Dennis Cass Wants You To Be More Awesome

Over the course of the year I bookmark lots of articles, websites, and whatnot with every intention of turning those choice items into even choicer blog posts.

For a variety of reasons (which, by the way, my voice recognition software often interprets as “for a Friday of reasons”) many of these items never make the final cut.

And so let us take a moment to recognize and to celebrate what was almost good enough in 2009.

1. Authonomy

HarperCollins is experimenting with an online slush pile/social network/American Idol contest called Authonomy. While trying to write about this site I could never figure out if it was the Future or merely a curiosity born out of fear and desperation. (I suppose it could be both!)

2. Will Work For Praise

This BusinessWeek article caught my eye because it talks about — at least in a tangential way — part of the dark side of being a writer. As the article notes, we’ll happily do creative work for free as long as it gets us a little attention. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to take this concept and talk about larger economic and cultural forces or merely riff on how sad our profession has become, so I just let it go.

3. Self-Publishing Review

For a while I was working on a trend piece about the coming legitimacy of self-publishing. The point I was going to make was something about how if mainstream publishers continue to offer their authors less and less — and if self-publishing can acquire the rigors of traditional publishing — then our whole conception of what “real” publishing is will change. But I only got as far as finding this cool link for a website that seeks to elevate the standards of self-publishing.

4. The Book is dead, the Book will live on, blah, blah, blah

Somewhere in the middle of 2009 I decided to swear off the whole FUTURE OF THE BOOK conversation. (Too many cooks!) That said, the Institute for the Future of the Book’s if:book blog is a nice clearinghouse. And the unsinkable Jonathan Karp’s article This Is Your Wake-Up Call: 12 Steps to Better Book Publishing is a nice, um, wake-up call.

5. Good and Bad Procrastination

Sometimes you set out to write a post and in doing research for said post you discover that someone else has done a good enough job of writing it already. My post on good versus bad procrastination falls into this category. Hit it, Paul Graham!

6. Will My Video Get 1 Million Views on YouTube?

Still other times you set out to write a post (like, say, what the number of hits on your YouTube video means) and quickly find out that in order to write said post you’d have to do so much legwork that it wouldn’t be worth it. Then two days later Slate up and publishes a thoughtful, well-researched piece about the very same subject. Problem solved.

7. 10 Hallmarks of Amateur Recording

The final entry for my 2009 anti-roundup roundup comes courtesy of Des McKinney’s Hometracked blog. His post on the ten hallmarks of amateur recording had me inspired to do a similar post about the 10 hallmarks of amateur writing. Except I wasn’t going to merely copy his idea but instead create some kind of cross-disciplinary bridge between his world and mine. Then I remembered how smart you are and realized that given the opportunity you could figure it out for yourself.

Thanks again to all the readers of this blog for a memorable 2009. Here’s to the increased furtherance of awesomeness in 2010.

What follows is the opening paragraph from “The Debt Economy,” an article written by James Surowiecki that appeared in the November 23, 2009 issue of the New Yorker:

John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that all financial crises are the results of “debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale.” The recent financial crisis was no exception, with everyone — homeowners, private-equity investors, our biggest banks — taking on enormous amounts of debt. If it’s frustrating that the government is footing the bill to clean up the mess, it’s even worse that the government helped pay for the debt binge that created the mess in the first place, thanks to a tax system that actually subsidizes borrowing. Debt didn’t get dangerously out of scale because the system was broken. It got out of scale, in part, because the system worked.

Let’s narrow in a little further:

Debt didn’t get dangerously out of scale because the system was broken. It got out of scale, in part, because the system worked.

Try reading these two lines out loud.

Notice how in the first sentence your voice travels downhill to the word broken. Then, in the second line, it travels back up to end (brightly in tone, but ominous in meaning) on the word worked.

I think this is very nice. You could argue that it’s a little mechanical, but you also have to agree that it’s an effective way of erasing one set of expectations and replacing them with another. (Which is what Surowiecki needs to do in order to advance his argument.)

Like any technique the two-line reverse can be used for ill:

He left the house that fine spring morning never having felt more alive. What he didn’t know — nay, what he couldn’t know — was that this was the day he would die.

But it can also be used (slightly) more subtly.

Imagine a paragraph about a guy arriving late to deliver a big speech at an important auditorium. He hurries through the stage door. Minions scurry to get the proceedings started. He checks his breath. Wipes the sweat off his palms. He gets to the wings just as the person introducing him gets something in his bio wrong. Then this:

He takes the stage expecting to see an audience filled with hundreds of people. Instead there is one.

The “two-line reverse” gets you out of the droning quality of early drafts, where the sentences come one after another with little relationship to each other. Try it the next time you want your work to have a little more music.

First, this is NOT the cover to the January/February 2010 issue of Poets & Writers magazine, which is all about INSPIRATION. That cover was designed by Chip Kidd and is pretty rad, but for some reason the P & W website is not letting me rip the image.

So I went into Flickr where I found the photostream of Stephen Poff. He did a series on INSPIRATION and so I’m Creative Commons-ly using his work instead. We all cool/clear?

That said, I’m very happy to be part of the aforementioned Poets & Writers issue in which I have an article called “How To Get Unstuck.” The piece uses  psychology research into creativity to (hopefully) help writers of all stripes become more emotionally intelligent about writer’s block.

There are also jokes.

So far I’ve received some very nice feedback on the piece. Since it’s not available online I thought it would be helpful to create this post in the event people stop by and want to leave a comment.

To kick things off, I offer this e-mail I received from writer Emily Calvo:

I LOVED your recent Poet & Writers article about creative thinking. Having spent 20 years paying the bills by writing ads and marketing pieces, I can’t wait around for inspiration or I’d starve. Your description of the process of unlocking the brain is perfect. I’m also a psych major and a poet, so this topic is particularly interesting to me.

One additional thought I’d like to share with you. In the many brainstorming sessions I’ve conducted, I’ve noticed that the ideas generated eventually become grossly inappropriate. Politically incorrect, humorously nasty and just plain X-rated. Too often, that’s when the participants want to “cash-in.” They assume that they’ve reached the bottom of the barrel. However, I’ve noticed that when they keep going, the best stuff decides to finally pop out of their heads. It’s as if the inappropriate ideas have allowed them to open the door to greater flexibility and less fixation.