Need a kick in the pants?
The Guardian got 29 professional writers1 to offer some ‘tips for successful authorship‘.
via The Book Bench
The following is a list that’s aim is to make you a better painter or artist in general.
PRACTICE!
Draw every day all day and then some more. Get a sketchbook, use it. Use it often. Set up a space for the sole purpose of art. paint there, draw there, live there.
Screenwriter John August, whose blog was a great asset when I was writing my first screenplay, offers up some tips for outlining stories with index cards.
As somebody who has crashed and burned with index cards—pathetically—I am eager to see if any of these work for me.
By History of Violence screenwriter Josh Olson. This guy sounds like a hoot.
Once you get past how much you wouldn’t want to hang out with this guy, though, you’ll find that he’s actually got some great advice to give. So read his fucking piece.
Here’s my favorite link from yesterday’s Gladwell piece: Late Bloomers, or, why we tend to see a correlation between genius and young fame.
Follow this advice and you’re sure to fulfill your dreams of Broadway stardom in no time, without all of the trifling effort and emotional sacrifice.
Playwright Llewellyn Hinkes dispenses with a hapless write-in question. Sure, there’s a lot of snark in there. But there’s also seems to a good point buried beneath all the shrillness. Plus it’s hilarious.
In a blog post last month, I mentioned the pep-up power of Merlin Mann – specifically, the pep-up power of a specific speech on the subject of Getting to Work that he delivered at MaxFunCon.
Here’s a recording of the speech and Mann’s writeup. Listen, read and be moved.
Michael Erard on the troubling effects of entertainment that rewards short attention spans.
We need a Ronald Reagan of attention, someone to inspire us away from the fight over smaller and smaller pieces of the attention pie. Someone who will inspire us to make the attention pie bigger.
via Ideas.
According to an article recently published in Scientific American, creativity is somehow tied to our personal feelings of distance. And yes, all definitions of ‘distance’ apply here – physical, mental, emotional, make-believe.
Now, if I could just find a way to harness this awesome power for the good of all mankind…or profit.
In the course of Making Things there is an undisputed, torturously difficult first step: getting started. Whether it’s because you’ve got a whole heap of self-doubt, little spare time or inferior – you call them unworkable – tools, there are some serious barriers to entry for creative work.
Merlin Mann has made a career out of advocating ways to cut through personal apathy, excuse-making and general procrastination. Though I have only read a relatively small slice of what he has written – reading it all would be a pretty arduous task considering the wide scope of his internet presence – it’s the above quote that really got me. If you’ve ever experienced a creative block, I’m sure it’ll get you too.
Mann is, of course, referring to the Brute Force school of thought, the key dictum of which goes something like this: sometimes you can’t hop over those barriers to entry – sometimes you’ve got to push through them. A binary choice: do it or don’t. Easy, right?
Let’s pretend it is. You suddenly find yourself at that most crucial of all junctures – the painful first step, the point at which all energy is just potential.
To your left is a torturous path of self-consciousness, repetitive stress injury, possible dysfunction and, perhaps ultimately, self-respect and absolution. This is where you want to be, but it’s certainly not going to be easy (and never claimed to be, either).
To your right looms whatever it is that you’ve had all along. And the way there is all downhill. Heck, you can lie down and roll there, if you want. 1
Presented with this maddening choice, how’s a rational human being supposed to act?
To this end, I resolved over a month ago to sit down every day and write 1,000 words.
The inspiration came in the form of a blurb on author Michael Chabon’s Wikipedia page describing his own writing process: write Sunday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. I had never thought of approaching writing that way before – as if it were a job, with clearly delineated hours and overtime. I mean, was I supposed to clock in or something?2
Chabon, of course, had his first novel published when he was just 25. Clearly his discipline was, and continues to be, a powerful asset.
The simple truth is that nobody is born with a fully-developed writing muscle; it’s slowly sculpted, Schwarzenegger-style, over the course of years of backbreaking work. This is the second-most important thing to remember when it comes to creativity (the most important being, of course, the quote at the top of this page).
As it turned out, 1,000 words per day was a tall order. I managed to keep up with it for about a week before I got my first lousy post-college job and the bottom fell out. Since then, it’s been snatches of 200 words here and there. In the month of July, excepting this blog and all the writing and coding that I’ve stuffed into its craw, I have written a total of 2,722 words3.
By most accounts that’s a pitiful figure for a person who was hoping to make a serious commitment. 4 And, to make matters worse, I tend to cite all of the barriers I mentioned in the first paragraph – no time (I have a job!), extreme self-doubt (what do I have to write about, anyway?) and a complete lack of tools (if I only had a camera-a nice one-I’d be the greatest thing since Hitchcock!) – as the reasons why.
With this blog I hope to redouble my efforts. Even so, I consider it fairly emblematic of my worst tendencies (it took me nearly two months to design and code everything – a period during which I did very little writing, citing the fact that I was too busy working on my imminent vessel of true expression and would start as soon as it went live, etc etc).
Think rationally. Understand that, objectively, there is absolutely nothing standing between you and your first novel. Or your first painting. There’s just tons of hours to get through and some bad habits to slay.
So get going. We’ll do it together.
Scott Adams writes on The Dilbert Blog that success-seekers ought to forget about striving to be in the top one percentile of one given skill – they should instead focus on being in the top 25% of as many skills as possible.
Spun off from a post by Jason Kottke.
Adapted from a commencement speech the author delivered at Kenyon College in 2005.
For a lot of college kids in the United States, the recession has made scaling back ambitions a must.
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