A Brief Message: No Resistance Is Futile

Paul Ford has been posting six-word Twitter updates for a few weeks, and now he’s also created the magnum opus of six-word criticism: sexological reviews of the 763 mp3s in this year’s SxSW torrent.

Writing on (the 200-words-or-less site) A Brief Message, Paul talks about how the constraint changed his approach and his thinking:

Now when I face a new writing project, I open a spreadsheet. I want a grid to keep track of sources and dates, or to make certain that the timeline of a story makes sense. The grid imposes brevity. Relationships between sentences are exposed. Editing becomes a more explicit act of sorting, shuffling, balancing paragraphs. In this spirit, I’m rewriting some blog software to read directly from Excel. We’ll see how that goes.

Yes. Constraints. As Paul shows, constraints get you thinking about the creative process in a whole new way.

Me? I ♥ constraints. 30 seconds. 5 things. Less than 140 characters.

In fact:

Twitter’s making me a stronger writer. I think harder about how to say more using fewer and shorter words. Nothing beats hitting the Twoosh. (140 chars)

Let’s close with a favorite quote on creative constraint from Anne Lamott’s wonderful Bird by Bird. She explains that she keeps a one-inch-square picture frame on her desk to remind her of “short assignments:”

It reminds me that all I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame. This is all I have to bite off for the time being.

Well put. (And only 17 characters north of the Twoosh.)

William F. Buckley Jr., one of the fathers of modern American political conservatism, died Wednesday. Whether you agree with his politics or not, it’s hard to ignore this positively startling fact from his New York Times obituary: in addition to writing and editing more than 55 books,  read more »

I want to put up a Web site that offers a portfolio of my writing samples, along with a blog, and probably other professional stuff that escapes me at the moment.

What do people recommend for setting up a site like this? Would you use a CMS? If so, which one?

If anyone can offer any examples of good writing portfolio Web sites, please let me know. Thanks!

Robyn

Sort of an add-on to the New York Times piece Merlin linked the other day about Scrivener and its cohort of new writing applications, Jeffrey MacIntyre at Slate coins a new term for programs that eschew the familiar, bloated twiddliness of Microsoft Office for simplicity:

There’s an emerging market for programs that introduce much-needed traffic calming to our massively expanding desktops. The name for this genre of clutter-management software: zenware.

The philosophy behind zenware is to force the desktop back to its Platonic essence. There are several strategies for achieving this, but most rely on suppressing the visual elements you’re used to: windows, icons, and toolbars. The applications themselves eschew pull-down menus or hide off-screen while you work. Even if you consider yourself inured to their presence, the theory goes, you’ll benefit most from their absence.  read more »

“Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work.” — Chuck Close

It may be that I like hearing about the work habits of writers and artists I like almost as much as I like their work. How do you force yourself to do work no one (really, like, no one) is clamoring for, in addition to doing the long apprentice work you need to do to build your chops? As most of our work gets less structured and more creative, it might prove helpful to take a look at how artists get their stuff done.

And, sorry, all those romantic notions you have of absinthe spoons, manic episodes and Kerouac-like rambling on a long roll of butcher paper really aren’t operative. Creative work is mostly showing up every day and enduring a million tiny failures as you feel your way to something a bit new.  read more »

An Interface of One’s Own

I was delighted to see my favorite OS X writing app, Scrivener, turn up in today’s “The Medium” column of the New York Times Magazine. I reviewed Scrivener about a year ago, and still use it whenever I have to research, plan, and draft anything more complicated than a blog post. In fact, as luck would have it, I was actually working on my upcoming Macworld talk in Scrivener when I took a break to read the paper and saw this article. Kismet or something.

Columnist, Virginia Heffernan, notes the app’s beloved full-screen capability:

To create art, you need peace and quiet. Not only does Scrivener save like a maniac so you needn’t bother, you also get to drop the curtain on life’s prosaic demands with a feature that makes its users swoon: full screen. When you’re working on a Scrivener opus, you’re not surrounded by teetering stacks of Firefox windows showing old Google searches or Citibank reports of suspicious activity. Life’s daily cares slip into the shadows. What emerges instead is one pristine and welcoming scroll: Your clean and focused mind.

High fives to other great apps mentioned in the article, including Ulysses, WriteRoom, and Nisus Writer. Slightly lower fives go to Microsoft Word, which, once again, takes its usual drubbing as The Application Everyone Wants To Get Away From™. Poor Microsoft Word, the mascara-smeared Gloria Swanson of word processors.  read more »

Information R/evolution

I really enjoyed this video presentation by Michael Wesch on how we make, find, and share information in a world where we’ve shed the idea of paper as our sole medium for storage and communication — where ideas can munge and mix freely, thanks to digital collaboration.

Gorgeous.

Now, of course, as a fan of paper for certain kinds of work, I always feel like jumping in at this point to defend our pulpy little friend from what sometimes turns into a blanket party.  read more »

Its about 3:11 am here and i can’t get to sleep cuz i’m fricken scared! i’m only twelve but i love to write books, sing, and….bug people. kay that was kinda a waiste of time. anyway, i help my friend give advice to people who need it. the end

Ten Things to Learn This School Year

I’m intrigued by this bit of advice from Guy Kawasaki on the stuff you don’t learn in school (but should):

How to write a five-sentence email…Whether UR young or old, the point is that the optimal length of an email message is five sentences. All you should do is explain who you are, what you want, why you should get it, and when you need it by.

While exaggerated for effect, this strikes me as sound advice. And, in the context of a discussion about education, I’m reminded of the “hamburger essays” we used to have to write in school. Yeah, sure, there aren’t many times in life where you have to sit down and write an actual 5-paragraph essay, but they sure did encourage you to think about structure, rhetoric, and arc. As ever, that bit of constraint gives you the focus needed to improve the quality of your presentation.

Man, in retrospect, I’ve sent a lot of emails that could and should have been whittled down to five sentences (if that). Emailarrhea.