TL;DR: Listen to this, and if you haven’t already, read this.
Two years ago I read Maya Angelou’s memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The economy of words and effortless storytelling made it an instant favourite. A book that has brewed in the back of my head since, and one I look forward to reading a second time.
I was amazed to discover that the real Angelou was totally at odds with how I had pictured her. Her memoir deals with some serious issues, from rape to the racism she endured growing up in the American south. I had pictured her as flinty-eyed and stoic and maybe — understandably — a bit joyless. It was a real treat to hear her real voice: like warm butter, full of mischief. The indestructible kind of person who laughs easily and speaks with humility.
It really hit me how little I know the writers of my favourite books, even the ones who are still alive. They might have adopted any mask for the sake of their work, and I might never know.
Side quest: In this interview Angelou also talks about her mother Vivian, who sounds like a beast of a human being. Angelou speaks about an occasion when, already a hotel owner, surgical nurse and real estate broker, her mother joined the navy:
They told me they wouldn’t let black women in their union. You know what I said? ‘You wanna bet?’ I’ll put my foot in that door up to my hip!
Apparently Angelou finally did write a biography about her mother in 2013, in the last volume of her memoirs, Me and Mom and Me. One for my reading list.
One of the most down-to-earth talks on finding time for creativity that I’ve ever seen. Just short of ten minutes but he covers a lot of territory, from his life in the arts to the deeper meaning of creative pursuits for society and personal growth.
Like millions of other people, I would have Neil Gaiman’s babies (we’d sort out the mechanics). His world-renown literary works aside, he also gives a bloody good interview.
What really grabbed me today was Neil’s comments on writing longhand. He always writes his first drafts out in a notebook, and it affects not only his process, but he has observed it affecting others, too.
Neil notes that before PCs with word processors were mainstream, he edited an anthology of short stories. Then, the word counts averaged around 3,000 words. Only a few years later, with more computers around, he edited another anthology, only to find that the average word count has more than doubled.
On a computer screen, words are cheap. There’s no paper or ink to waste. There’s no selection pressure on the choice of words — just use them all. I wonder if short stories are fundamentally more difficult to write by computer than by hand. Does the brain process the task in a measurably different way?
Gaming environments for success
Neil has a well-known writing habit: if he doesn’t write then he is free to do nothing, but he is only allowed to do nothing. In minutes, doing nothing tends to lost his charm, and he so he writes. Procrastination is short-circuited.
But he also does something else. Neil produces his second drafts by copying his longhand manuscripts onto the computer. When he does this, if he realises he doesn’t need a page or so, he just doesn’t copy it up. Instead of deleting a whole chunk of digital copy, feeling like he’s losing work, he in fact saves himself the labour of transcribing.
This approach of using technology, environment and ritual provides an environment where Neil maximises his chance of doing the things he’d rather do. It doesn’t have to always work, it just has to be better than the default state.
Prime your environment to make the next action easy.
First drafts are just meet-and-greets
In any case, Neil doesn’t try to catch lightning in a bottle. Even the master doesn’t spit out perfect prose right away (though I suspect his first go is usually still disgustingly good). I’ll close out with his thoughts on what first drafts are for.
… Nobody is ever meant to read your first draft. Your first draft can go way off the rails, your first draft can absolutely go up in flames … it is you telling the story to yourself.
I haven’t posted since November. A lot’s happened since then, including a new job and a downpayment on our first house.
I’ve spent a lot of that time editing, rather than writing. I’ve focused on my backlog of short stories, dusting them off and buffing them until they’re like glass. The oldest of the stories was written over two years ago. Even in that relatively short span, I’ve changed as a person, and that change is reflected in each draft of the stories.
First drafts are always unrefined, anyway. It’s like firing a bow and arrow while blindfolded: you’ll settle for shooting in the right direction at first. As Joyce Carol Oates said:
“Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.”
Two of the stories only needed tightening, though I’ve managed to shave them down by around 30% each. The other two required a complete overhaul; they’re barely the same stories I started with.
I’ve been submitting them, with no expectation of acceptance, taking the long view. I’m racking up the rejections already.
My short-story submission statistics so far this year (I use Duotrope to handle my submissions)
In terms of writing activities, I’ve done nothing else for almost three months. Every morning for around an hour, and in the evening when I can squeeze it in. It’s put me in an entirely different headspace: every word counts; misplaced punctuation reads like a bullet fired through a china-shop window.
It’s very different from my usual get-it-on-the-page, word-vomity method of writing fresh material.
What’s really been impressed on me is that revision can create a definite sense of peace and solitude. Like those model ships that people build inside bottles. But it can also be a bottomless pit — there’s no natural end to the process.
“A work of art is never finished, only abandoned,” remarked Paul Valéry (though there seems to be some controversy over who actually said it).
