Dennis Cass Wants You To Be More Awesome died a long time ago, but today I’m making it official.
Thanks to everyone who made it fun while it lasted, but ultimately I found myself unable to both dispense priceless advice and live up to said advice in the priceless fashion it deserved.
Right now I’m in the process of creating the next thing. At some point this blog will be deleted, but in the meantime feel free to poke around its perfectly preserved corpse.
Great fun last night getting a call from the Mobys from Melville House publicist Megan Halpern, who helped relay my acceptance speech to the fine people at The Griffin.
Thanks to the dodgy connection and the crowd noise, it was a little hard to get exact read on the room. Nevertheless, I distinctly heard the sound of a single, brilliant, highly stylized, postmodern (and at times exhausting) tear running down the face of fellow finalist Thomas Pynchon.
Don’t take the loss too hard, old chum. Your place in literature is secure, even if you’re kind of eating it on YouTube.
Also, if you’re reading this and haven’t read THE CRYING OF LOT 49, please stop reading this and get yourself reading that. There are some things you don’t joke about.
Finally, a huge thanks to friend and co-conspirator James Lotter for making the vid a reality.
Writer Tanya Whiton writes:
First, thank you so much for your fascinating and helpful article in the Jan/Feb issue of Poets & Writers. If you have a moment, I’m wondering if you might expand a bit on the notion of the conceptual ladder? (A Google search took me to a site about the Kabbalah, which was interesting, but not quite what I was after.) Is the conceptual ladder the way in which an individual’s mind moves from concept to example and back again? Or is the conceptual ladder a series of concepts, ranging in complexity, each of which might act as a starting point? Or perhaps some combination of the two?
First, glad you liked the piece. I’m currently working on getting Poets & Writers to release it on the internet so more people can read it.
Second, before I clarify the concept of the conceptual ladder I need to do two things.
1. Introduce the following backpack:
2. Redefine art (from the point of view of the person creating it):
A piece of art represents the sum of EVERY creative decision rigorously applied
One of the ways we get blocked is that we make assumptions about our work that we don’t even realize we’re making. We unconsciously decide that a flea market backpack can only pay tribute to Barack Obama OR Harry Potter OR Sonic the Hedgehog.
Once we’ve made that decision (again, often without knowing we’ve made it) we wrestle with making our backpack great. We run our hand over many pleathers in order to figure out which one is the finest pleather. We fuss over color and dimension. We pay extra attention to every stitch and seam because our backpacked tribute has to be JUST RIGHT.
The problem is that we acted too soon. We self-imposed unnecessary limits on what we considered appropriate and/or effective backpack decoration. We failed to consider that maybe, just maybe, the best flea market backpack would pay tribute to Barack Obama AND Harry Potter AND Sonic the Hedgehog in a kaleidoscopic explosion of who’s the boss of all humankind. (Don’t listen to FAIL blog, who featured this item a few weeks ago. This is a WIN.)
So you could look at the conceptual ladder as a hierarchy of ideas that moves from simple to complex, from quiet to loud, from demure to outrageous, etc.
Or you could think of the idea as occupying a rung on some kind of imaginary idea ladder. How would the idea change if it occupied a higher rung? How would it change if it occupied a lower rung?
Or you could think of your own badass self as standing on the ladder. How does your view of the idea landscape change as you climb up and down?
Or you could come up with an entirely different metaphor (knobs, dials, sliders, DNA sequences) to belabor (as I have) at your leisure.
The point is to find some kind of tool/reminder to keep your idea-generating as fluid and elastic and expansive as you can. Then, start using that fluidity, elasticity and expansiveness early and often, because once a creative decision is made (unconsciously or not) you have to live it. Forever.
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.
About two weeks ago I bought a copy of MacSpeech Dictate. The idea was to find a tool that would help me be productive while also saving wear and tear on my delicate, sugary forearms.
So far so good. I’ve been able to keep up with my deadlines. I’m back on Facebook. Pretty soon I’ll be able to be up on this blog with more frequency.
