re only encouraged to ask about Big Important Things like very old books and Bergman ﬁlms. Which, of course, is bullshit.

There’s no reason you can’t look at the lifetime of any good piece of story-telling — and, yes, why not, let’s say that could include blogs, Twitter accounts, and Flickr streams — and be able to see what the change is.

Yes: if it’s any good, I can look at one page or one photo or one 140-character post and enjoy it for its value as one independent thing in the world. But over time, all those potentially thousands of pieces can and do snap together, often without our even realizing it. The question is, what story is it that we’re telling? What is the arc?

And, that’s where I look to an example of middlebrow culture that falls somewhere between Bergman’s Death playing chess with Man on a beach and Scoble’s latest shaky video of a guy who likes golf speaking in press releases. But, The Wire is a piece of popular culture that beautifully illustrates how satisfying all those seemingly unrelated pieces of an arc can be — and how much richer they each become when the audience is engaged, challenged, and rewarded by the effort of giving the work 100% of their attention. Of course, it also helps if the creator is talented, tries really hard, and doesn’t treat the audience like a bunch of bored imbeciles. But, I digress.

Like any story, The Wire has characters, settings, and things that happen over time. Example? Let’s start with a single, one-minute scene from s01e05 — an episode called “The Pager,” that’s from right around the time when the series really started cooking. Which, not coincidentally, was also when the intersecting arcs started to reveal themselves.

The Scene

Meet Jimmy McNulty.

Jimmy’s a talented, politically deaf, pain-in-the-ass homicide detective and drunk who’s estranged from the mother of the two children he adores. One night, in the shitty little apartment he’s recently moved into, Jimmy’s too wasted on cheap scotch to properly assemble the Ikea furniture that he bought for his kids’ imminent visit. Jimmy is a mess, because he’s dealing with change. In his own inimitable way.

But, see, you don’t really even need to know all this to just enjoy the scene. (Please watch from 0:09-1:25)

One small scene of a guy who’s drunk and a little careless. There’s loud music playing in the next apartment. He has to make a few trips to get all of the stuff he bought into one room (bet he’s in a walk-up apartment, right?). Jimmy’s useless tonight, clearly more focused on the bottle than on assembling the parts of his new SÜLI. Here’s a middle-aged man whose bedroom contains a green plastic lawn chair. Plus, the whole sorry scene is grimly lit by a single high-wattage desk lamp — reminiscent of the unforgiving light ﬂooding the interrogation rooms that Jimmy and his partner, Bunk, work every day. Painful already, right?

So, that’s just one very small bit of character, setting, and thing-that-happens. While it’s certainly not a story, in and of itself, it’s still an entertaining, well-made scene to watch. Not as famous as Jimmy and Bunk’s deservedly best-known scene from the previous episode (warning: very NSFW), but you get the idea. You can already tell a few things about this show.

It’s well photographed, the set is painfully realistic, and the man dealing with change seems convincingly Baltimorean and drunk (although the actor portraying him is stunningly British and, to my knowledge, mostly sober).

Even if you have no idea what else happens on the other dozens of hours of this series, past and future, you could watch this one-minute scene and think, “yeah, that’s pretty good.”

The Episode

But, if you were able to watch the whole episode — and it’s a good one — you’d see an atypically intense and complex police drama about cops in an understaffed bureaucracy trying to gather string about a case that seems impossible to crack. You’d see that some of the cops are brilliant (“Natural PO-lice”), some are dedicated, a couple are intoxicated by brutality, and a memorable pair with a Gaelic pun for a name are hilariously useless and corrupt. None is perfect, but none is without his or her interesting and redeeming qualities. End to end, it’s a very colorful bunch.

Same goes for the dealers and drug kingpins, who are struggling with their own related set of problems around bureaucracy, trust, and continuity inside a crumbling system. Theirs is a mature but increasingly vulnerable criminal enterprise that’s being menaced and robbed at will by a dangerous and unforgettable outsider with surprising tastes, ethics, and style.