When to draw a line under a project is one of the hardest things to get right. Working on a lot of short stories in sequence seems like a good way to get better.
I’ve never revised any piece as much as I’ve revised these stories. I’m sure I could recite them from memory by now. I might even get an acceptance if I keep it up.
I have a post-it note on my desk that says RADIANT GENIUS. All-caps, no explanation. Just RADIANT GENIUS. It’s been on my desk for a while now. I have no idea what it means, so it’s useless, the product of a less refined moment.
But I can’t bear to throw it away. Adorable that I thought that note would be useful later. How could anyone forget the entire phantasmagorical world of ideas unlocked by those infamous words of power: RADIANT GENIUS.
There’s another note on my desk. It says Robots and Dragons. And there is a little smiley face on it, to emphasize the calm confidence I had in those words at the time. Clearly it was a genius idea — though I’m not sure I’d call it radiant genius.
I’ve written a bit about notetaking and systems for developing creative ideas. But the above are evidence that there’s another side to scribbling everything down: some proportion isn’t useful and is at best clutter, and at worst is confusing.
A few might be comedy gold, fodder for the pinboard. But the whole effort at keeping notes falls flat if it isn’t searchable to some extent. The whole system has to be purged periodically for it to be of any use.
For me, that just means reading over everything, collating things into a blog post or my .inbox file on Evernote (inbox sorting in Evernote is explained here), or a list of quotations that I keep on Notion (twinned with things that sync from my Kindle using ReadWise). Occasionally things go into Obsidian, where I’m building a sort of personal Wiki (they call it a Second Brain, but that sounds a bit grand for what I’ve got going on).
Keeping things running smoothly does mean throwing things away, which I find difficult, especially when I feel like the note is just on the cusp of reminding me of something good. But if it doesn’t serve as a decent trigger for your memory, the note has failed, so it has to go.
I wrote a few weeks ago about my generally scattered mindset at the moment, and how that’s been refelcted in a messy workspace. So my focus for the next little while is keeping clutter to a minimum. Though I’m going to keep RADIANT GENIUS a while longer.
I have a special love for certain kinds of films. Not because of how technically great they are, but rather because of how they manage to be unself-consciously outrageous.
There’s a recent film about a Megalodon (giant prehistoric shark) called The Meg. It’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about.
Early in the film, the giant shark destroys a nuclear submarine by smashing into it with its face. At the end of the film, Jason Statham kills the shark by stabbing it in the neck with a knife. The disregard for physics or even consistency of the viewer’s expected suspension of disbelief is just… *Chef’s kiss*.
It might not be fair or accurate to call these films B-movies, because some of them have big budgets, well-known casts and have a lot of commercial success. I’m using that label because of how they are perceived by critics and the public.
These films are usually sneered or laughed at, and are generally considered to be lacking in quality or artistic merit, on a tier lower than the standard action flick.
They’re essentially films that people love to laugh at.
I love them. I love them because, in my opinion, they are about as close as you can find to untainted acts of creation in cinema. I don’t accept the premise that “artsy” films are intrinsically more creative or “worthy”, because I think there’s a certain amount of self-awareness and pretension that creep into those circles, which pollutes the end product.
These action-based B-movies are made by people who know that they’re going to be laughed at for what they create, and they absolutely do not care. They go ahead and create with genuine passion and often end up with over-the-top and raw results. There’s freedom and beauty in that. An echo of the child who plays with abandon in the corner of the room, ignoring everything else around them. That’s creation, and it goes back to the old Bradbury quote I’ve thrown out before:
“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”
But let’s also acknowledge that I often just want to watch a giant lizard fight a giant monkey, and that’s okay too.
I live with frequent brain fog. I’m not sure why. Could be chronic stress, bad sleep patterns, over-dependency on caffeine to function, general anxiety. Who knows.
What I do know is that I only get about an hour a day of clear thinking, if I’m lucky. It’s difficult to compare between individuals, given natural variations in energy levels and attention span, so let’s be specific.
Most of the time I function just fine: I can socialize, run errands, exercise, do admin, and perform the less intellectually demanding aspects of work. But anything insightful, thoughtful or creative is walled off behind a snarl of vines, iron wool and vertigo.
As a rule, the wall comes down once a day.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much of a pattern in what triggers the spells of clarity. They just come, leaping from the shadows, unbidden and grinning.
Sometimes I’m lucky, ready at my desk or a quiet corner or a train. I can drop what I’m doing and take to the keyboard or a pad of paper before the wall is thrown up again.
Other times, I’m not so lucky. Maybe more often than not, I can’t possibly take advantage of the clear spells, like when I’m in the shower, out on a run, or during a conversation.