I’ve also gotten a lot of interest from writers about how the software works, its accuracy, and in general what it is like to write with your mouth.
And so here is my take on using voice recognition software. With the exception of a few minor tweaks, I am letting the work stand.
How does it work?
It’s pretty simple. You install some software. You “train” the program so it recognizes your distinct speaking style (this takes about 10 minutes) and then you’re ready to go.
Included in the price is a headset with a specially designed microphone. So you pop that baby on and commence filling the air with your words.
You can speak about as fast as you normally speak, although you have to tell the program when you’re using punctuation, which can slow you down a little bit. But after a while you get pretty good at putting in the commas and periods and then you don’t notice that you’re even doing it.
If you make a mistake, then all you have to do is say “scratch that.” If you’ve just called for a piece of punctuation then the program will remove only that. Otherwise it will pick a word or phrase and delete that. More on how this affects your writing later.
Is it accurate?
Yes. For the most part it gets what you say right. It can handle homophones (full disclosure: it did take me a few takes so that word didn’t come out “humble phones”) although when it gets something wrong it can be frustrating and your best bet is to put in a placeholder word and move on.
For example, I would have preferred to write “sweet, delicate forearms” in my opening line, but I had to go with “sugary” because the program got the context wrong. It kept writing the word “suite” as an address. Still, the fact that the software takes context into account is a big plus.
If anything most of the problems have been my fault. One of the humbling aspects of using voice recognition software is that it lays naked your bad diction.
For example, I didn’t realize that I pronounce the word “already” like the man’s name Artie. As in “I Artie did that blog post.”
(I was also called out by a friend when I promised in an e-mail to “deftly” get in touch with her after the holidays.)
But this is easy enough to fix by over enunciating some words. When I need to say the word “disgust” I put more of a Z. sound into that first syllable, so it doesn’t come out “discussed.”
Does it feel weird?
At first I felt like a parody of the slick, self-involved artist who talks his thoughts into a micro recorder. But once I started enjoying using this new tool I got over any feelings of self-consciousness.
What’s nice about the software is that once you get into a groove you find that you can produce a lot of words in one sitting.
You can also talk your way through an idea and it captures your entire thought process. You are not always as aware of what you are writing as you are when you do it by hand, but I like that quality, especially when I’m in the discovery phase.
But that lack of awareness also brings us to the most important question:
That’s nice, but is it writing?
I’m going to say that it’s not writing, but that doesn’t mean the voice recognition is not an extremely useful tool for writers.
The reason I say it’s not writing is that the nature of the software rewards you for plowing forward. There are all kinds of commands for editing text but so far for me they’ve proved to be too cumbersome. Even saying “scratch that” a million times to undo the work can become a pain. Often it’s just much easier to spew and then fix it later.
I’m also going to say it’s not writing because it’s so easy. You just don’t agonize over the words, the structure, the internal rhythms, etc. of your work the way you do when you’re writing by hand or typing. It all just kind of comes out and that’s okay.
I’ve also noticed that after four hours of dictating I’m not at all tired. It reminds me a little bit of when I first started writing and everything that came out of my pen seemed like pure gold to me. And the reason was that while I was generating copy I wasn’t purposefully working the material.
Same goes for this software. I’ve had a 5000-word morning using MacSpeech Dictate, but when I went back and looked at those 5000 words I ended up cutting a lot more than I would have cut from 5000 typed words.
But given how I work that’s not a problem. I’ve always liked getting it all out in front of me and then working with it later. So this tool suits me well. But I definitely wouldn’t recommend it to the writer who agonizes their work one line at a time. I think you’d get too caught up in the mechanics of the program and you’d lose any benefits from being able to say it to the page.
One thing I do know is this: I’m working and my arms don’t hurt. So I will continue to use the software and perhaps even dig deeper into its many features.
Take care and have a great holiday break. I’ll be back up on the blog in the new year.
Thanks to everyone who has been inquiring after my health during my leave of absence. You have my gratitude. Also know that even though my site has gone (temporarily) dark I’ve thought about you (and your growing awesomeness) every day.
