Smart Advice from Smart People Archives - Page 5 of 20

Vintage Links 003: Phish, Insane Clown Posse, Design, Clouds, and Habits

PETERMBALL Smart Advice from Smart People August 16, 2019Vintage Links

Back in March, before my dad passed away, I’d started the Vintage Links project in order to put some structure around clearing my overstocked “To Read” folder. At time of writing, there are about 600 of them remaining, and I’m going full Marie Kondo on those fuckers: everything is checked, thanks, and either deleted or filed away so I don’t have to deal with it again.

I got through two instalments before life went all kinds of chaotic, and I think it’s time to resume now that the year is settling down. This week I’m clearing a grab bag of useful links for writers and one particularly pretty short film that’s well worth giving ten minutes of your time (and if you want to see more, you can see the prior instalments using the Vintage Links tag).

9 Lessons from Phish and The Insane Clown Posse For Deep Fan Engagement (Fast Company, 2013)

Read the post over at Fast Company

Back in 2013, journalist and pop culture commentator Nathan Rabin wrote an entire book about deep fan communities that had built up around acts like Phish and The Insane Clown Posse. This post is a fantastic distillation of what these sorts of acts do to engage such fervent adoration from their fans, and in particular how they’ve built a loyal following that follows them from project to project (I mean, seriously, the Insane Clown Posse built their own wrestling federation from their fanbase, it’s…well, insane).

It’s an incredible list of ideas if you’re working in a niche (which, frankly, many emerging writers are), and I’m vaguely disappointed that the book is still only available in print.

The Ten Basic Elements of Design (Creative Market, 2017)

Check it out over at the Creative Market website (and there’s an infographic to go with it)

I got interested in design about fifteen years ago, when I first started looking at RPG book covers and trying to figure out what made them work beyond the great cover art (which, as an emerging RPG publisher, was well beyond my price range). By the time I started working for the writers centre eight year slater, we were starting to have those conversations with writers who were venturing into the world of indie publishing as the kindle took off.

I’d tagged this one because it was an incredibly useful primer for people starting to look at cover design and start thinking about the elements that made something work.

Four Common Myths About Habits, Debunked (Lifehacker, 2015)

Read the post over at LifeHacker

There’s a lot of bad advice out there with regards to building habits, and the worst of them (also the first debunked in this article) is the idea that it takes 21 days to bed a new habit in.

Teaching people habits (and hacking habits) is frequently a huge part of teaching people to write, so posts like this are always a handy reference point. The real useful thing to do is probably reading Charles Duhig’s book on habits and their formation, which I recommend to writers and other artists at every available opportunity, but stuff like this is always a useful reminder.

The OceanMaker (Vimeo, 2015)

Watch it over on Vimeo (or click the embedded video below)

A short, ten-minute animated film about a post-apocalyptic world where pilots compete to harvest water from the last remaining source of moisture–the clouds. It’s incredible what the film gets out of a simple concept and some really nice design–particularly when you consider it’s the result of a seven-week project done on a laptop.

The OceanMaker from Mighty Coconut on Vimeo.

The Horrible Space Between…

Warren Ellis is going through a run where he posts content from his late, lamented Morning.Computer site to his shiny new WarrenEllis.ltd home. Which means I got a chance to revisit one of those posts where every writer I know feels incredibly seen:

…never ask anyone who’s just finished a book if they’re happy with it, because the answer is always IT’S AWFUL MY CAREER IS OVER GET AWAY FROM ME I WILL TEAR YOUR FUCKING HEART OUT AND EAT IT IN FRONT OF YOU. There’s a terrible space between the conclusion of the copy-editing and the release of the thing where you’re convinced that it’s a rotten piece of work and you’re going to be Found Out and everything is over. You start telling the wall — because you don’t know anybody any more, because you’ve been indoors for months destroying a laptop with your crap — that if you only had another six months, if you could just alter a couple of things, if you could just maybe take out and replace a plotline, and maybe the main plot, and all the characters, and change the title, and write a whole different book, then everything would be fine…
On Finishing A Book, WarrenEllis.ltd

Apropos of nothing, you should probably be reading WarrenEllis.ltd. You should almost certainly be subscribed to his newsletter. And, honestly, the only way I’m getting through the political chaos of the modern world is re-reading Transmetropolitan, which has started feeling terrifyingly contemporary and yet contains astonishing amounts of hope amid its bleak, post-human cyberpunk vision.

Sixty People

PETERMBALL Smart Advice from Smart People August 6, 2019

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 a band, I became a photographer, and I wrote poetry. All if it is mixed in those same cardboard boxes up in the attic. Of course, these acts lead to me honing my skills, and meeting an amazing array of collaborators. These early failures made me appreciate the value of what it means to connect with a single person who appreciates your creative work, hence this very book that you are reading.
But still, I would have loved to have had sixty followers for this work. To look out onto an audience of sixty people who cared. To have had sixty people waiting for my next painting.
Blank, Dan. Be the Gateway: A Practical Guide to Sharing Your Creative Work and Engaging an Audience (p. 138).

In a world where quantity of engagement tends to drive all the conversations around social media and author platform, it’s good to have the reminder that those who read are people who have invested time and attention in what you do.