Catching the tails of creative bursts over a week usually produces a sprawl of notes like this… (see half-baked wisdom point #2 below)
Recently, I’ve had more free time and a rested mind, so I’ve been able to catch the clear spells more often. Maybe half the time.
In more usual circumstances, I’m a caffeine-addled, sleep-deprived, anxious mass, carefully groomed to look like a high-functioning adult. I might catch a clear spell once a week.
I’ve tried to use my recent ample free time to maximise the number of usable clear spells. I’ve experimented, and come up with five things that work for me that I think are worth noting (and I stress: they work for me; this is not advice).
Today’s Nuggets of Half-Baked Wisdom
1. Scheduling: I hate schedules, but they work. This is advice that’s been repeated again and again by creatives in every medium. See Daily Rituals by Mason Currey for dozens of examples. If you want to create, or even to think, it’s never going to happen if you don’t set aside time for it. That’s the bare minumum. Like condoms: better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.
2. Notepads, notepads everywhere: I’ve heard one person say they keep a waterproof notepad in the shower. I haven’t gone that far, but I do have notepads stashed everywhere else now: in my pocket, my coat, my bag, beside my bed, beside the treadmill. It might not replace access to a journal or keyboard, but the little snippets and notes build up.
3. Strategic drug-taking: Calm down, I’m not onto mescaline… yet. But I’ve started taking caffeine at scheduled times to optimize its effects, giving a small kick without overloading me or causing a crash later. See books like Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, and Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, for the science. And if I’m stressed and too rigid to move, a wee dram of whiskey greases the wheels.
4. The Gaiman Method:Neil Gaiman says his writing method is simple. He sits down at his desk to write, and it doesn’t matter if he produces nothing. But he’s only allowed to stare out the window. He’s free to do that all he likes, but eventually his mind gets bored and starts making stories. Crafting an environment to induce boredom not only removes opportunities for procrastination, but actually incentivises your mind to invent its own distractions.
5. Don’t Force It: Probably the most important of the five. Everything has limits: we know when we’re too tired to go on, when our limbs are twisted to breaking point, when we’re about to lose our balance. Nothing good comes from pushing too hard. I’ve found that once I managed to make use of a creative spell, I often tried to squeeze it for all it was worth. But ultimately, what came out of it just wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be, because I tried to climb a mountain in one leap.
How many times have you heard somebody say that X is dead? Cinema, books, a sane taste in music. People love prophesizing the end times of art forms. It’s the doomsayer’s crack.
Some people say the MCU is destroying cinema, by crowding out opportunities for other films. Funding from film studios is finite, and they are likely to choose guaranteed profits over experimental films every time.
The same can be said for books. After the UK Net Books Agreement collapsed in the 1990s and books were routinely discounted by juggernaut retailers, profits in publishing collapsed. (A topic covered among many other book-related tidbits in The Diary of a Bookseller.)
The same story can be found almost everywhere, including music. Streaming services like Spotify are magic to consumers, but result in a cut-throat existence for many artists.
New art seems to be living on slim pickings. Established names are being commissioned over and over with huge budgets, and new names skulk in the shadows, judged as too risky for investment. This seems to be the way of things in the rent-it-don’t-own-it, endlessly-remake-the-classic-hits culture.
Art is dead, some say.
What a load of old shit.
Art forms cannot be destroyed, only changed.
They are defined by constant flux. There were no departures from normality, because ‘normal’ is not a benchmark but a brief window of time between metaphorphoses. A change for the better or worse depends on perspective, how willing you are to embrace it.
The printing press was originally seen as a disruptive technology that would make people lazy. The same cry came when the Kindle was invented, only to see print books sales spring back after the initial craze — with another bump during the pandemic. It’s true that independent bookshops are seeing dire times, and retail giants loom large over publishing, but that’s more a failure of regulation of our economy than a decline of the book.
And the monopolies of the film industry aren’t totally at the expense of creativity and ambition. The MCU is a landmark success because it was so experimental, launched in large part by Jon Favreau while making Iron Man.
From the beginning, the MCU films have had big budgets, but the whole universe of extended films could have crashed and burned at any point, with many others films half-finished and millions in investment lost.
I’m not immune to a feeling of doom. I will admit that I despaired while watching Jurassic World. I watched Jurassic Park so many times as a child that even now I could quote it to you word for word (unfortunately not an exaggeration). Jurassic World was an entertaining film that I enjoyed, but a part of me flinched away from a plot so incongruous with the mentally stimulating source material, and CGI that was simply not as good as in the original film — despite over twenty years of technological progress and the fact that the original came out in 1993.
This isn’t an isolated incident. After promising so much and almost reaching the heights of greatness, Prometheus quietly assassinated the genius mythos of the Space Jockeys in Alien. I was less than pleased.
Perhaps I’m being timid. Let me rephrase: I was more than upset by these things than if somebody had squatted down in full view and shat all over my garden.
