Creativity

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?"

43 Folders: Time, Attention, and Creative Work

Merlin Mann — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:14:34 -0400

[“what is this?”]

Here’s something I wrote last week for this site’s new “About” page:

43 Folders is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

Call it a motto, or a charter, or — if you have to — a “mission statement.” But, for both of us, it’s a stake in the ground that keeps me focused on what I feel best suited to do for you with this site right now.

I want to help you identify and remove any obstacle that keeps you from making things that you love. And then I want to help you figure out how to make those things even better. That’s pretty much it.

R.I.P., Productivity Pr0n

Friends, I’m done with “productivity” as a personal fetish or hobby. There are countless sites that are all too happy to vend stroke material for your joyless addiction to puns about procrastination and systems for generating more taxonomically satisfying meta-work. But, presently, you won’t find so much of that here.

Except inasmuch as it can help move aside barriers to finishing the projects that you claim matter to you, “productivity” is often a sprawling ghetto of well-marketed nonsense for people who really just need a ritalin and a hug. So, for myself, random tips and lists that aren’t anchored to solving a real-world problem for a smart but flawed adult with a mind are dead to me. Pour a forty on ‘em.

From now on, I’m going to talk about how people make stuff. Books, art, code, buildings, ballets, companies, furniture, whimsical hats, songs, or what have you. But understand: this isn’t just for fancy people and fine arts majors.

You’re already “creative”

If the work that really matters to you involves understanding a relationship between a handful of seemingly unrelated things and then figuring out the best way to portray, magnify, or resolve those relationships, then you’re already doing creative work. Any time you make a connection between two or more axes that hadn’t occurred to you 10 minutes ago, yes, you’ve done something creative. Seriously. This does not require your wearing a beret.

But, then — and this is really important — if you want to actually make something out of all that insight, and if you have the will and desire to polish and improve the execution of all the things you produce, then we’ll have a lot to talk about.

But, if you want a “site about GTD,” “a blog about index cards,” or a wide-mouthed sluice of recycled links to lists of geegaws that will keep you momentarily distracted from how sad you are, then you’re wasting both of our time here. So, go. You’re stinking up the joint.

This is now a site for people who want to finish things that they care about — but who still occasionally need help, inspiration, and the courage to push all the bullshit off their work table. This is about clearing that space every day, and then using it to do cool stuff that makes you proud.

So. What, then?

Does this mean that Inbox Zero, Time and Attention Management, or advice on reducing noise will be going away from 43 Folders? No. Freaking. Way.

If I may say, that’s all great stuff, and you’re still going to need it if the mind is willing but the attention is occasionally weak (or under attack). No, if anything, you’ll be seeing more articles targeted at how to do this stuff well so you can get back into the studio faster.

You’re also going to see more material about the habits and patterns that have been demonstrated to work for makers who have had long-lived careers in the creative world. In itself, this is the direction I’m most fascinated with right now, and it’s likely one I’ll be returning to often in the coming months:

How do you fire your muse and learn to rely solely on working your ass off every day?

As I’m learning, it definitely can be done, but there’s no secret or silver bullet; it’s just work, work, work, combined with a personal commitment to editing and improvement that produces the best results of which you’re capable as often as possible. It’s the kind of productivity that’s about applying your time to frequent, high-quality “releases” — not laying in a hammock while people in Bangalore update your website.

But, what about all the cool notebooks, links to lists of “GTD resources,” and ponderously detailed tutorials on how to label a file folder? Yeah. From now on, maybe don’t expect a lot of that here. Unless I feel it has a direct link to helping you do things.

Here’s the thing

A notebook is basically the creative equivalent of the NFL jersey you picked up at Macy’s; unless you fill it with a lot of hard work and sacrifices, you’re just a dilettante with poor spending patterns. An aspiring something. A fan of the game. An existential cosplayer. And, that’s not what I want to help you to be. Even if you really love Moleskines or the Raiders, God love ‘em.

So, we’re going to talk about what goes in the notebook; not the fact that it’s pretty and has a little bookmark. Then I want you to leave here.

That’s the basic idea. We’ll see what evolves.

And, there’s these other things

I’m also working on some other stuff for the site that I hope will please more people than it annoys. In any case, they’re each important to me. Here’s the shape of the map.

