Dangerous Ideas: Getting Started Is Overrated

Success requires that you know what you're doing, before you begin:

In short, I've noticed that people who succeed in an impressive pursuit are those who:

• Established, over time, a deep emotional conviction that they want to follow that pursuit.
• Have built an exhaustive understanding of the relevant world, why some succeed and others don't, and exactly what type of action is required.

This takes time. Often it requires a long period of saturation, in which the person returns again and again to the world, meeting people and reading about it and trying little experiments to get a feel for its reality. This period will be at least a month. It might last years.

10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines - Smashing Magazine - StumbleUpon

Time to start redesigning everything.

1. Form Labels Work Best Above The Field
2. Users Focus On Faces
3. Quality Of Design Is An Indicator Of Credibility
4. Most Users Do Not Scroll
5. Blue Is The Best Color For Links
6. The Ideal Search Box Is 27-Characters Wide
7. White Space Improves Comprehension
8. Effective User Testing Doesn't Have To Be Extensive
9. Informative Product Pages Help You Stand Out
10. Most Users Are Blind To Advertising

12 Standard Screen Patterns

This is useful for thinking about how to organize information into an interface.

Reductionism in Web Design

Useful ideas for improving design, content, and architecture through taking out everything extraneous to the core ideas.

Go Into The Story: "Why is it three act structure? The cycle of life."

This is the dumbest thing I've read on the subject of writing in quite a while. Not only is it stupid, but there's no substance to it. There's nothing intrinsically useful about thinking about things in three's. There's certainly nothing in the graphs that give a clue about how they break into three's. There's no such thing as the "cycle of life." And even Aristotle is pretty vague about how you divide something into a beginning, a middle, and a end.

Why not just have a beginning and an end, a cause and an effect. You could work entirely in binaries and have something just as unhelpful.

The idea that you need something in three parts is just a myth. Worse yet, the idea that you need to justify your outline is just a distraction from actual creative work.

Screenwriting Tips... You Hack, Guest Post Week: Tip #7

But, why else would you be writing about vampires?

Guest Post Week: Tip #7

Don’t have your vampire carry his lost love’s portrait in an antique locket. And in the name of all that’s holy please don’t have that portrait exactly match the female lead of your story.

-tip by Paul

Should you pre-rinse your dishes before loading the dishwasher? on Shine

I need to stop reading Yahoo news.

Is Exercise the Best Drug for Depression? - Yahoo! News

Middle-brow, obvious, but true.

Me On Creative Failure - lonelysandwich

Adam Lisagor on Creative Failure

Get better

[Kung Fu Grippe]

Failure = Success? Let's Hope So

This is the kind of week I'm having. I'm reading self-help advice on overcoming failure. This is from MSN's Esquire page:

That's why you have to drop to one knee and propose to the girl you're pretty sure you love. That's why you have to send out your résumé, even though your job is just fine. That's why you have to climb that 14,000-foot mountain. It won't always work out. You may get divorced. Or fired. Or frostbitten. But the alternative is a life of vague disappointment.

When that nagging little voice pops up, wondering what's going to happen if you fail, just ignore it. Yes, it's hard. As humans, we're programmed for loss aversion. But money is just money. Your job is just your job. Your life - the adventure of your life - is all you really have that's yours.

When things go wrong, when you're sliding toward an unavoidable crash, don't panic. In those long seconds before the impact, look around and figure out how you entered into this mess. Think about how you'll frame the story a year from now, over a few beers. Can you come up with an honest version that ends, "So in a funny way, it was the best thing that ever happened to me"?

True all true. Nothing ventured nothing gained and all that. But failure still means you failed. You can't whitewash it. Or at least I can't.

