Smart Advice from Smart People

Every Friday I go through my well over-stocked folder of blog posts, articles, and other online produce that’s been marked “To Read” and clear out a handful. The best of them–aka those that still seem interesting or useful here in 2019–get posted here (and you can see the previous instalments using the Vintage Links tag).

At some point I should find a version of that intro that I like and repeat it for every future instalment, but today is not that day.

THE SECRET STRUCTURE OF GREAT TALKS (Nancy Duerte, 2011)

Watch it here

I spend a lot of time talking to people about writing–both now, and back in my dayjob at the writers centre–and about 50% of the gig is trying to get people excited about their own work and trying new ideas out (Heck, it’s 50% of the gig in regular blogging as well).

This talk may have originated in 2011, but it floated through my feed in 2013–aka the year that I was delivering workshops and presentations on a what felt like a fortnightly basis. This video about the importance of communicating ideas effectively, but it’s also a really interesting because of the kind of tools that Duerte uses to in her analysis. Consider, for example, the way in which she uses the visual examples to showcase the rhythms of certain speeches.

It’s an intriguing talk to watch twice–once to get the content, the second to see how it’s applied in the presentation you’ve just watched.

Also, as an aside, there was an incredible burst of nostalgia that came up the moment I found myself on the TEd.com site for a talk. You don’t often notice the internet shifting, but it does–it’s feels like I haven’t seen a Ted Talk go viral in the better part of four or five years, even if the flow of content remains one of the most interesting starting points for research on the internet.

THE BEST WAY TO SHUFFLE OR RANDOMIZE A DECK OF CARDS (Numberphile, 2015)

Watch it here

I played a lot of board games, once upon a time, and I was never particularly skilled at the art of the shuffle. Which is a shame, because it’s one of those things you end up doing a lot in board games. Particularly during that three year period where everyone was obsessed with Dominion.

It turns out that the biggest problem with my shuffling was poor technique.

This video features a mathematician talking through probabilities and the number of applications of particular shuffling techniques required to actually create randomness. Mine, naturally, was the version that required 10,000 applications.

6 STEPS IN MAKING YOUR NON-PROFIT’S BLOG A MUST-READ WEB DESTINATION (Pro-Blogger, 2015)

Read it over on Pro-Blogger

As someone who has spent a good chunk of years as part of a busy, overworked non-profit where blogging was regarded as a good thing, I spent a lot of time looking for tips on how to streamline things and get more content out without doing a hell of a lot more work.

This one largely arrived towards the end of my tenure in the non-profit space, but it’s so damned good (and such a sensible plan if you’re starting a blog, period) that I’ve I’m tucking it away in my useful-blogging-links folder so I can refer back if I ever find myself launching a new platform.

HOW TO KEEP PLANNING KICK-ASS DATE NIGHTS IN A LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIP (Lifehacker, 2015)

Read it over on LifeHacker

I am spectacularly bad at this particular aspect of being in a relationship, and occasionally find it useful to have a guide to work from. But originally flagged because I was doing research into functional couples and thinking about the kinds of relationships that generally get presented in fiction, which often highlight disfunction because it’s an easy source of conflict within a scene. Off the top of my head, I can only really think of two characters who start a book a) happily married, and b) largely into one another the entire way through.

The first is Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man, which bucks all kinds of hardboiled detective trends by having a loving couple who pushes one another with banter instead of playing to femme fatale tropes, and the protagonist’s marriage in Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars.

It’s Friday, September 30, and so I launch into the fifth instalment of my Vintage Links series. It’s been an interesting week clearing the To-Read folder, as i’ve had my first run of posts/articles that were either a) no longer online, or b) now taken over by godawful spam sites that have camped on the former name.

The Bizarre, Complicated Formula for Literary Fame (Joshua Rothman for the New Yorker, 2015)

Read it at the New Yorker’s Website

When you work in a writers centre, you tend to accumulate articles about how various writers get famous or made a giant splash. They’re almost always talking about outliers, because the kinds of folks who get the big coverage are exceptions to the rule, but they’re also the source of information for how publishing works for many new writers. They assume every successful writer’s career trajectory mirrors Stephen Kings, or Dan Browns, or JK Rowlings, or…well, you get the idea.

This…isn’t one of those articles. Rather, it’s a look at what makes Romantic poets like William Wordsworth more famous and remembered than their contemporaries, via an academic study by HJ Jackson at the University of Toronto. The answers are surprising, involving writing different types of works, creating work that is easily illustratable, and work that is highly adaptable.

I’m intrigued by how well this seems to marry up with the insights on creativity from David Epstein’s book, Range, which argues for the power of being a generalist rather than a specialist and the power of writing in different styles and genres.

The Easiest Way To Get Started Running: Mind Your Breath, Not Time (Lifehacker, 2015)

Read the post at Lifehacker

It’s notable that 2015 was the year that I learned I had chronic sleep apnea, and one of the contributing factors was my weight. I started accumulating posts about diet, budgeting (’cause treating sleep apnea costs, yo), and exercise as they rolled through my feed.

This one caught my attention because it was all about committing time to the act of running, but tailored the process to your current condition. It was such a useful approach that I flagged it as a metaphor for learning to write in classes.

Business Musings: The Hard Part (Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Blog, 2015)

Read the post at KrisWrites.com

Rusch has been posting about the state of indie publishing for years, and always comes at the strategies with the mindset of a career-long writer and editor who has seen the status quo of publishing shift more than one. This post talks about the shift away from the tactics that worked in the early days of Kindle, and the problem with binding your approach to a single tactic and retailer that you don’t control.