1. Less noise in general

Less chrome, less noise, less blah-blah, and less unnecessary anything. On a given day in the future, you may notice this as fewer ads, lower (but higher-quality) post volume, and an ongoing attempt to make the site fast and easy to use. I’m working on this. With money and people and new relationships and so on. More as it develops and becomes worth highlighting.

2. Walking a truer productivity walk

It’s important to me that we both try to stay focused on the real goal: which is being done with a project that you care about. It’s not about hanging out, smoking cloves, and chatting about “Différance” late into the Paris nights. I want you to visit here, get what you need, then get the hell back to work.

So, if you occasionally notice me smiling, and putting a firm but gentle hand between your shoulder blades as we begin a walk toward the door, it’s because that’s closer to where your work is. It’s not here, it’s not in your inbox, and, with all due respect, it’s probably not in a list of 5,000 links.

Like I said recently, if you’ve crossed the river, you should quit carrying the boat. And while I very much hope and desire that you make 43 Folders your first stop when you need to feel inspired and confident about making decisions that support your best work, I truly do not want you to waste time here. That would make me sad.

So, yes, please read this page: How to Use 43 Folders. It’s a new page that provides basic guidance on finding fast answers, and ultimately, on helping you figure out why you’re here.

I imagine the how-to will evolve as the site evolves, so I would be honored if you would trust me enough to bookmark that page, then consider making it the place where you begin your visits here. With any luck, it can also frequently be the page where your visits quickly end here. And, although I have to imagine it will vex the nice people who are kind enough to sell ads for my site: that’s okay by me.

3. Mostly firewalled self-promotion

While it’s my site and will always be used to promote my ideas and my business in the way that I think is most appropriate, I also don’t want it to turn into a glorified billboard for me — especially to the exclusion of the writing and ideas that make it theoretically useful. And, especially in the articles and content well. That space is getting more sacrosanct.

With much sadness, I’ve recently watched some of my most beloved and respected friends’ blogs degrade into a depressing slurry of pimping, random affiliate linking, paid (or pseudo-paid) placement, idiotic traffic boosters, and wholesale ego boosting about every bakesale, state fair, or mall opening that its authors plan to chopper into.

Here, except for The Monthly Pimp, I want the content well to stay clean, focused, and worthy of your trust and my credibility. Ads go in the ad zones, and anybody can buy one to sell pretty much anything. But it doesn’t buy placement in a 43 Folders post, and it shouldn’t buy my association or endorsement elsewhere. Maybe for a truly paid, public endorsement deal; but not for a banner ad buy. That’s just weird. Plus I don’t own a chicken suit.

This doesn’t mean that I won’t link to my own work and my other sites and projects whenever I think it’s appropriate. It also doesn’t mean I’ll stop linking to Amazon for products or A2 for web hosting when it’s germane to what I have to say. But, I do already have a site that’s purely self-promotional. And that’s where I’d like most of that that stuff to live now.

OT: If you’re a blogger I know and love, maybe at least consider joining me in your own overdue Superfund cleanup to the extent that you’re comfortable and able. Too much money can easily buy you a very dumb audience and an astoundingly influential cohort of ex-readers.

4. No more fake “conversations”

I’ve loved so many of the comments and forum posts on 43 Folders. But, for an endless number of reasons that you’ve probably seen for yourself across the web, the quality and care of visitor contributions everywhere has hit what I truly hope is rock bottom.

Stupid, venal, ignorant, self-linking comments from people who couldn’t be troubled to actually read the article. Angry forum posts full of personal attacks, giant avatars of Manga characters, and 4-vertical-inch signatures about which Golden Girl you are. Nonsense tagging, meta-commenting, ass-kissing, trolling, and…oooo!…video responses….neato! Please. It’s nuts and it’s pointless and it’s really cynical on the part of almost every publisher that allows that crap to go on.

“Conversation,” like “friend,” is a word that has a meaning to human beings with faces and brains. I will not abuse it as code for the surplus page views produced by someone with an afternoon to kill.

5. This is my site. There are many like it, but this one is mine

43 Folders is now, once again, about what I have to say about things, and I want that to be the sole reason that the idea of a visit here either attracts or repels you.

Yes, there will still be occasional guest posts, open threads, and of course, I’ll be linking to and quoting widely from the work of others. But I’m taking a cue from John, Andy, Jason, and anybody else who wants to own every pixel of their site. I’m buying back my own stock, even if it incurs a short-term writedown.

