Dennis Cass Wants You To Be More Awesome

Wonderful Q & A in the A.V. Club with Up director Pete Docter. I’ve long been a fan of Pixar’s mighty storytelling abilities, and this interview delivers sweet, juicy insights into their process. Dig this:

AVC: How late in the process do you continue tweaking the story? Is it set in stone before you start animating it?

PD: Ideally, it’s set in stone. But the truth is—and every film’s different—basically the way we work is, we divide the film up into sequences, roughly 30 of them. And the ones we feel are tent-poles, holding the whole thing up, those go in first, and we start animating those. Hopefully, everything else starts to come along. It’s weird—on almost every film I’ve worked on, the first sequence we storyboard ends up being the first sequence that goes into animation, and ends up being almost shot-for-shot the same. In Toy Story, it was the Army-man sequence, which Joe Ranft mostly boarded, of these guys sneaking out and rappelling down to spy on the birthday party. It was almost shot-for-shot the way he boarded it. Same with this one. We had Peter Sohn, this really great story artist who’s doing the short film that’s gonna be attached on this one—he boarded the sequence with Carl where the nurses pull up and knock on his door, and he says “Just give me a moment,” and then he floats his house off into the sky. We had these poetic images of him floating past stores and windows, and that is almost shot-for-shot. Other sequences, we reworked 40, 50 times, it’s crazy. But you do what you have to do to get it right.

This idea of the tent-pole is super right-on. I’d also like to add that you need to know what your tent-poles are supposed to accomplish. In the aforementioned Toy Story example, the Army-man scene establishes that these toys are resourceful and capable. Without it, then Woody leaving the safety of Andy’s room to rescue Buzz would feel like a stretch. But thanks to that scene, you’re prepared for these toys to do the impossible.

Tent-poles in plot- or action-driven stories are essential, but even literary pursuits have them. (For some reason, the unsettling Dick & Jane opening to Toni Morrison’s THE BLUEST EYE springs to mind.) Ignore them at your peril.

Some homework for the weekend if you’re interested:

1. Clear your mind of desire, expectation, and what you’ve done in the past.

2. Taking only the premise of your project (no peeking at the thing-in-progress itself) make a list of tent-poles, jotting down a few quick notes on what said TP is supposed to achieve.

3. Set aside for 14.5 hours.

4. Compare your TP list with what you’ve done so far. Where are there gaps to fill? Where are you overstaying your welcome?

5. Take a nap or eat a hot fudge sundae.

6. Get to work.

Final note:

The TP list is different from an outline. Outlining is great, but you can also outline yourself into a corner. (I’ve also found that outlines can start to justify themselves, even if they’re wrong.)

The TP list is free of chronology. It only cares about weight. In baking there are all kinds of substitutes for eggs, but chocolate is irreplaceable.

A reader writes:

Every essay I’ve ever written turns into something else entirely. Also, I notice I often sit down thinking I’m going to blog about one thing, and it goes somewhere else. I know this is normal, but is there any way to make it less maddening?

One way to think about ideas (and this is a direct outgrowth of my book) is to remember that they are part of your body. Even though we have this natural separation between mind and body (what Yale psychologist Paul Bloom calls “common sense dualism“), your thoughts are indeed biological.

Ideas live on oxygen and amino acids and blood sugar. They are less “in” your head (as if your skull were some kind of storage facility) but “of” your head. They are you in all your you-ness.

Can we say the same thing about the work?

Sort of.

You can feel very attached to your short story about a 19th century pineapple baron, or feel a deep personal investment in your photo essay about the fallacy of “clean coal,” but the work exists outside your body. It exists on a page or a canvas or a screen, not to mention in the mind of the person who is appreciating the work. Atoms other than You Atoms are involved.

When your work starts to get away from your ideas, that’s good. That’s your creative mind searching for ways to turn that idea—that little slice of you—into a piece of work that another person can understand and relate to.

I would be more concerned about the person who writes in with this question:

I have these ideas that I keep circling around. I turn them over, and look at them from all angles, and review them over and over and over again, but they never go anywhere. Am I crazy?

Is that who you want to be?

Please describe the people and the circumstances surrounding the following piece of graffiti:

Bonus points for scenarios that have little or nothing to do with war, protesting and/or stopping.

