Peter M. Ball

Big Thoughts

The Broken Lens

I broke the lens on my phone camera moving furniture around my flat. There’s no memory of it happening, just an afternoon lugging boxes of books into the afternoon and the realisation that the lens was shattered. My first two attempts to fix it resulted in failure, the repair places shrugging their shoulders and telling me they didn’t have the parts. After that, I placed tape over the broken lens and made do until I had the chance to get it repaired for good. The camera will still take photos, but they aren’t crisp and the colours are all washed out. The kind of photos that are no longer suitable for scanning documents with the phone, or photographing receipts that are uploaded to a rebate app. The kind of problems that are annoying enough that you notice when they come up, but aren’t quite regular enough to justify the time and the money it takes to resolve them when

PeterMBall 18/04/2018

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Know Your Enemy

I’m reading a book on social anxiety, because I believe in knowing your enemy. I wrote three different versions of this blog post and deleted them all, because sometimes trying to write about anxiety is enough to trigger my damn anxiety on its own. For all that it’s hailed as a solitary profession, the anxiety I feel about writing certain things is inherently social. It’s the fear that one’s secrets will be revealed, that the things you do will invite harsh judgement that is terrifying correct; you are actually stupid, or unlovable, or worthless, and now the con you’ve played thus far has been revealed for the sham it is. Society anxiety tells you it’s better to hide, or avoid the situation, rather than risk such exposure. Writing invites people to judge you. It hangs your ass out there for posterity, which means your mistakes and shortcomings can be rediscovered long after you left them behind. You may draft alone,

PeterMBall 17/04/2018

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Endings and Hard Decisions

The interesting thing about writing is the sheer amount of craft that goes into a single moment. Stories tend to climax when a major character makes an important decision – Luke Skywalker turns off his targeting computer and uses the force, or Katniss Everdeen refuses to play by the rules of the Hunger Game and refuses to kill the final competitor – and everything else in the story tends to focus on making that decision as meaningful as possible. Character arcs, themes and conflict. Narrative voice and carefully developed metaphors. All just an elaborate construction to contextualise a single difficult decision and imbue it with meaning. We aren’t built to make hard decisions. Even something as simple as “I should start getting some exercise,” is met with considerable resistance as we delay and make excuses. Watching fictional characters make those hard decisions is a promise that one day, if it really mattered, we could overcome that resistance and make the

PeterMBall 17/04/2018

Journal

Really Simple Syndication

I broke out my RSS reader last night while sitting on the couch with my partner. I’ve been using Newsblur for tracking blogs ever since Google Reader shut down, and part of me still holds a grudge against Google for deciding that RSS was an archaic bit of technology they no longer wanted to support. I value my RSS reader to the tune of a yearly subscription, even during the lean years where it felt like an extravagance. My partner had never encountered an RSS reader before. The difference in our age is a handful of years, but within those years was the advent of social blogging platforms such as Livejournal and the eventual rise of social media. Things powered by RSS without anywhere near the level of control if you value the ability to curate and sort the flows of information into meaningful categories. Occasionally I read about the death of the blog. It’s all about social media these

PeterMBall 16/04/2018

Sunday Circle

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them). After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all. Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here). MY CHECK-IN What am I working on this week? Everything in my life ground

PeterMBall 15/04/2018

Sunday Circle

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

PeterMBall 08/04/2018

Sunday Circle

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

PeterMBall 01/04/2018

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Going Back to Primary Sources

I’ve spent a large chunk of my life teaching principles from E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel: the differences between flat and round characters; “the king died, and then the queen died” is a story, but “the king died, then the queen died of grief” is a plot. I never had to read the book, because those lessons are part of the fabric of writing now. They were referenced by mentors, reinforced with examples, used to mark out the lines between good writing and bad. I had what I needed, so why go looking for the original? I had a copy if I needed it – often more than one – but there was other stuff to read that advanced his original points. Forster wrote his speeches in 1927, and the ideas had been hashed out (I didn’t even have Forster’s name right, half the time, referring to him as EM Forrester for much of the last decade). Academia doesn’t

PeterMBall 29/03/2018

Big Thoughts

Mess is an Invitation

We rearranged our apartment two weeks ago, slotting furniture into new configurations and making more space for my partners stuff. Then, I got sick with a head cold, and my partner inherited the cold from me, so the job remains 80% done instead of getting everything tucked away and finalised. My desk, which was one of the few pieces of furniture not moving during the process, has played host to a small pile of things set aside as part of that final 20%, which I’ve largely been ignoring for the last seven days as I worked from the couch. It’s all too easy to find reasons to work from the couch, instead of addressing the problem. To work with the state of the desk as it is, and look for a quick solution. It’s not that the mess is hard to clear, but that clearing it means I may need to consider the questions that come after the space is

PeterMBall 26/03/2018

Stuff

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

PeterMBall 25/03/2018

Sunday Circle

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

PeterMBall 18/03/2018

News & Upcoming Events

“You Don’t Want To Be Published” is out. Here’s How to Get It For Free

So I have a new book out there in the world, a collection of essays and blog posts titled You Don’t Want To Be Published (And Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing). It’s available for sale at all good ebook retailers as we speak, but I’m going to suggest you hold off on purchasing it for a moment. Because I don’t want you to buy this book. I want you to subscribe to my newsletter, Notes from the Brain Jar, where I’m giving the book away as a special bonus to all new subscribers. If that sounds like a deal you’re interested in, you can sign up here and you’ll get your copy of the book mailed out all neat-and-easy. If you’re not the newsletter type, you can still purchase the book. Or, if you’re so inclined, read everything for free by copy-pasting the titles into Google and finding the original blog posts or essay publications, almost

PeterMBall 13/03/2018