Category: creativity

You Start at the End

I just watched a wonderful routine by Penn and Teller in which they teach us the seven principles of magic. They tell us what they are doing and yet the still manage to mystify and amaze us. In case you were wondering, the seven principles are, to palm, to ditch, to steal, to load, to simulate, to misdirect and to switch.

I can’t help but think the same principles are an integral part of writing a truly great mystery story. Or singing a good song, or painting a good painting. People love to be surprised. They love to find layer upon layer of meaning in just about anything that you show them. And now, I finally understand how you go about creating something of this sort. I’d like to say I figured it out myself but actually, people have been telling my this my whole life.

If you want to surprise people, you have to create the effect backwards, starting at the ending and working your way backwards to the beginning. It’s the way you write thrilling stories. It’s the way you make thrilling speeches. It’s the way you write compelling songs. And, it is the way you do magic tricks.

On Writing, Programming, and Composing

I used to be daunted by a blank page. Now I am beckoned. It is an invitation to pour out whatever I am thinking about. I grew up in a time when you either laboriously wrote out your thoughts in long hand with pen and paper or you typed them with a typewriter. In either case erasing was complicated to the extent that it wasn’t really a good option. I think many writers just marked through their mistakes and kept writing.

I remember sitting in the spare bedroom of the trailer in Carbondale surrounded by a bunch of wadded up sheets of yellow paper containing discarded starts of the screen play I was attempting to write. I had no concept of how to write a draft. I was a perfectionist. If it wasn’t exactly what I meant to say, I ripped the page out of the typewriter, wadded it up, and loaded a clean page.

Even when I finally got a computer, I didn’t know how to write with it. I spent hours typing a few words and deleting them and then typing a few more. I had similar problems with programs. I have started many programs that never got much further than a skeleton and a few simple primitives. The important thing in both cases was that I didn’t quit trying.

For a while, I kept just starting over again doing the same thing each time. Then, I started varying my approach. I had some successes with programming at work. I eventually found The Artist’s Way and learned how to bootstrap my writing by sitting down every day at the same time and writing a minimum of 750 words. I eventually became confident enough in myself that I was able to write 50,000 words in a month.

I have learned that I must keep raising the bar, demanding more of myself. I recently increased my daily minimum to 1000 words. I decided that I would spend at least part of my words writing something that was more focused than a journal entry. Some days I find that I still spend the whole entry rambling. Others, I actually dive into a topical post as soon as I start writing. I feel the quality of my writing improve with practice. I notice my mindset while writing changing. It has become an exercise in organizing my thoughts instead of struggling with the mechanics of writing.

I have struggled off and on with integrating what I know to be good grammar with the conversational voice that often ignores such faux pas as dangling participles. I have also have had problems with sounding pedantic when I write. I am still struggling but I seem to be doing better with less struggle lately.

On the programming front, I have had similar experiences. I have learned that good tools are very important to being productive. They can help you be more productive so that you have more time to think about the code you are writing. This means that you don’t have to take the first thing that works as the final product. I am feeling the urge to rewrite more often. Too often in the commercial world the people that are paying for the software don’t appreciate the value of iterating a couple of times to improve the design of a piece of software.

I am to a point now that I am facing a common challenge in all of my endeavors. To finish. I suppose there is a corollary that has just occurred to me. Each time you iterate over a piece you should strive to finish that iteration. Each iteration should have as its primary goal to improve over the previous iteration. If you make the practice of finishing each iteration, it doesn’t matter if you have an iteration that is a regression. You can fall back to the last iteration and try again.

This is true of writing, programming, and my other artistic endeavor that I haven’t even discussed yet, composing music. In fact, it is even more applicable to composing music. So much so that there is a special name for it. It is called improvisation. There is improvisation in writing and programming but it is not as exposed to public scrutiny as musical improvisation is. It occurs to me that essay writing is literary improvisation though. And live coding is programming improvisation. So the paradigm does translate across all three fields.

A good essay would draw some conclusions at this point. I’m not claiming this is a good essay. It is certainly not a bad start though. So I’ll leave it at that.

A New Writing Process

I wrote a blog post last summer about discovering a process for writing that worked for me. It was lengthy and a little bit rambling but the essence of it is reproduced here.

Fargo changes the game. Instead of writing from the outline, I expand the outline until it becomes the piece. This is a much more transparent way to proceed from ideas to end product. In fact, I can’t imagine writing any other way now.

Like Fargo itself, the new process is simpler and more effective. The self similarity is in itself pleasing to me. I think I’ll stop now while this post is still simple and to the point.

A Process, at Last

When I started looking at tumblr, one of the first people that I followed was therealkatiewest. Katie West is a lovely young woman from Toronto that teaches English in college and takes incredible nude photos of herself and posts them on the internet. I had noticed that she hadn’t been posting much lately and wondered why. Today, she posted a short text post to tumblr and pointed to her blog. It is just what I needed to read.

She has been spending time on a Teacher and Trainer of Adults graduate certificate program and had been very busy. She was also licking her wounds from an unfortunate run in with a narrow minded and vindictive person in authority but I’ll let her tell her own story. I was inspired with her attitude toward the whole experience and the way she threw herself into becoming a better teacher and rekindling her muse.

Earlier this week I watched a YouTube video of Ron Carter, the famous jazz bassist, giving a master’s class. He said a lot of things that have affected me profoundly but the most important thing he said was to practice honestly. He further clarified that when you practice, you aren’t making art, you are refining the skills that you use to make art. When you sit down to practice you should have an objective and you should keep practicing until you have mastered the skill that was your objective.

I realized that the whole morning words exercise was practice. The missing thing was having a clear objective. At first, just writing seven hundred and fifty words a day was objective enough. Then I started refining the objective. I wanted to write the words without spending most of the time talking about how many words I had written or how many I had left to go. I sketched from life. I made lists of things that I had to do. I observed what was going on around me.

Then I decided that I wanted to earn badges. The most prominent badges revolved around how many days in a row you had written or how many words you had written since you had started. One of the badges was for not getting distracted. Another, that I am still actively pursuing, was for writing your words in under twenty minutes ten days in a row. Now that I have acquired many of the badges, I realize that I need to focus on goals that are too specific and in some cases too personal for there to be badges awarded for them. I need to set my own goals and award my own personal badges when I achieve them. I also need to start making art outside of my practice sessions.

I remember the point where I realized that I could actually play the violin. All the practice that I had done had finally paid off. I need to practice the things I love to do more so that I can hone my skills at them. But, I don’t need to practice at the expense of not creating anything.

Another spin on the whole practice thing is to practice until you get to some level of competence and then give yourself permission to fail when you attempt a piece. Keep attempting things until you succeed but don’t let the interim failures get you down. Sucking at something is a necessary step on the path to mastery.

I also thought a little bit about the process of creating. I thought about it in the context of writing but it is equally valid in other creative contexts. The origin of this line of thought was the assertion that writing (or more generally, doing) and thinking (about doing) are not necessarily the same thing. You don’t necessarily have to do them at the same time.

In fact, a little bit of thinking beforehand actually enhances the process of creation. It lets you decide what you want to say, where you are going with a piece. It’s not that doing and thinking are necessarily mutually exclusive, i.e. you can take notes (sketch) while you are thinking and you can think while you are creating. The important epiphany was that when you thought about what you were doing first it was easier to achieve the elusive state of “flow” while you’re actually creating.

I think I have discovered an artistic process that works for me. I sketch my writing with an outliner. Then, I sit down and write what I’ve sketched. The amount of effort that I put into the sketch depends on the size of the work that I am sketching. At some point though, you’ve got to quit sketching and just do it.