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.)

Talk about unplugging. The latest Bruno Aveillan ad for Loius Vuitton is the sweetest little homage to letting go. God this guy can make ‘just being’ the sexiest damn thing in the world. This clip is like transcendental meditation on ecstasy. My life hack resolution this week is to slip a volume of Pablo Neruda into my brief case and to somehow find a half hour in my workday to step off the gerbil wheel and just be…  read more »

I started keeping text files of ideas a year or two ago, but the system quickly collapsed due to its own complexity.

I am a journalist and a blogger, and so I started out with three files. — blog ideas and article ideas. I also had a file called “inbox” for random thoughts, most of which would get turned into GTD next actions.

The first difficulty I encountered was that it wasn’t always clear, up front, what’s going to turn out to be a blog, and what will be an article. Back then, I went by gut feeling, now I think I have some good thumb rules — but either way, this decision should not be made at this stage of the process.  read more »

I’m not a Christian anymore. Perhaps I got a raw deal when God was passing out churches—mine was shaken apart in my late teens by a pastor who got busted for sneaking a few hundred thousand out of the offering plate to buy Nazi war memorabilia, not to mention banging a few dozen women who came to him for marriage counseling—but I’ve made my peace with the Prince of it.

One particularly Christian principle has apparently stuck with me over the years. It wasn’t until recently that I rediscovered it. (Not animal sacrifice, which I never abandoned.) And whether Jesus of Nazareth existed as a real meat person or was the product of a coterie of desert sci-fi novelists, one thing he taught has been helping me a lot lately.

It’s awfully nice to forgive.  read more »

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

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

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

Mark Joyner of Simpleology has apparently hooked up with one of my favorite visionaries, Jacque Fresco of the Venus Project. Together, this Monday, they’re teaching people who can’t how to draw.  read more »

It's taken as a given that we now deal with more information than previous generations ever imagined, living lives in which "number of clicks" is a meaningful measure of time. As Spanish productivity guru Balthasar Gracian says:

There is more required nowadays to make a single wise man than formerly to make Seven Sages, and more is needed nowadays to deal with a single person than was required with a whole people in former times.

Except he wrote that in the 17th century.  read more »