Category: Smart Advice from Smart People
Smart Advice from Smart People

Mark of Cain, Youth Radio, and Pneumatic Drills

An excerpt from my favourite bit of online reading this week: We did play Mark of Cain on Triple J, but not in the breakfast program. This is because Mark of Cain sounded like a pneumatic drill slowed to the pace of a Fitzroy junkie looking for his tram ticket and so were only played after 9am. We called this dayparting. This is an industry term used only by people who know about music scheduling for radio. It comes courtesy of Helen Razer’s defense of Triple J over on Crikey, and references a time period where I was a moderately enthusiastic fan of the radio station, Razer as a presenter, and yes, godsfuckit, the Mark of Cain. I mean, I’ve more or less got an entire story drafted that’s all about the summer they released this cover: There are still days when I can fire that song up and listen to it non-stop. One of these days, I’ll even figure

PeterMBall 18/01/2014
Smart Advice from Smart People

Dignity is a Luxury Rather than A Necessity

I’ve been broke a few times in my life. Sometimes it’s been because I worked contract gigs. Sometimes it’s been because I’m unemployed. Either way, a lot of the stuff that Eric Ravenscraft talks about in his blog post for Lifehacker seems really familiar, particularly the stuff about financial advice being aimed at people who are not you when you’re broke, the deliciousness of service station hotdogs, and this bit in particular: Money isn’t just about paying for goods and services. Money is about dignity. When you get below $20,000/year, dignity becomes a luxury rather than a necessity and, when viewed solely through the eyes of financial advisors, luxuries should be cut first. Eric Ravenscraft, The Financial Advice I’m Glad I Ignored When I Was Broke There were years where I routinely lived on about $18,000 a year. Maybe a little less. These days, I look at the money I used to live on in my twenties and wonder how the

PeterMBall 07/01/2014
Smart Advice from Smart People

Your Audience: Building versus Earning

2013 was a hell of a year. I did a lot of stuff. A lot of that stuff was huge: I ran GenreCon; I produced eight or nine full-day workshops over the course of the year; I went to so many cons that I could spend 2014 sleeping and still not pay back my sleep debt; I went to motherfucking Vienna and rode the Wiener Riesenrad, which is one of the few tourist attractions anywhere in the world that holds some appeal to me (largely thanks to its prominence in The Third Man and Before Sunrise). I discovered that riding the Wiener Riesenrad is a fucking terrible idea if you’re afraid of heights. One of the smartest things I heard last year came via Chuck Wendig, who did an interview at the Get Read online conference where he talked about author platform and maintaining a career as a writer. I meant to post about it back then, when I first heard it,

PeterMBall 01/01/2014
Smart Advice from Smart People

Writing, Not Blogging

I keep reading articles that say blogging is mandatory for writers nowadays. That agents and editors won’t take you on if you don’t already have a platform. This is hooey. Let me repeat that. Hooey. Cat Rambo has a sensible blog post about not blogging up on her website this week, which I’m linking to because: a) it’s good, common-sense advice that syncs into the things I routinely tell people who ask about writing and social media and stuff; and b) it neatly explains why I’ve been absent around these parts, and left everyone hanging half-way through the Die Hard series. The TL:DR version: I’m being mugged by life at the moment, and most of my brain-meats have been expended getting the GenreCon Program up and running. The head-space I’ve got left over goes on projects in order of deadline, ’cause when you’re working with limited time and mental resources, ya gotta prioritize the things that need to be done and

PeterMBall 27/09/2013
Smart Advice from Smart People

A Shift in the Creative Paradigm

From the latest installment of the Lefsetz Letter, tracing the changes that have occurred in our lifetime. As always, Bob Lefsetz is writing about the music industry, but if you’re a writer and you’re not reading this and mentally inserting “book” instead of “album”, it may be time to start paying a little more attention to what’s going on in the industry: CREATION Used to be expensive and we felt anybody who’d made a record deserved attention. Now anyone can record, even on their iPad, and we need a reason to pay attention. As usual, the entire post is pure gold, but I find myself re-posting this fragment because I keep speaking to aspiring writers through work who mistake The Book as an end-goal. They’re all excited by the possibility of epub and self-publishing because it makes getting published achievable, but they haven’t figured out the counter-point of that. What they want isn’t having the book out there, what they

PeterMBall 13/07/2013
Smart Advice from Smart People

Joe Hill’s Secret to Achieving Creative Focus

One of the things that makes the great truly great is their ability to make difficult things seem effortless, at least when they’re looked upon from the outside. It’s one of the reasons I’m intrigued by seeing the process of great writers up close, even if I’m long past the stage where I believe there’s some mysterious secret to writing that will unlock everything. In this respect, Joe Hill’s tumblr post on creative math achieves greatness twice over. It makes his writing itself seem effortless, while simultaneously acknowledging the effort that goes into his work, and its a distillation of a great deal of complex thought and experience into a single elegant point: what’s my trick for staying focused on a project? Happiness. I follow pleasure. It makes me feel good to stay focused on one thing at a time, to pour myself fully into it, so that’s what I do. I think any creative act usually grows naturally from enjoyment.