Along the way you’d see a lot of beautifully shot scenes that show (without telling) why these people are so desperate. Plus you’d be introduced to secondary characters who are anything but stage dressing, such as a junkie informant who’s inked and ﬁlled-in with the complex texture of a Mercutio or a Fagin.

So, basically, if you gave this episode from June of 2002 about an hour of your time, and it was the only thing you ever saw of The Wire, you’d probably walk away thinking, “Wow, I didn’t understand almost any of that, but it was really interesting and well made. This looks like a great show that you have to actually watch and think about.”

But, here’s where it gets really good, and where we start to see a bigger arc that may not have been clear before.

The Season

Indeed, if you watched that whole ﬁrst season of The Wire, you’d ﬁnd yourself rewarded with a storyline — an arc — that I will not spoil for you.

But, you’d start to see that almost every character you meet ends up having some effect on at least a handful of other characters — even if they never knew the others existed. The decisions that people make early in the season have resonance throughout the story that plays out in unexpected ways. And the change that describes the generic arc of that ﬁrst season (Antihero cops try to take down an antihero Baltimore drug crew) ends up telling a much deeper story than any typical police procedural that I’m familiar with.

Even in one season, we’re seeing a story that’s closer to Dickens or Zola than any styrofoam plate full of Law & Order. This is nothing short of a Greek Tragedy about broken people trying to stay alive in a broken system. Nobody’s perfect, and everybody is fucked in one way or another.

In my opinion, it’s a breathtaking set of 13 episodes. And if those hour-long TV shows were all you ever watched: again, you’d have enjoyed a real treat.

But there’s a lot more story, more change, and still more to the arc.

The Series

Finally, if you watched all ﬁve seasons of The Wire, you’d see a lot more going on than you imagined from one season, one episode — let alone one short scene of a drunk cop trying to build children’s furniture by lamp light.

You’d see each successive season turning to a different broken and dying institution: unions, government, public education, and print media, respectively. You’d see the same themes, and characters, and mistakes, and hopes, and horrible consequences brought back to life in different ways. Stuff that happened before still means something; possibly even more than you’d ﬁrst realized.

This is a show that uses previous story arcs to deepen and expand on current stories. It uses things you’d never noticed from previous viewings as the centerpiece for a whole new story. It suggests grace notes that are barely audible unless you’ve been listening carefully for a very long time.

In sum, The Wire pays back the attention you invest in it like few pieces of art created in my lifetime. It’s vicious about telling every letter of the story with muscular precision — even when it chooses to do so at pace many would consider pointlessly deliberate: “dull.”

And, because the story rarely stops to explain what’s happening for the folks who just wandered in from the ﬁrst segment of Family Feud, it demands that you bring the same care and thought to watching the show that its creators brought to making it. Thinking, on both ends of the art. That is engagement.

Like great literature, yes, you can return and enjoy this series on many levels and based on whatever you have to bring to it at a given time. It’s not only smarter than anything else that I’ve seen on TV, it’s also smarter than I am. Which I love.

Arcs Matter Because Writing Matters

I doubt that I’ll ever make anything one-tenth as intelligent, thoughtful, and engaging as The Wire, and, in all likelihood, neither will you. But, again, that’s not the point.

The inspiration you need to take away from this is the idea that every scene matters to some arc. Even the one minute with the drunk furniture assembly. Whether your given “scene” is in a screenplay, or an Excel spreadsheet, or the Tweet that you’re about to type about your ﬂight delay: it matters. It all matters.

Like I said in the talk where I ﬁrst brought up this thought about The Wire (video and slides of which below), if you think what you write about or otherwise choose to make doesn’t matter, talk to Stephen King.