If you have comments about what I say here, post about it on your own blog. That’s what it’s there for, and it’s a place where owning your words will have gravity and, in most cases, will be associated with the name of a real person who doesn’t pinch loaves on his own couch.

And, then, there’s everything else

Over the next year, I’m going to do lots more speaking, more of my own independent video and podcast projects, and, yes, in all likelihood, I’ll finish one book and make progress toward a second.

N.B. In the case of that last thing, it’s likely to be the sole public remark I’ll have to share until I have a release date, an Amazon page, and a sample chapter for you to download. But, that’s getting ahead of myself. We’ll see what happens. Do wish me luck.

So, “hi.” Again.

I want you to know that I’m back. I’m here. And I’m thinking very much about how 43 Folders can become a focused resource for people who do work that they love and make things that matter to them — but who just want to do it better and with less bullshit and existential overhead on every conceivable front. And, if it’s not clear, I really want that same lack of bullshit and surplus of polish to be evident in my own work as well. It’s the goal, anyhow.

We’ll see how I do. As ever, it’s going to be mostly letters to myself. But, the material is out there, and as much as my schedule for other work and the time I set aside for my family and friends will allow, I want this site to be really consistently good. And, where it’s able, I’d love for 43 Folders to help you make your stuff even better.

So, that’s it for the throat-clearing and metatalk for now. Thanks for hearing me out, and I hope you’ll stop by sometimes if you think 43 Folders can help you make something cool today.

Now: back to work.

”43 Folders: Time, Attention, and Creative Work” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 10, 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?"

Cooking for the Creative Beast

wood.tang — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 06:46:44 -0400

Guest post

Guest blogger, Matt Wood, learns how to feed his creative side (without giving it a big gut). —mdm

Earlier this summer, I was in the kitchen, trying to cook dinner. I had a pot on the stove and a fire going on the grill outside. I was fumbling with a bag of frozen peas when my three-year-old started shouting at me to fix one of his toys. “Hold on a second, son,” I said. “I can’t do two things at once.” He looked me, dead serious, and said, “But you have two hands, Daddy.”

Too Many Pots on the Stove

My life usually feels like this. I set out to do make something nice, and I end up with a scorched side dish, charred burgers, and crunchy peas. The output barely resembles that delicious-looking picture in Cooking Light, but hey, the toy trains are running on time!

My immediate solution has been to limit the inputs and not try to do so much at once. If I can’t cook a nice meal with a preschooler underfoot, then I won’t even try. Chicken nuggets and grilled cheese for everyone, and you’ll like it, thank you very much. While this approach to dinner fulfills various statutes regarding child neglect, it’s also not very satisfying. Apply this approach to work and it certainly creates more time to do Important Things, but it makes for soggy, microwaved output as well.

For example, around the same time my son was questioning my competency with opposable thumbs, I was going through a phase where I had stripped by my daily routine down to the bare bones. I wasn’t happy with my word count, and I blamed it on the internet. I unsubscribed from RSS feeds right and left. I shuttered my blog. I quit visiting forums. I stopped following half the people on my Twitter list. And it worked, for a while. In the first few weeks of this monastic regimen, I wrote a 20-page essay—with footnotes—about my childhood baseball hero that was accepted by the first publication to which I sent it. Score. I thought I was on to something.

Then my ideas ran out.

My creative beast is restless and hungry, and I’ve learned that if I starve it by arbitrarily limiting its routine, it’s not happy. It’s all well and good to cut the fat out of your life to make time for what’s important, but you can take it too far. By turning off the internet, I turned off my source of inspiration. I was trying to write in a vacuum.

Apparently this works for some people. I was in a workshop recently with a guy who has a cabin in the New Mexico desert where he holes up with four dogs, smokes pot, and writes novels. He said it was the only way he could get any work done, but that wouldn’t work for me. Not yet.

Batting Practice

I’m learning, slowly, that creative work requires both inspiration and a certain amount of warm up. Fooling around online gets my creative juices flowing and helps jump start more important work. The benefit doesn’t come from the sheer volume of information I consume; it comes from redirecting some of that stream and trying to synthesize it into a blog post or a pithy comment, none of which may be things I’ll put on my CV at the end of the day. But one-off, frivolous activities like that keep my brain working, and help me warm up to create things that will make me proud. I’ve cautiously reintroduced some of my old online haunts back into the routine since the summer drought, and sure enough it’s helped shake more ideas loose.