A reader writes:

I want to submit an essay to the NYT Magazine’s “Lives” page, and the only way I can find to submit is via the lives@nytimes.com. I hate submitting pieces to generic addresses, but I’m wondering if it’s worth my time to dig further and try to track down another address for an actual person with an actual name. If they haven’t heard of me, would it even help to send it to a specific individual? The real question (perhaps for the blog) is: Are generic addresses just a black hole, a sucker’s shortcut to the rejection bin?

The editors at the Times aren’t sadists. They don’t have a dedicated “Lives” account just to torture aspiring writers like you.

What fun would such a black hole be anyway? If you really wanted to make writers feel bad, then you’d want to find away to string them along. You’d assigning stories you had no intention of running; send out contracts that you’d never sign; offer notes on drafts without reading them; say you’re scheduling their piece for two months from now and then never run it. (I imagine you’d also want to a webcam to figure into all of this.)

The “Lives” e-mail address is real, but if you submit you will still want to keep the following in mind:

1. A lot of those pieces are shopped by agents and/or are adaptations from upcoming books.

2. A good number of them also possess a sneaky yet potent newsworthiness. (Ever noticed how the woman writing about the strange connection she has with her twin sister also happens to be a psychiatrist who counsels Army Rangers in Afghanistan?)

3. The rest are either crazy emotional, or off-hand funny, or mystifying in their pointed lack of anything I’ve mentioned so far.

I have written for any number of major magazines, but I’ve never been able to crack the code on sections like “Lives” or “Shouts & Murmurs” in The New Yorker. That doesn’t mean you won’t, or you can’t, or that you shouldn’t try. But if you do, my guess is that the e-mail address will be the least of your worries.

Good luck.

Taking a short break. In the meantime:

This Is Your Wake-Up Call: 12 Steps to Better Book Publishing by Jonathan Karp, editor-in-chief of the awesome Twelve imprint. If you are interested in writing a book you will want to read this.

Mark Reiter and Richard Sandomir wrote a book called THE FINAL FOUR OF EVERYTHING. To help promote the book, they created a delightful website that allows you to make your own custom tournament bracket for whatever your heart desires.

Here’s mine:

David Bowie vs. Nature

Finally, in the Little Changes Create Big Effects Department, I present . . . Disturbing Strokes:

For my U.S. readers have a fine Memorial Day weekend. Everyone else have a fine regular weekend. For those of you who work nontraditional hours, enjoy your Thursday-Monday work/play time cluster.

See you next week!

A reader writes:

I have the rights to 25 romance books hubby and I wrote back in the early 1980’s. Those books sold over 2 million copies. I have been advised that a smart promoter could package them as Classic Best Selling Romances and maybe sell the whole lot to Hallmark or a corporation as a promotional freebie, etc. What advice can you give me, please?

I like the way you’re thinking. The question for me is what will provide the occasion to bring them back.

Do the stories or characters have some kind of 80s retro appeal? Or are they “classic” in some other way? Do all 25 books perform at the same level? Or at certain titles more likely candidates for making a comeback?

My advice to you is first to use your curatorial powers to put parameters and constraints to this idea.

It’s one thing to approach someone with a crate of books, dump them on their desk and say, “Here. Use these.”

It’s quite another to approach someone with nine books, have criteria for why they’re the best, and then provide a rationale for what makes these books relevant today.

Finally, for all you romance novel haters I’d like to leave you with this:

Embrace . . . the stormy castle!

I recently reviewed a book for Mother Jones called THE EMPATHY GAP by Loyola University philosophy professor J.D. Trout. Even though I kind of made fun of Trout and his book (TEG contains great information, but has, in my opinion, debilitating tone and voice issues), there is one story from the book that I cannot escape.

It seems that Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport used to have a messy men’s room problem, especially when it came to the urinals. Dudes would go in there and, despite their European sense of history, pretty much wee everywhere.

Dutch airport officials could have launched a public service campaign urging people not to be such inconsiderate slobs. They could have come up with a slogan and a visual grammar for their campaign, and printed a bunch of signs that only a few people would read, and fewer still would act upon.

Instead, they tapped into an insight about male behavior: if we can aim for something when we pee, then we’ll aim for it.

Enter the urinal fly.

