Writing

The Wire: Writing Into Your Arc

Merlin Mann — 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 ©2008 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 Mann — 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 ©2008 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 Mann — 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 ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

What Makes for a Good Blog?

Merlin Mann — 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 ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Berkun's Game-Changer: Disruptive, Breakthrough Essay on Transformative Jargon Utilization.

Merlin Mann — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 09:18:21 -0400

Why Jargon Feeds on Lazy Minds - Scott Berkun

Scott Berkun, writing on how buzzwords cheapen language, dull meaning, and enfeeble our thinking:

If I could give every single business writer, guru or executive one thing to read every morning before work, it’d be this essay by George Orwell: Politics and the English Language.

Not only is this essay short, brilliant, thought-provoking and memorable, it calls bullshit on most of what passes today as speech and written language in management circles. And if you are too lazy to read the article, all you need to remember is this: never use a fancy word when a simple one will do. If your idea is good, no hype is necessary. Explain it clearly and people will get it, if there truly is something notable to get. If your idea is bad: keep working before you share it with others. And if you don’t have time for that, you might as well be honest. Because when you throw jargon around, most of us know you’re probably lying about something anyway.

Marry me, Scott. (And, yes: I, for one, will stop saying “game-changer” now. Tic noted.)

Orwell’s excellent 1946 essay is freely available in numerous locations and in various formats across the web. I like this vanilla version.

[via delicious/charliepark]

”Berkun's Game-Changer: Disruptive, Breakthrough Essay on Transformative Jargon Utilization.” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 11, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Lunch Poems

brianoberkirch — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:04:26 -0400

Guest post from our pal, Brian, on how one of my favorite poets of the 60s captured interstitial time to make art. —mdm

At the late late party after party we were talking about how you know if you're a writer. I suggested that actually writing routinely was the tip off. Then someone had a better idea: that writers are those who feel guilty about not writing. A first-world problem, to be sure, but if you know any working writers, one of their most beloved hobby horses is that they just don't have time to write. Students, money, speaking engagements, lint, bacon, the Cubs, morning sex. So many things between them and great sentences.

Frank O'Hara didn't seem to have this problem. He made it a point not to be a professional poet, but to write poems and essays and catalog introductions and letters and his own life in the due course of long days he filled equally with chatter, lunches, working at the MOMA, talking on the phone. Kenneth Burke called literature equipment for living, and O'Hara never put his away. He was always making. Sometimes poems, sometimes friends.

He has a slim book of work called Lunch Poems, and you might think of that as his primary mode of composition. While out walking from the museum to get lunch, he'd do a poem. Maybe he'd type it up and stick it in a drawer later. I'm pretty sure that one of my favorites of his (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!) was drafted during a ferry ride en route to read with Robert Lowell. That is balls. And it's also a better lesson than maybe any one of O'Hara's works: your creative life is part of your life. When making things is just another open window, you've won.

Here's O'Hara reading Lana Turner.

”Lunch Poems” was written by Brian Oberkirch for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 06, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Kurt Vonnegut on Writing Better

Merlin Mann — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:30:53 -0400

“How to Write With Style” by Kurt Vonnegut

In an essay from his 1981 collection, Palm Sunday, the wonderful Kurt Vonnegut offered simple, sensible advice on improving your writing. Love this bit on learning how to “sound like yourself”:

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.

The seven points, in all:

Find a subject you care about

Do not ramble, though

Keep it simple

Have guts to cut

Sound like yourself

Say what you mean

Pity the readers

[via MetaFilter]

(Ask me about the time in 1986 that Kurt Vonnegut bought me breakfast.)

Update 2008-07-14 09:11:30: If you’re curious, here’s my Kurt Vonnegut story, which I shared on another site of mine not long after his passing. What a good human Mr. Vonnegut was.

Kung Fu Grippe: “Tonight, I’m thinking about Kurt Vonnegut.”

Tonight, I’m thinking about Kurt Vonnegut.

When I was about 17, I read Slaughterhouse-Five for the third or fourth time and, somewhere in there, the author unknowingly flipped a switch that would help make the difference between my going to college versus finding an apartment out by the airport, near the anonymous tan brick building where I could learn how to fix cash registers. (This is true. It was a very close call.)

A couple years after that, at a college that did not teach cash register repair, some friends and I arranged an independent project to read more than a dozen of Vonnegut’s books over seven weeks. Late in that semester, when the author came to speak on campus — and for which visit he collected the entirety of the school’s modest annual speaker’s budget — Kurt Vonnegut took everyone in our reading group out to brunch at the Hyatt. It was one of the best Saturday mornings ever. It was like Palm Sunday but with eggs and actual Pall Malls — with him carrying on about politics and madness and misunderstandings and annihilation. (This is true. He bought us all breakfast and he was really nice and generous and not just a little crazy.)

