Category: Smart Advice from Smart People

Finished reading Dan Blank’s Be The Gateway last night. Immediately flagged it as a book to re-read and annotate when I’ve got a little more time up my sleeve, as it’s one of the more clear-headed tomes out there about art and being on the internet. One of the more resonant moments: Blank is talking about working with artists/writers get down on having a small email list, or number of social media followers, and immediately contextualises it against his experience working as a young artist in the nineties: Having had sixty people validate this work would have made a huge difference in my quest to stop dabbling and really try to share my work in a bigger way. Having a single person who encouraged me would have meant the world to me. Sixty would have made me double down on my art, instead of letting it languish. In these years, I tried many other creative projects as well. I had

I’m reading Dan Blank’s Be The Gateway at the moment, a book about author platform and writing that is probably as close to my own philosophy that I’ve come across thus far. There’s a focus on identities and how they shape reaction to our work, and why “just telling good stories that entertain people” is frequently a failure to understand what you’re really offering readers. What really caught me, reading through it this morning, was an exercise on judging the priorities in your life. In it, Blank advises getting a stack of index cards and writing down all the things that matter to you, whether it’s a single word (“Family”) or a long term goal (“Take better care of myself”). Once you’ve got everything down, try and arrange all your cards into a pyramid: one things goes at the top, representing your highest priority. Two cards go underneath it, then, three, then four. It may take time to get the

Angela Slatter has written a post about writing the third book in a trilogy and figuring out structures for the Always Trust In Books blog. It amuses me because a friend of mine recently commented that I do not seem to like geeky things, citing the fact that I rarely seem to talk about Star Wars or Star Trek or Doctor Who. Meanwhile, I suspect that I am the person referenced who banged on about story structure and Star Wars in Angela’s presence a little too often, because it’s spent a lot of time as my go-to for structure examples (back in the days before I banged on about story structure and Die Hard instead…) For the record: I’m a fan of Star Wars, fan of Doctor Who. Usually irritated by Star Trek, outside of Discovery and Deep Space Nine, because it never fits what I want from the narrative and the abstract level in which their space battles never

DAEMON VOICES: ESSAYS ON STORYTELLING is a collection of Phillip Pullman’s writing on the subjects of writing and writers. I was tempted by this collection despite never having read Pullman’s fiction–in my head, he’s catalogued as that guy who wrote the YA novel that was turned into the film with the polar bears. I haven’t even seen the film, but the visual of the polar bears has been stuck in my skull for a decade now.  I have friends who are huge fans of Pullman’s Dark Materials books, though, and the first essay in the collection was more than enough to convince me it was worth ponying up the cash. The essay, Magic Carpets, details the responsibilities Pullman feels as a storyteller. He leads off with something unexpected: your first responsibility is financial. Like every other member of a capitalist society, you need money to support your loved ones.   When we start writing books we’re all poor; we all have to

In Winifred Gallagher’s Rapt, she talks about focus as a means of overcoming our instinctual fear. We read books and plug into phones on public transport to tamp down on the fear that we’re travelling alongside strangers, a source of physical danger and possible contamination as flu season begins. We set aside places like bathrooms and kitchens where unclean tasks are attended too, allowing us to set aside the fears of and rituals to prevent contamination unless we’re in that room. Then someone using the public restroom forgets to flush their floater. The ritual of the bathroom is broken, and your attention is drawn to all those fears you’re subconsciously setting aside. You are reminded that the room is a place of pollution, for all that we try to keep it clean and wash our hands before leaving. Social spaces used to have conventions that help us set aside our fear of other people. We behaved professionally in the work