By simply putting a decal of a fly in the urinal, airport officials drastically reduced waste. More importantly, they were able to make this happen on a subconscious level. People didn’t have to walk into the bathroom and think, “This time I’m really going to work on my splashback [their term, not mine].” Instead guys just mindlessly aimed for the fly.

This is the genius of the “outside strategy.” You don’t have to make people smarter/better than they are. Instead you design scenarios that extract greater benefits from the cognitive tools they already have.

Which brings me to Freedom and SelfControl, two computer programs that also act like “outside strategies,” only this time for the information-addled attention network in your weak, sagging brain.

For the longest time, if I really (and I mean really, really, really) wanted to get work done, then I would go to the government documents section of the University of Minnesota’s Wilson Library. Why? Because the U of MN doesn’t allow wireless access to strangers. Because I’m unlikely to waste time browsing through microfiche from the Kennedy administration. Because no one else goes down there, which means I can’t even people watch.

Big love to the U of MN and Wilson Library, but you can image how this situation was less than ideal. With Freedom, I get that government documents experience anywhere. Freedom turns off only the networking component of my Mac. I can still use Scrivener (itself worthy of a post) and Word and iCal. But no e-mail, no Facebook, and no [sniff] DCWYTBMA.

To say that it’s changed my life is an understatement. After a few weeks using Freedom, I discovered that the book browsing and the people watching really weren’t the problem. It was the internet. The @#$%! internet. As long as that baby is “off” then I can get a lot done.

Best of all, I don’t have to engage in energy- and time-consuming internal battles. I don’t have to force myself to concentrate or get mad at myself when I can’t. The program does that for me, leaving me free to do what I’m in this game for in the first place: the work.

Have a greet weekend everyone!

Thanks to one of our readers for the heads-up on this story about Dan Baum, a writer who detailed his hiring and firing by The New Yorker on Twitter. I’ve always said that if you’re going to burn a bridge, burn it trendy!

Of more interest is Dan Baum’s website, where he generously offers .pdfs of proposals he’s written for various national magazines.

Here are the proposals that worked

Here are the proposals that failed

Two things I hope you take away from reading Baum’s proposals:

1. You write the piece in order to get permission to write the piece.

Notice how many facts Baum already has at his command in these proposals. So if you’re pitching a story about Twitter, you can’t just say, “Twitter is really hot right now so it would make a good story.” Better to put a number on the hotness (there are X million people on Twitter). Even better to make some calls and find the fact that won’t immediately show up in a Google search (people are joining Twitter at a rate of X people a minute). Better still to contextualize that more pointed fact (at a rate of X people a minute, Twitter achieved in three weeks the user base it took AOL three years to build).

2. The difference between a proposal that sells and one that doesn’t is that the proposal that sells sells and the one that doesn’t doesn’t.

If I mixed up all these proposals and asked you to pick the ones that turned into paid stories and the ones that didn’t, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Even if you’re an excellent writer like Dan, you only control part of your destiny. There are countless other factors—editorial mandates, competitive works, the Coriolis effect—that determine the outcome. Do your best—and by all means learn and grown and all that—but most of all get yourself out there and pitch. Quality matters, but it’s also a bit of a number game. Act accordingly.

A reader writes:

Any tips, references, links that would help me learn about composing a pitch for a documentary film? In this instance to the Major League Baseball Network. Similar in approach to a compelling magazine query?  And thanks for sustaining your blog!!

Firstly, you’re welcome for the blog. I do it all for you.

As for the question, my first reaction was to send our reader a follow-up:

Do you make documentaries?

Here was his (prompt) response:

No. Which I guess raises the obvious. What exactly do I have to sell?

His delightfully insightful and self-aware answer reminded me of an equally self-aware and insightful question that a student recently asked me:

Do people buy ideas or do they buy you?

The answer is a mixture of both, depending on the stakes. To use a magazine example, if you’re pitching a cover story then they’re buying you, because if you mess it up then the whole issue comes crashing down. If you’re pitching a 500-word tidbit for the front of the book, then they’re less concerned about you, because if you flake, then it’s easy enough to compensate for your incompetence, you worthlessness swine.

Major League Baseball Network may very well be starved for ideas, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that they’re not waiting for pitches from strangers with no documentary film experience.

Ideas are cheap. Execution is priceless. Become the person who can execute and the ideas will take care of themselves.