It’s also a post on the steps you take when your tactics crash into a trough, which is one of those things that’s going to happen more than once in any writer’s career. Some really useful insight:

Every single successful freelance writer I’ve ever met bounced on and off day jobs early on in her career. Every single one—except those who have a spouse, significant other, or family member who was willing to bankroll the ups and downs of a writing career.

Using the day job to relieve financial stress is a time-honored freelancer tradition.

Indie writers have never faced this before. Most of them believed that the gold rush would last forever. Some burned bridges horribly with their day jobs, so there’s no returning.

But there are other day jobs. Most freelancers get lower-level service jobs to tide them over—not career jobs. Things like retail or waiting tables or temp work. Those will often pay the bills until it’s time to freelance again.

Never look at one trough—no matter how deep—as the end of your career. It’s only the end of your career if you end your career.

How To Research Like A Journalist When The Internet Doesn’t Deliver (LifeHacker, 2015)

Read the post at LifeHacker

Exactly what it says on the tin. A remarkably good primer on how to research if you’re a writer, digging into things well beyond what you can find with a Google search. I may have sent this out to more than a few people who called into the Writers Centre looking for advice about researching their projects, but it’s lingered in my to-read file despite this.

The Vintage Links series is an attempt to clear 600+ bookmarked links I compiled over a period of six years, mostly coinciding with the period in which I worked for Queensland Writers Centre. It involves a lot of stuff I flagged because it would be useful at work, in my own process, or just plain useful.

Every week I gather together four of the best links I came across while clearing out the bookmarks folder on my browser, presenting a grab-bag of interesting stuff. I’m going full Marie Kondo on those fuckers: everything is checked, thanked, and either deleted or properly filed so I don’t have to deal with it again. If you want to see more, you can see the prior instalments using the Vintage Links tag

An Oral Hisotry of the Mortal Combat Movie (Aaron Couch for Hollywood Reporter, 2015)

Read it at Hollywood Reporter

I have a soft spot for video game adaptations. They’re very rarely great works of cenema, but will often be servicable and entertaining (Tekken, DOA, Resident Evil), bizarre to the point of abserdity (Double Dragon, Super Mario Brothers), or a cinematic car crash of ubelievable proportions (Streetfighter). Back in 2014, Aaron Couch did a bunch of interviews with folks involved in one of the first adaptations to reach that servicable and entertaining milestone—Paul Anderson’s Mortal Combat adaptation from 1995. 

This breakdown of the film’s production process is a fascinating look behind the scenes, casitng light on the challenges that impact on the final product of a film and the decisions being made in the moment.  It also gives you a glimpse of an alternate universe where Cameron Diaz played Sonja Blade in the film, and a whole new world of appreciation for the work ethic and glory that is Robin Shou:

Anderson: Robin would rate the fights. They would be a one, a two or a three. That would refer to how many ribs he bruised when he did the fight. The Reptile fight was a three-rib fight, so he really felt like he’d delivered for me.

The Heroines Journey: Learning to Work (Theodora Goss, 2015)

Read it over at TheodoraGoss.com

I’m a huge fan of Theodora Goss as a fiction writer. The Rapid Advance of Sorrow is one of those short-stories I come back to again and again, trying to plumb the depths of how it works and figure out all the little things that elevate it into something special.

Her blog is just as good as her fiction: often engrossing and open about process, full of deep thought about the topics she chooses to tackle. Back in 2015 she did a run where she looked at archetypal female stories,, and the ways the heroes journey as envisioned by Joseph Campbell makes for a poor fit when applied to female protagonists.

I’d flagged this post as a reminder ot read the entire series, but it’s also a remarkably useful examoination of a particular sotry beat. 

How to Recover From An Unproductive Day Like It Never Happened (LifeHacker, 2015)

Read it over at LifeHacker

Possibly one of the most useful articles I’ve ever come across on Lifehacker, and the kind of content that keeps it on my RSS feed when the firehouse of data they send my way starts to feel overwhelming.

I’m generally pretty good with managing my day when the idea of managing and being on top of things is something that I’m focusing in. I’ve got a productivity system that works for me, and when it’s running hot I get a shitton of things done on a daily basis. But I also have a tendency towards anxiety and fixed-mindset thinking, which means a bad day can quickly blossom into a bad week once I lock onto the idea that everything’s going a bit shit right now.

This article was the first place that suggested setting up a series of post-bad-day habits designed to get you back into a productive mindset, and that’s an incredibly useful idea.

Kelly Sue DeConnick on Discomfort (Vimeo, 2015)

Watch the video at Vimeo

One of the joys of clearing my Vintage Links file is occasionally finding something I’ve filed away and forgotten about that’s absolutely startling and great. This video, from comic book writer Kelly Sue DeConnick, absolutely belongs in that category.

It’s a speech about writing, and in particular about writing things that make people uncomfortable (whether that person is yourself or your audience). It’s also a speech about being read, as evidenced by this particular bit of insight.

…it is a weird thing to have something that you have had a hand in creating become a tattoo phenomenon, but my ego stays in check because as proud as I am of this book, and as much as it means to me, I know that what Dan Curtis Johnson said is right. You don’t get that tattoo to celebrate something in the book, you get that tattoo because the book celebrates something in you…

If you pay close attention there’s little bits of practical craft advice in there, among the broader talk about intent and goals, and the entire thing is well worth 20 minutes of your time.