He started writing a book I adore before he nearly died, then ﬁnished it in excruciating pain after it turned out he was still barely alive, let alone whole. The story he tells about what happened in-between may change your mind about whether this stuff is worth caring about. Just understand: it matters to the people who follow your arc and it really ought to matter to you — long before some idiot with a rottweiler hits you with his giant van.

There’s already one arc that you began the minute you made something, called it “done,” then put it someplace where people could see it. How that very, very large story gets told may be too late for you to completely control. Sorry, but that — as Omar would say — is all in the game.

But you very much do have the power to design the arcs you make, starting today. And even if you haven’t ﬁgured out how your ﬁnal episode ends, consider how the pieces you want to lay down might ﬁt together. And how the string that you gather might crack a case you hadn’t expected.

Who do you want to delight? Who do you pray gets your references? Who will you ﬂatly refuse to explain your backstory to? What’s the one goddamned thing that only you can make today — and what arc might it ﬁt into downstream? Which “average reader” are you prepared to ﬁnd the courage to tell: “Fuck you.”

Above all: whose attention will you reward with the best thing you can possibly make today?

Good. Now go, and reward the shit out of them.

Supporting Material: “How to Blog”

kung fu grippe - How to Blog

Here’s the presentation I recently did in which I talked about this Wire stuff for the ﬁrst time (that part starts around the 53:00 mark in the video)

Video

Tip: Sean’s a nice enough guy, but his introduction in this very choppy video will redeﬁne your personal concept of “headache-inducing.” With respect, skip to 5:20 to get to where my actual talk begins.

Update 2008-09-25 11:09:18 PDT

I apologize. I cannot get this busted-ass video embed not to autoplay, and if I hear Sean screaming about a scavenger hunt on my site one more time, I’m going to lose it. Video’s here. So sorry for the extra click.

Slides

”The Wire: Writing Into Your Arc” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 25, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Deciding Whether to Read a Book: Some Wildly Reductive Heuristics

Merlin — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:42:04 -0400

People send me lots of books, so I have to decide rather quickly whether one should be added to the ambitious pile of stuff I already really want to ﬁnish reading.

On the off chance that you care or ﬁnd it useful in developing your own ﬁltering, here’s my insanely reductive, mean-busy-guy way to make a 90-second decision on whether to read a new non-ﬁction book from an author I’m not familiar with.

It does not matter whether you agree with these; that’s how you know they’re personal heuristics. Also, they are almost uniformly unfair and unkind. So.

For each question, my preferred answer would be “No.” Few of these are dealkillers, but they do quickly aggregate to make the decision easy and obvious for me.

At the highest level, is this book’s topic based on the typical “zeitgeist” product that gets greenlit by someone who watches lots of golf on TV and who seldom ﬁnishes reading the 1,000-word “features” found in in-ﬂight magazines?
Does the book have one of those irksome, “Everything You Know About Everything is Completely WRONG!“ titles?
Is the author’s large, whitish face the primary feature of the cover?
Does the cover art contain high heels, Mistral, or any reference to either Oprah Winfrey, Joel Osteen, or “Dr. Phil?”
Can you ﬁnd the word “secret” anywhere on the cover of the book?
Is the book published by a company that you’ve never heard of – or, far worse, does that company appear to share the last name of the author or his yacht?
In the event that this is a book by a “famous” person: if the book were written by someone you’d never heard of, would your interest in the book or its topic wane signiﬁcantly?
Are there a very large number of “intentionally blank” white pages at the beginning and end of the book? Are there an astonishingly large number of pages that have been provided for “Notes?”
Does the Table of Contents lack at least 10% stuff that sounds kind of familiar to you (and at least 30% stuff that does not)?
Does the ﬁrst non-front-matter material in the book (often a “Preface” or “Introduction”) seem like a damp hotel room towel that’s matted with the author’s self-congratulation? Is it primarily a sales tool for persons who will never read any further? Does the author seem more arrogant than conﬁdent?
Does the book’s body or heading text suffer from careless or illegible typesetting? Does the book look like an unﬁnished government manual? Should the designer be horse-whipped for choosing a bold display face for body text?
Does the book suffer from the overlarge margins, giant type, two-paragraph pages, and “inspiring quotations” that often suggest a rushed, shoddy, or lazy manuscript?
Have you already found erors and misspelings?
Does the book’s index seem weak or does it not contain entries for the topic or person whom you most associate with the book’s theme or title?
Does page 69 bore, vex, or annoy you?
Can you imagine a future in which closing this book on the last page will make you angry that you didn’t just go back and re-read A Confederacy of Dunces instead?
Now that you know about this book and have thought about all these horribly petty little things, can you imagine not reading it this week?