To torture another metaphor, it’s like baseball players taking batting practice. It’s fun for them to crank balls into the cheap seats to make the crowd ooh and ahh. It doesn’t count in the standings, and yet it’s serious work. They’re sharpening their eye, loosening muscles, working on hitting balls to the opposite field. If they went a week without launching a few crowd-pleasers into the stands, their performance in the real games would suffer because they’d be wasting their first few at bats working out the kinks that should have been worked out in practice.

The same goes for writing, or any other creative work. You need to let yourself practice with blogging, journals, or throwaway poems and work under less than perfect circumstances, the same way a guitarist noodles around with chords while watching TV, or an artist scribbles on a sketchpad while riding the bus. You can’t be too precious with your words or your notes or your brushstrokes. Believe me, someone will be there to trash your work anyway, no matter how long you petted it and brushed its hair. It’s more important to keep your brain switched on than trying to preserve every last bit of inspiration.

Distraction as a Role Player

Blaming your failures on wide distractions like the internet is just an advanced form of procrastination anyway. I’d gotten so used to blaming the amount of time I spent online for why I couldn’t get anything done that it became an all-or-nothing proposition: work or the internet. Dedication or distraction. The distraction became an excuse for why I avoided putting in time on things that matter.

But the trick isn’t cutting out that distraction completely, it’s acknowledging it, admitting its power over you, then drawing lines and finding its proper role in your life. There is a big difference between surrendering your attention to the demands of someone else and simply letting your brain wander off and play on the swings for a while.

Your boogeyman may be Guitar Hero, or fantasy football, or long phone conversations with your friends. This isn’t permission to mainline RSS feeds or wire Wikipedia straight into your brain. We all know where that leads. But you’ll find that in responsible portions, your creative side feeds off those rejuvenating distractions. It can’t live on chicken nuggets and grilled cheese for long.

”Cooking for the Creative Beast” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 15, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Making Time to Make: One Clear Line

Merlin Mann — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 01:10:45 -0400

This article is Part 3 of a 3-part series about attention management for people who do creative work called, Making Time to Make.
Previously: Part 1, Bad Correspondence
Then: Part 2, The Job You Think You Have

Could an email recluse like Neal Stephenson just cowboy up by agreeing to a monthly chat session or the occasional visit to a fan forum? Sure, he could. Could a volunteer intern scan Neal’s email once a week for particularly wonderful notes? You bet. Could he even conceivably just drop all the blast shields, open a chat room, “livestream” from his desk, and then spend the rest of his life answering questions from people with nothing better to do? Maybe. Sure. But, probably not. He’s already told us as much, hasn’t he?

The point, from my perspective, is that Stephenson possesses the man-sized pant stones to declare precisely what the people who enjoy his work should expect from him. And, in so doing, he has drawn a clear line that some might find hard to love, but that is very easy to see, understand, and respect. No, he didn’t hire someone to answer his email, or get a kid to pretend to be him on Twitter, or install a Greasemonkey script that “autopokes” people on Facebook (I’ll leave you to guess which two of these I do).

Neal Stephenson essentially said, “Listen, gang, here’s what I’m going to make for you: novels.” And then, he went back to typing. To working. On work.

Get Ready for the First World

No, sir, no one that I know (including me, of course) could ever get away with such an ambitious opossum routine when his primary medium is the web — and, really, who’d want to?

It’s fun and gratifying to connect with people, to find common interests, and to make things as a group. That’s why the internet is so much more fun than reading the corkboard at your laundromat. Usually.

The challenge for each of us today — maker, worker, leader, or layabout — is to figure out where our own clear line should be drawn, and to determine how we effectively communicate where that line is in a way that’s useful, civil, and as open as we need for it to be. Again, though, all in the context of firewalling time to make things.

If this all strikes you as fancy, handlebar moustache talk from an old misanthrope who doesn’t get things like whatever the hell we’re calling “conversations” this week, maybe you’re on to something. You wouldn’t be the first to say so. And, if you’re honestly completely unburdened by doing the things that are important to you while staying in joyful personal contact with everyone who wants it from you — then, I do applaud you. I guess. Although, frankly, I think you’re probably fibbing at least a little.

Drawing Your Line

For myself, I think it’s critical to set reasonable expectations about how, when, and where people can expect to have authentic, honest-to-God contact with us, and here’s why: if you leave every channel open to everybody and anybody, all the time and without limit, you necessarily prevent yourself from ever stepping away from the fray for long enough to focus. You’ll never make the time that it takes to produce the sort of good work that theoretically made you so appealing in the first place.