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Listening to: NPR - Animal Collective Live, 10-01-2007
via FoxyTunes

Don't Be a Blockhead

Writer's advice of the day, from Sarah Monette:

One of the hardest steps in going from a dilettante writer to a serious writer, and then to a professional writer is learning to generate inspiration. The lightning bolt from the blue is all very well, but it isn't reliable, and if you want to make a career out of writing, you cannot sit around waiting for the lightning to find you. You have to get behind the mule in the morning, as the Tom Waits song says, and you have to do it whether you're inspired or not. When you're blocked, that means you have to go look at what's blocking you, see if you can crawl under it, or climb over it, or squeeze around it on the left, or hack a chunk out of it on the right. And if it throws you off, you have to jump right back in. You have to make the block explain itself to you, and then you have to take it apart and keep walking.

Writer's block can stop you from writing, but you cannot let it stop you from working. And that's the most important thing not to do with writer's block.

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Listening to: Smog - Running The Loping
via FoxyTunes

Are You a Reader or a Writer?

One of the issues that we have as writers is aspiring to create experiences as mind-blowing and real as those we remember from reading great books and authors in the past. More often than not we analyze works not as writers but as fans. This makes it difficult to gain the perspective required to really understand what makes something work, and how we might do the same ourselves.

Chris Huntley has this bit of sage advice:

An early axiom determined in the development of the Dramatica theory was this: If you look for meaning in your story, you cannot predict how to put your story together. If you want to predict how to put your story together, you cannot know what your choices will mean. In other words, you can try to find meaning in a work OR you can predict how to put it together—but not at the same time from within the same context. Why? The short answer is that we use one as the given in order to evaluate the other. When looking for meaning, we assume a particular story structure. When looking for structure, we assume a particular meaning (author's intent). It's tied to the same reason we can see light as particles and waves, just not at the same time within a single context. One aspect defines the basis for the other. Story structure provides the basis for seeing meaning in the story. Meaning provides the basis for understanding and manipulating structure in a story.

In other words, meaning is tied to the audience's experience of the story while structure is tied to the author's perspective of the story. The audience perspective allows a synthesis of the underlying story elements to discover its "meaning." The author's perspective assumes a given meaning (author's intent) and allows manipulation of the arrangement of the story's structure and dynamics. Using the appropriate context is important.

I'm very intrigued by this relationship between meaning and structure, as well as the notion that structure and prediction are the same thing (it's all very scientific sounding). Understanding the structure of something, how it works, allows you to repeat the process and make predictions about the likely outcome. This is the writer's perspective.

On the other hand, the reader can't see the process. They can only look at the effects and speculate about what the author intended. More importantly, what a reader takes from a work is really their experience and enjoyment of the bells and whistles. It's all surface. The mechanics of the thing never really come into it. It is in fact a very different perspective from the author's, just as living in a house is very different from being the architect of the house.

Even deep analysis of theme, history, society, economics, etc. are just more rigorous forms of meaning making. It is only when we have a complete picture of the meaning of a work that we can begin to work toward understanding how that meaning was encoded into the story.

So the challenge is to look at examples and works we admire not from our natural perspective as fans and readers, but from the much more difficult perspective of the architect, the scientist, the writer; stay focused on all those moving parts and formulas that no one else can see.

Go For Character

From the "Running With My Eyes Closed" blog:

A pilot script can be rich in scenes that are only present to develop character and don't drive the story forward in any other way. Written well, they don't stop the action. Instead, they up the viewer's commitment to the series.

The pilot script for a TV series is like the opening scene of a screenplay or the first chapter of a novel. If you give the audience someone they're interested in, they will become more invested in the plot and the story you are trying to tell.

Hit the Ground Running

Actual real advice from actual real writers. From the Write Here, Write Now blog:

You've heard the phrase, "hit the ground running"? In my experience, those scripts that are read in full are those that do this. We join an obvious protagonist, with an obvious journey, from page one. That protagonist's motivations and backstory is hinted at from the start (no expositional dialogue please: "I need to change my life because of the death of my wife..." Yuk!) and his or her need to gain something - and indeed whom the antagonist is and why they are standing in the protagonist's way - needs to be introduced. All within ten pages: therein lies the challenge.

Lots more good stuff there.