No on all counts? Good! You’ve found your book. Happy reading.

And, a propos of nothing, here’s my current non-ﬁction pile. If you wanted your book to earn a spot, you’d need to beat this competition (some of which do break at least one of these rules, but all trump on quality and great writing).

The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
- This is the second-best non-ﬁction book I’ve read this year, after the amazing On Writing
Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting by Robert Mckee
When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Richard Lannon, and Fari Amini
Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky

Noted in passing: all the books on the list were purchased by me with actual money. One data point on how many freebies currently make my cut.

”Deciding Whether to Read a Book: Some Wildly Reductive Heuristics” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 27, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Attention & Ambiguity: The Non-Paradox of Creative Work

Merlin — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 07:40:22 -0400

Psychology Today: The Creative Personality

[via delicious.com/huxant, w/a reminder by Jack Shedd]

Some days, I can’t decide how I feel about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (say: “chick SENT me high”). He’s written some great stuff, but, sometimes, he mixes Big-Word academicspeak with anecdotal observation in a way that smells a little hokey to me.

So, although I’m trying not to audibly roll my eyes at a pop-psychology Top 10 list about creativity’s “dialectical tension,” I deﬁnitely am interested in one of his observations about the “paradox” of creative people.

Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility

This is a theme that comes up again and again when professional artists and writers talk about how they approach their work. I’m thinking in particular of things I’ve read recently by Stephen King, Anne Lamott, and Twyla Tharp.

Most all makers with longevity talk about a process that involves regular, scheduled work periods that allow generous time for warmups and getting into what Csikszentmihalyi himself has called, “Flow.” For as long as he or she can stay in that Flow state, a good artist is capable of synthesizing unbelievably disparate material and ideas in a way that’s often satisfying and productive. For those who cannot, it means another morning of video games, Facebook, and binge eating.

Artists who are in the early draft stage of a given project tend to adopt a generative attitude about capturing and accepting whatever shows up without judgment or self-editing – having a gentle attitude about imperfection that gives “bad” or “incomplete” ideas the same wide berth as the the apparently-great ones.

This is not stressful for the gifted artist who knows the dirty little secret that nobody shits a masterpiece; it’s all about editing, re-writing, and shaping the raw materials into something that will eventually become whole, polished, and cohesive. Eventually. But, ﬁrst, you have to get something down. And that’s where that supposed “paradox” sure comes in handy.

My 8th grade English teacher, Mr. Selfe, introduced the concept of the paradox by saying it was something that “contradicts itself…or seems to contradict itself.” I recall my 14-year-old self thinking both my teacher and this recursive concept were very profound and deep. But, really, that second part is entirely appropriate here.

The artistic combining of “playfulness and discipline” only seems contradictory to the aspiring artist who believes creativity means buying a beret and playing a Miles Davis record while you shoot black-tar heroin. The truth is that creativity is much more about combining the self-discipline to tolerate ambiguity with the will to transform the results into something meaningful. It’s not really contradictory; it’s largely an issue of intentionality and attention.

If you can ﬁnd a regular time and place where you feel safe to let all your ideas sit naked for a while, you’re much more likely to produce work you can be proud of. Granted, in the editing process, you’ll adopt a schizophrenic alternation between openness and judgment, but it’s still not really a paradox at all – no more than “heads” and “tails” make a coin paradoxical.