PeterMBall 17/06/2013
Smart Advice from Smart People

All Writing is Political

I’m about to commit a metric butt-load of white-male-privilege sins by being a white-male-guy whose linking to another white-male-guy saying sensible things about writing and feminisim, but just this once I’m going to be okay with it. Chuck Wendig wrote a post about Sexism and Misogyny in Publishing. It got some responses, ’cause Chuck knows his shit when it comes to building an audience on the internet, and so people link his posts around. Then he wrote a response to the responses, and called out this particular piece of bullshit in a way that had me punching the air like a madman. “BUT IT DOESN’T SERVE THE STORY!” Worst excuse ever. I hate this excuse. I hate it like I hate the DMV, hemorrhoids, airline travel delays, and bad coffee. I hate it because it suggests that writers are not in control of their own stories, that they are merely conduits for some kind of divine unicorn breath, some heady Musefart that

PeterMBall 12/06/2013
Smart Advice from Smart People

Charlotte Nash on Project Based Writing

So Charlotte Nash came across my radar last year, courtesy of some recommendations people made for emerging writers who’d be a good fit for panels at GenreCon. Unfortunately I missed the panels she was on – curse of being an organiser instead of a punter – but all feedback suggests that Charlotte was a) very smart, and b) knows her stuff. My own experience with her written work hasn’t been as in-depth as I’d like, but pretty much everything I’ve seen supports the smart-and-knows-her-shit theme. Her recent blog post, Project Based Writing, came about in response to my ranting about writing advice last week. Charlotte isn’t a write-every-day-and-hit-2.5k writer either, but her discussion of the issue offers up an interesting alternative. Here’s a snippet: Engineering work is often project-based – a well-defined “deliverable” by a certain date: a tunnel, a bridge, a rocket. And since, to my mind, a piece of writing (a novel, story, blog, whatever) is a fairly clearly

PeterMBall 27/05/2013
Smart Advice from Smart People

You Have Great Taste: Ira Glass on Creative Journeys

This week has been a lesson in the ways of the internet. I put a handful of links to a brilliant Ira Glass video on creativity and taste in the middle of my post about On Writing and only 3% of you fuckers went and watched it, despite the fact that I talk the damn thing up ’cause it really is that useful and awesome. I put one link in a post about Robot Jox where I mention that the writer is shitting on his own project, and all of you motherfuckers go traipsing off to snicker to look at Joe Haldeman being all “yeah, this film is a dog, man. What were we thinking.” You people, you people worry me. And I know the excuses that people will throw my way. I hear you sitting up the back, being all, “”No, Pete, it’s not like that, we swear.” To that I say: “bullshit, motherfucker. I’ve got goddamn metrics. Three fucking percent.” “But it’s

PeterMBall 24/05/2013
Smart Advice from Smart People

The Lefsetz Letter

…those who win will have two qualities. One, they’ll be great. Two, they’ll persevere. Getting Lucky, Lefsetz.com On the surface, the daily Lefsetz Letter that arrives in my inbox doesn’t have much to do with writing. Bob Lefsetz writes about music and the music industry, mailing out his thoughts every weekday, and the tagline, first in music analysis, really says it all. And yet, on busy days at work, it remains one of the few things running through my various feeds that I’ll actually take a time-out to sit and read. The Lefsetz Letter may be about music, but the music industry was one of the first to get utterly freakin’ pantsed by the internet. It spent years standing there, shorts around its ankles, wondering what the hell happened and why people with freakin’ computers came along and changed everything. And this is what Lefsetz writes about, day after day. He’s a smart guy who looked at the industry that changed around him and

PeterMBall 07/03/2013
Smart Advice from Smart People

Writing Advice Picked Up on the Weekend

The cold that chased me through the Rabbit Hole and Continuum finally caught up with me over the last weekend. I picked up a couple of books to keep me entertained over the weekend of coughing, spluttering, and spending some quality time in bed. By the time you read this, I’ll have spent two days living on cold-and-flu tablets and Peter Corris novels, in addition to some non-fiction in the form of The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers.  Thus far, my favourite entry has been a conversation between Paul Aster and Jonothan Letham, which included one of those perfect answers you can’t help sharing: PA: You try to surprise yourself. You go against what you’ve done before. You want to burn up and destroy all your previous work; you want to reinvent yourself with every project. Once you fall into habits, I think, you’re dead as an artist. You have to challenge yourself and never rest on your laurels,

PeterMBall 20/06/2012
Smart Advice from Smart People

You must be prepared to work always without applause…

You must be prepared to work always without applause. When you are excited about something is when the first draft is done. But no one can see it until you have gone over it again and again until you have communicated the emotion, the sights, and the sounds to the reader, and by the time you have completed this the words, sometimes, will not make sense to you you read them, so many times have you re-read them. By the time the book comes out you will have started something else and it is all behind you and you do not want to hear about it. But you do, you read it in covers and you see all the places that now you can do nothing about. All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure, and general drying up of natural juices. Not a

PeterMBall 07/05/2012

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