And, perhaps as importantly, you also can never devote your undivided attention to the biped mammals who are breathing air in the room with you. Here. People. With faces and hands. Not “friends,” but friends. Real people. Because, if total focus on the known important stuff in your life has to battle with a never-ending doorbell attached to your brain, it’s hard for me to imagine how your work, or your family, or your sense of who you are, alone in a room without the ringing, can possibly thrive. But, again, that’s really up to you to decide.

Balanced Patterns for Recovering Time to Make

If you’re determined to get back to work today — to start making more than SMTP queries — here are a few patterns for helping you find your way. Adapt as needed.

Clarify your needs

Think about what kind of environment you need to do your best work, and consider what you’d want to change today in order to make that environment more accessible to you for uninterrupted blocks of time.

Consider that the busy work, meta work, and stupid or boring monkey work in the life of a creative person should serve one purpose: clear the decks of distraction so you and your brain can work uninterrupted. To me, that is “Step 0.”

Define “OFF”

Decide what it means to be “available” versus “not available” at a given time. How long can your world tolerate your absence, and what does it look like when you re-surface? What needs to change in order to minimize stress and drama? Remember, the time you make needs to be all yours to the greatest degree possible. If you can still hear the phone ring or the baby crying, you may not really be “OFF” yet.

Consider the equivalent of a safe word for when the really important stuff needs to punch through your firewall. This is a young field with blunt tools right now, so consider employing wetware; work with a partner, colleague, or friend to be your attention sentry during times when you need to go off the grid for half a day. Reciprocate.

Draw your line

Make it clear how, when, where, and for how long people can expect to interact one-on-one with you. Don’t hesitate to point to community forums and mailing lists to which you contribute, FAQs you’ve answered a million times, or any other resource that liberates the previous use of your attention by exposing the fruit of its labors to the world.

How? Could be lots of ways, but whatever you use, try to find automation and economies of scale. That means:

add info on your Contact page explaining what people can expect from you
use auto-responses and email templates
where necessary send short responses to clarify when you’ll be available again

Also? Google. Tell people about this amazing new thing called “Google.” Apparently, it’s a service that helps people find all kinds of information without sending a single email. Handy.

Be honest

In the case of email in particular, you quickly learn the irony that a short response — far from retiring a topic — often is regarded as confirmation that you “want to play,” providing unintentional encouragement to send you lots more email. And, then come the growing expectations, now that you’ve unconsciously shown yourself to be an email punk.

Listen: if someone starts demanding a level of engagement with you that you can’t meet, just say so. And consider telling them why. You’d never hesitate to say “I have a doctor’s appointment,” so don’t be embarassed to say, “I can’t talk to you now, I’m in the studio all morning.” If you can’t work because you’re distracted by someone who wants to argue about how you spelled “wookiee” (don’t laugh — it’s happened to me twice; once when I was wrong and again when I was right), you need to cut the cord.

Also, keep in mind that most time burglars eat excuses for lunch. There’s an entire industry around shooting down excuses, and it’s called “sales.” Give people the honest attentional equivalent of “I have no money, and I’m not interested.” And, if that doesn’t work? Yes, lie. Tell them you’re dying, and today you’re going to SeaWorld with your church youth group for the last time.

Let bits drop

You’ll need to decide for yourself where the floor is in terms of requests for your attention that don’t require (or deserve) a response. V14g#RA spam clearly does not need a “No, thank you,” but what about the guy with the terrible new book who suddenly wants to be your boon companion and wants to “keep in touch” thrice weekly? For me? Those emails maybe don’t get answered so much. (Sorry, I Have a New Book Guy: at least I didn’t use your name)

Remember: for a lot of people, your one-time attention and decency will instantly be melted down to base metals for shit like PR blasts, “funny joke lists” (aka ‘blogging for old people’), and frequent help desk-style requests. If you’ve decided that this stuff is out of scope for your time on The Marble, systematically destroy it with brutally efficient filters that are the equivalent of Tachy Goes to Coventry.

To paraphrase the great Lucas Jackson:

Sometimes null can be a pretty cool response.

Be courageous

If someone cannot understand or accept why the judicious use of your attention — and its application in the service of making work for a broader audience than exactly them — takes precedence over their need to repeatedly monopolize your time, dump them. This is not a good person.