But it was worth the risk to try something new. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Lots of people worked incredibly hard on these films, and I’m sure that millions of people really did love them, and don’t care much for ‘old films’ from the 70s or even (the pain) the 90s.
We went to see No Time to Die the other day. I thoroughly enjoyed it, top marks.
Looking at the reviews on IMDB, however, you’d think the film had been a two-hour shot of the entire cast giving the audience the finger. Die-hard fans are genuinely upset to have had their drug-addled misygenist stolen away from them.
The film’s crime is innovation. Taking old material that has been milked dry for decades, and giving it a little spin and a twist. Taking characters in new directions. Even growth — if you can imagine such a thing, in a Bond film.
I don’t want to pick on Bond fans who are upset, because we could have the same conversation about any fandom when something that dissapoints it comes along. This particular occurrence happens to have me fired up. Fans of old-school Bond: I hope you never feel that anyone is trying to screw with something you love.
Nonetheless we need to stay limber and ready for the new, even if we’re still in love with the old. Changes to the industries around art will always happen, have always happened. But they’re not the real drivers of change. A lack of interest in experimentation and new material from fans is the real danger: if there is no demand for anything new from consumers, creators will lose any leverage to actually create. If we’re going to stave off a time of rebooted remakes of reimaginings, we need to be excited by being turned on our heads.
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
– Mary Oliver
If you let it, the chaff of life will crowd out your true purpose. Without conscious curation, life falls onto default rails, and and it is possible to spend years on what is fundamentally unfulfilling.
Over 10 years ago, when I was 19, I finished my fourth novel. I was surprised to find it wasn’t obviously a steaming turd, so I decided to try and get a literary agent. (An adorable story, involving me writing my age on the cover letter, as though to assure them I wasn’t actually three toddlers in a trench coat.)
Ray Bradbury’s gloriously messy workspace. (Image Credit: this Medium article about Bradbury’s recipe for a good life.)
Some of my friends laughed at me, for writing nerdy fiction for nerds, and for aspiring to anything loftier than a birthday party at All Bar One.
I wasn’t quite old enough to realise that friends who laugh at you for trying to grow are not friends at all. Nonetheless, I didn’t have time for their crap. As Ray Bradbury famously said:
“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”
I read every guide on the publishing business I could find, and started querying.
A year later, I signed with an agent, delirious with excitement.
It didn’t go well. By the time I was 21, we parted ways and I set out to publish the books independently admist the self-publishing revolution. It was 2013, the crest of the ebook gold rush.
I still have the original letter from the literary agent who offered to represent me.
I released five books over three years, and featured in a series of short story anthologies. My degree and subsequent PhD gradually took over, and the writing got pushed onto the back burner. I was satisfied with what I’d accomplished, so I let it slide further and further back, until it became not something I do but something I used to do.
More recently, with my doctoral studies coming to an end, it looked like I would finally have the time and energy to return to writing in a serious way. I couldn’t help wondering why I had stopped in the first place. I’d had a great time, after all.
Except, I have a journal that says otherwise. It tells a totally different story. As a friend of Greg McKeown once said to him:
“The faintest pencil is greater than the strongest memory.”
Looking through that journal, the signs of burnout are obvious. There had been ups and downs, but it’s clear that, at some point, it had simply stopped being fun. I suspect that juggling it all meant that I ended up treating it like a chore, rather than something I enjoyed. And something with a long payoff horizon is unsustainable if you get no enjoyment from it.
The key to avoiding burnout in doing what fulfils you is to have some fun with it.
The key is play.
The ideal work is that which feels like play. We’re socialised to think the opposite from a young age. Ken Robinson has a spectacular TED talk about the school system killing creativity (see below). I remember first watching the talk in 2015 and emphatically agreeing: play and exploring are vital to self-actualisation (see Maslow’s Pyramid).
Then I proceeded to grind away in a playless desert for years.
Being aware of a fault doesn’t automatically change your behaviour. Habits are difficult to form deliberately. As explained in this Freedom article, “According to a 2010 study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, it took study participants anywhere from 18 to 254 days to carry out an eating, drinking or activity behavior habitually, with an average time period of 66 days.”
Maintaining the space and time for play requires commitment.
Sounds odd. Committing to play.
But in the modern world, that’s exactly what it takes. Greg McKeown talks about this very thing in Chapter 13 of Essentialism: subtraction. Cut away all the non-essential chaff of life, leaving the single thing you want to use your energy on (more about that here).
McKeown quotes what is apocryphally attributed to Michaelangelo, which I’ll paraphrase here:
When asked how he accomplished the feat of carving his masterpiece, the statue of David, Michaelangelo replied: “It’s easy. You just chip away everything that doesn’t look like David.”
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