I’ve barely followed anything he’s done since Bluebeard, but Mr. Vonnegut’s humanity and sensitivity have always been a warm presence for me. He cared about the state of the sorry souls on the planet in a way that marks a lot of people as nuts, but, for this, I imagine he could give a good goddamn what people thought.

And, yeah, I’m sorry that I never got the chance as a grownup to buy him an omelette and say thanks for the words and for saving me from that tan cash register school out by the airport. I owe you one, Billy Pilgrim.

People aren’t suppose to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore. I’ve finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt. It begins like this: “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” It ends like this: “Poo-tee-weet?” —Slaughterhouse-Five - Wikiquote

”Kurt Vonnegut on Writing Better” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 14, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Whining, Blue Smoke & the Mechanics of Getting Unstuck

Merlin Mann — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 09:40:00 -0400

I’ve been working on a bunch of (non-43 Folders-related) stuff lately, but I started feeling that hankering to come back and write something new here. To get the engine started, I went through some old posts and turned up a few (oddly self-inspiring) ideas that I want to re-share. The topic? “Getting unstuck.”

Hack your way out of writer’s block - “Literally. Put five completley random words on a piece of paper. Write five more words. Try a sentence. Could be about anything. A block ends when you start making words on a page.”
Solve problems by writing a note to yourself - “Seriously, open up your email program, type in your own email address, then choose a brilliant subject line that perfectly encapsulates your particular problem.”
Do a fast “mind-sweep” - “And as long as you let that stuff accumulate as chunky deposits on the edges of your perception, it’s very unlikely it’ll get done since — well — they won’t get done until they’re been captured and properly started, right?”
Cringe-Busting your TODO list - “Per cringe item, think honestly about why you’re freaked out about it. Seriously. What’s the hang-up? (Fear of failure? Dreading bad news? Angry you’re already way overdue?)”
Patching your personal suck - “Every patch that fails teaches you a little something that might come in handy some day. Mistakes, as they say, can be a buddhist gift.”

I guess all I’d add — since it’s on my mind today — is that I’m learning how much it pays to listen whenever you hear yourself mentally whining.

First off, even when it’s yourself, nobody likes a whiner. So it’s worthwhile to be mindful about the extent to which your internal monologue is becoming personally insufferable. As with B.O. and a lack of flossing, the chances are good that others have already noticed things about you before you have, so — you know — congratulations on making it to the party.

But, second, and perhaps more importantly, that whining should be telling you something. Whining is the ~~white~~ blue smoke in your tailpipe that lets you know you’re burning mental oil. It means you’re unconsciously devoting cycles to something that you can’t, won’t, or shouldn’t be spending time thinking about. Otherwise, why would it be bothering you, right? You’d be either extricated or done with it.

Once you pinpoint where that whine’s coming from, that’s the perfect opportunity to decide what the hell the hang-up is. Because if it’s worth whining and fussing about, it’s worth deciding what obstacle (obstruction?) in either the Real World or your own mind is keeping something from happening.

And once that obstacle is identified and out there, ample methods exist for helping you execute in a way that’s sane and sensible. But you can’t complete a task you don’t understand, so grant yourself the personal luxury of unpacking the problem behind the problem.

Put automotively? Obsessively adding a new quart of oil every day not only doesn’t fix your smoke problem: it feeds it. Instead, just use the smoke as a warning that it’s nigh time to trace the cracks in your engine.

As for me? Yeah. Now I’m feeling unstuck and a little less whiny. So, thanks. Onward.

Edit 2008-04-12 11:07:28 - Reader wemerson was kind enough to correct me on my metaphor in this post. Turns out that my use of “white smoke” was inaccurate; the smoke would be blue. Many thanks — and I made the correction. Learn more about smoke…

”Whining, Blue Smoke & the Mechanics of Getting Unstuck” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on April 10, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Creative Constraints: Going to Jail to Get Free

Merlin Mann — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:46:02 -0400

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.)

The Question to You

Got a good example of a creative constraint at work?

”Creative Constraints: Going to Jail to Get Free” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 24, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

William F. Buckley, Scourge of 20-pound Bond Paper

wood.tang — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:17:56 -0500

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,

The more than 4.5 million words of his 5,600 newspaper columns, titled “On the Right,” would fill 45 more medium-size books. His collected papers, which were donated to Yale, weigh seven tons.

That’s a lot of typewriter ribbon, people. And he was found dead in his study, apparently working on another column. Of course, that’s the accumulated work of a 60-year career, but if I could summon the work ethic to generate a fraction of that output, I’d be satisfied.

”William F. Buckley, Scourge of 20-pound Bond Paper” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on February 28, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"