But! Also remember to be cool

I’ll never forget the time that Jonathan Richman answered my stupid fan mail. Those 2 sentences on a piece of paper with his return address on it meant the world to me in 1988.

Always remember that some contact is just about a human connection, and that’s such a great thing. Just be realistic about how much of it you can personally manage, and then make the effort to reach back to people who are awesome.

And, NO, the whole point of this is that you can’t ever answer them all (and I’m not saying you should try), but if you can respond to 5, 10, or 20 emails or forum posts per week, without stepping on your “make” time, you’ll also make some really nice new friends.

Hint¹: Given limited time, always favor contact with young people; they need the high-five, and it means an awful lot when you reach back to them. These are good people.
Hint²: PR people who want to “thank you” for your work and then sign you up for a “webinar” do not count. These are not good people.

Noted in passing: Outside of various record sites, I can’t immediately find anything like an official anything for Jonathan Richman today. Don’t know if this is symptomatic of his long-professed affection for simple, old-timey things, or if he’s just decided to no longer field questions about The Velvet Underground from stoney liberal arts students.

Identify and engage your high-value targets

Embrace the disingenuous charge of elitism (or, as I prefer to call it, maturity) by not pretending that everyone is equally “special” to you. Remind the people who matter to you that you’re always available for them, then tell them how to do that, including specific instructions (n.b. this is important for relatives who think the internet is just eBay, urban myths, and Joel Osteen). Get a friends-only email address. Get a friends-only GrandCentral number. Do whatever it takes to provide a backchannel for your super-secret network.

Widen the channels to the people you adore, and never make them suffer by your weird compulsion to wave at strangers. You have plenty of time to make new friends, but for God’s sake, don’t neglect the ones you already have and enjoy. These are good people.

Respect others

In the interest of sharing the aloha with all the makers and consumers in your world, consider making it excruciatingly easy to deal with you. Especially when it comes to email. Everything goes both ways, so remember that anyone you contact today could be having the best or worst week of his life; choose your ultimatums with care and context.

Work. work, work.

The hard work of a creative life is a topic that I’ll be returning to often over the next few weeks, but here’s my one pro tip for you today: once you’ve stolen back your time and wrangled your attention, put it to good use by making awesome stuff that everyone you want to delight can enjoy. Throw a giant tent party for the world and show off what you can do when you stop compulsively typing for an audience of one. Get your awesome out where we can all see it.

Make it, release it, and make more. And never apologize to anyone for demanding the respect for your attention that you, your work, and the people who enjoy it each deserves. Make the time.

”Making Time to Make: One Clear Line” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 07, 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?"

Making Time to Make: The Job You Think You Have

Merlin Mann — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 01:00:22 -0400

This article is Part 2 of a 3-part series about attention management for people who do creative work called, Making Time to Make.
Previously: Part 1, Bad Correspondence
Finally: Part 3, One Clear Line

If you’re a publisher, journalist, author, blogger, musician, artist, designer, cartoonist, or any other sort of person whose job it is to connect with people by communicating ideas, it’s natural and wholesome for people who are interested in what you do (and many of whom are certainly makers-of-stuff in their own right) to develop a relationship with your work and to want a way to participate in it, add to it, and build upon it. It’s equally great to reciprocate in a way that’s collaborative, fun, and useful. God knows, it’s anybody’s dream to have people interested enough in what you do to find that they want to reach out to you. Talk about a first-world problem.

But, it can still be a big challenge, and in my estimation, it’s a multi-faceted problem that involves scale, resource constraint, and old-fashioned scarcity. It’s a disparity that confronts anyone who tries to exhaustively participate in every request for his or her attention with equally unrestrained brio — especially if you ever hope to make the time to do strong, creative work constituting anything but perfunctory meta-communication.

Thing is: if the amount of time you devote to lite correspondence with individual people exceeds the amount of time you spend on making things, then you may be in a different line of work than you’d originally thought you were. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But if you’re feeling off your game, it might be a good time to ask yourself whether you’re primarily a writer of novels or of email messages. Do you generate more IMs than comic panels? Have you drafted more web comments than scenes in your screenplay? Or, for that matter, do you find you’re taking more meetings than photos these days?

What is it that you really do? What’s the last thing you made that really excited you? Where are you and your work in all that “communication?”

The Connected Maker

The notion of the lone scribe, isolated in his garret and toiling away at an illuminated text, is an image that’s as cliche as it is romantic. In fact, it’s a hilariously quaint idea for those artists and makers who use social media and online communities to create, distribute, and expand upon their work.