Sure: you can call this, “dialectical tension” if you like. But, from a tactical standpoint, this stuff comes down to basic attention management – ﬁnding a way to shut out everything that’s not the thing that requires your focus to get made.

And, yeah, “talent” doesn’t hurt either, but there’s no way to even discover if you have talent until you’ve made a lot of crap and an occasional good thing, and ﬁnd a way for that all to be okay. Plus, anyone can tell you, “talent” is like having a nice ass or a rich father; it helps open doors, but the actual work on the other side of the door is all on you.

Donate your beret to Goodwill, clear a Saturday morning, and maybe brew a pot of coffee. You have a lot of work to do, and the paradox is that you can’t work on it while you’re reading about the non-paradox of creative paradoxes.

How you like that one, Mr. Selfe?

”Attention & Ambiguity: The Non-Paradox of Creative Work” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 20, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

What Makes for a Good Blog?

Merlin — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 08:14:17 -0400

My friends at Six Apart recently asked me to make a list of blogs that I enjoy. I think they’re planning to use it for their new Blogs.com project. Unfortunately, I’m late getting it to them (typical), but if it’s still useful, I’ll post it here in a day or four.

As I think about the blogs I’ve returned to over the years – and the increasingly few new ones that really grab my attention – I want to start with, ironically enough, a list. Here’s what I think helps make for a good blog.

Good blogs have a voice. Who wrote this? What is their name? What can I ﬁgure out about who they are that they have never overtly told me? What’s their personality like and what do they have to contribute – even when it’s “just” curation. What tics and foibles fascinate make me about this blog and the person who makes it? Most importantly: what obsesses this person?
Good blogs reﬂect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even ﬁve things. But, their brain so overﬂows with curiosity about a family of topics that they can’t stop reading and writing about it. They make and consume smart forebrain porn. So: where do this person’s obsessions take them?
Good blogs are the product of “Attention times Interest.” A blog shows me where someone’s attention tends to go. Then, on some level, they encourage me to follow the evolution of their interest through a day or a year. There’s a story here. Ethical “via” links make it easy for me to follow their speciﬁc trail of attention, then join them for a walk made out of words.
Good blog posts are made of paragraphs. Blog posts are written, not defecated. They show some level of craft, thinking, and continuity beyond the word count mandated by the Owner of Your Plantation. If a blog has ﬁxed limits on post minimums and maximums? It’s not a blog: it’s a website that hires writers. Which is ﬁne. But, it’s not really a blog.
Good “non-post” blogs have style and curation. Some of the best blogs use unusual formats, employ only photos and video, or utilize the list format to artistic effect. I regret there are not more blogs that see format as the container for creativity – rather than an excuse to write less or link without context more.
Good blogs are weird. Blogs make fart noises and occasionally vex readers with the degree to which the blogger’s obsession will inevitably diverge from the reader’s. If this isn’t happening every few weeks, the blogger is either bored, half-assing, or taking new medication.
Good blogs make you want to start your own blog. At some point, everyone wants to kill the Buddha and make their own obsessions the focus. This is good. It means you care.
Good blogs try. I’ve come to believe that creative life in the ﬁrst-world comes down to those who try just a little bit harder. Then, there’s the other 98%. They’re still eating the free continental breakfast over at FriendFeed. A good blog is written by a blogger who thinks longer, works harder, and obsesses more. Ultimately, a good blogger tries. That’s why “good” is getting rare.
Good blogs know when to break their own rules. Duh. I made a list, didn’t I? Yes. I did. Big fan.

And, yeah, you should disagree with potentially all of this. It’s because I have an opinion, and so do you. It’s why you probably have a blog. See? The system works.

Coming soon: the blogs I read, enjoy, envy, and admire.

”What Makes for a Good Blog?” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 19, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"