The good news is that I’m actually typing this and it doesn’t hurt like the Devil. The bad news is that these 144 words are the only writing I’ve done all day. So we’ll see what happens when the holidays are over and the money work returns and I have to manage both.
Help might come in the form of my new voice recognition software, which has been amazing. The next thing I do (hopefully sooner than later) will be to dictate what it’s like to “write” using only your brain and your mouth. I think you might be surprised.
In the meantime, be good.
Cheers!
The Awesome Blog can’t catch a break.
I have to go dark again for awhile until I heal up. I’ve been calling it tendonitis although the physical therapist I met with yesterday said it was really more a case of “forearm overuse” and “tired arm.”
I think this is payback for all the times I made fun of people with Restless Leg Syndrome.
Bottom line is I can’t type. Like, at all.
I just bought some voice-to-text software that I will be training in the next few days. It’s going to be an adjustment but hopefully I’ll be back “writing” sooner than later.
Take care of your hands, people!
I knew that it’s the largest body of fresh water in the world, that it contains about twenty percent of the world’s fresh water, that it’s 1,637 metres (more than a mile) deep at its deepest, that it was created by continental landmasses moving apart, that is has species of fish found only here. But, beyond its facts, Baikal really does have a magic to it. Travellers who wrote ecstatically about it in the past were not exaggerating. Most of Russia’s inland water is sluggish, swampy, inert; Baikal’s is quick. For sparklingness and clarity it’s the opposite of swamp water. The surrounding hills and cliffs that funnel winds along it keep it jumping. It reflects like an optical instrument and responds to changes in the weather so sensitively that it seems like a part of the sky rather than of the land.
From Ian Frazier’s “Travels in Siberia-II” from the August 10, 2009 issue of The New Yorker.
We’re about to enter Paragraph Party season again so I’m featuring this beaut to get us back in the mood.
One of the things we talk about in the Paragraph Party is the concept of Enter, Develop, Exit.
We use these words to avoid vague language like Beginning, Middle, End and to keep us far, far away from the confines of Topic Sentence, Supporting Sentence, Concluding Sentence.
Enter, Develop, Exit is about getting the reader in, making things happen, and then (delightfully) kicking them out. Frazier’s graf about Baikal shows this principle at work while also nicely illustrating how even basic scene-setting can be magical.
First, I absolutely love the Enter on this graf. Frazier starts out with some Best of Wikipedia tidbits, but he does a couple of things that rescue him from sounding like a 5th grader giving a geography report.
First, the phrase “I knew that” is wonderfully dismissive. It has a “as you may have heard” ring to it without calling attention to itself. You forgive him for his indulgence without even realizing it’s happening.
Second, Frazier breaks your will with details. A typical writer would just tell you that Baikal was the largest fresh water body of water in the world. Frazier keeps on you until the enormity of this lake really sinks in. If you’re not impressed with the high percentage of global fresh water, then he’ll take you a mile(!) under the surface, and if that’s not enough then he’ll give you special fish and continental drift.
The Develop section of the graf is the weakest, but Frazier still does a nice job of creating a bridge between the facts in the beginning and the beautiful imagery of the final line. I would’ve appreciated a quotation from one of those ecstatic former travelers, but I respect the choice to keep things clean.
What I do like is how Frazier puts Baikal in context with the rest of Russia’s inland water. “For sparklingness and clarity it’s the opposite of swamp water” is kind of a weird sentence, but you need it to build the overall image of Baikal (quick, jumping, etc.).
Now we’re ready to Exit.
“[I]t seems like a part of the sky rather than of the land” is just lovely. I especially appreciate that Frazier didn’t write this sentence so it ended on the word “sky” although I admit that on the first read I felt like this was a missed opportunity. What writer doesn’t want to lead their reader into the wild blue yonder?
Then I went back and figured out why I was wrong and Frazier was right. You’ll find the reason in beginning of the first line of the next graf. I’ll leave it up to you to figure it out:
“When a wave rolls in on Baikal, and it curls to break . . . .”