You could even argue (and I’d happen to agree) that talented people like Jonathan Coulton, Ze Frank, and The Ninja have fashioned an enviable career largely out of making something delightful and by actively participating in projects that folks who’ve enjoyed their work are driving. Clearly, this is an emerging model for anyone who wants to take their act online, and it’s generally great and very enjoyable for everyone involved. Except.

What happens at the theoretical point where Jonathan has to respond to so much personal email that it starts cutting into his songwriting time? Or, what if Ze were compelled to stop using forums and embedded video to communicate en masse, forced instead to conduct all his projects via one-on-one video IM sessions? And what about The Ninja? Well, imagine if, instead of appearing in a wildly-popular podcast, he were suddenly expected to visit every viewer’s home to personally threaten to kill them. That’s a lot of traveling. Even for a deadly ninja.

Nowhere, Man

In each instance, the dedicated attention might be fabulous for the individual who demands and receives the modern equivalent of face time. And, for a while anyway, it’d probably be a lot of fun for the makers to do. But, is this a sane, scalable, and sustainable way to do your work? I’d say no. No, it is not.

The power of connecting with people in an authentic way (no, not in that cheesy, half-assed, internet “friends” way) falls apart at the point where its resource consumption curtails your ability to keep making new stuff. It’s a twisted paradox, for sure. But, in essence, it’d be a little like the Beatles skipping the writing and recording of Rubber Soul in order to catch up on 1964’s fan mail.

Put plainer, my sense is that western culture would be a damn sight poorer today if John Lennon had been forced to carry a goddamn BlackBerry.

”Making Time to Make: The Job You Think You Have” was written by Merlin Mann 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?"

Making Time to Make: Bad Correspondence

Merlin Mann — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:31:08 -0400

This article is Part 1 of a 3-part series about attention management for people who do creative work called, Making Time to Make.
Next: Part 2, The Job You Think You Have
Finally: Part 3, One Clear Line

Over the years, novelist Neal Stephenson (wiki), has had at least a couple different pages where he’s explained why he’s chosen to limit the access he provides via email, interviews, and phone calls. It appears to be something he’s given a lot of thought to.

Via Jessamyn, here’s an Archive.org mirror of an older version of his page where he explains his introversion and need to stay focused on his work, alongside FAQs that answer many of the questions he typically has to field. Read it all though. It’s pretty good. Stephenson’s bottom line?

I simply cannot respond to all incoming stimuli unless I retire from writing novels. And I don’t wish to retire at this time.

And here’s another well known piece, Stephenson’s “Why I am a Bad Correspondent”, in which he lays out more details about why he’s chosen to create an expectation based on guarding his attention so slavishly:

Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can’t concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can’t do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.

He closes with a practical summation of why he’s made the decisions he has:

I am not proud of the fact that some of my e-mail goes unanswered as a result. It is never my intention to be rude or to give well-meaning readers the cold shoulder. If I were a commercial best-seller, I would have enough money to hire a staff to look after my correspondence. As it is, my books are bought by enough people to provide me with a sort of middle-class lifestyle, but not enough to hire employees, and so I am faced with a stark choice between being a bad correspondent and being a good novelist. I am trying to be a good novelist, and hoping that people will forgive me for being a bad correspondent.

As I read all this, I hear a man saying (at least in my words), “I can either be a guy who writes novels, or I can be a guy who answers email. Realizing I cannot be both, I’ve made the decision, and now I live with it.”

Like it or hate it, Neal Stephenson’s position is clear and well-articulated. If a bit pitched, it’s a stance I admire, and frankly I think it’s an only slightly more extreme version of a position every maker needs to define if he or she expects to create the time to keep making anything.

”Making Time to Make: Bad Correspondence” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 05, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Ira Glass on Working Through the Suck

Merlin Mann — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:37:16 -0400

YouTube - Ira Glass on Storytelling #3

Video featuring terrific advice from This American Life’s Ira Glass on having the tenacity to get better at the creative work you’re passionate about — even through the times when you know what you’re making isn’t as good as you’d like.

I admire Ira’s courageousness in using himself as an example of how to do it wrong.

(Also, now that I’m aware of that tic where radio people punch every third word, I’m hearing it all the time.)

[via Big Contrarian]

”Ira Glass on Working Through the Suck” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 07, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"