Writing Advice – Craft & Process

Collecting the posts I’ve written about the craft and process of writing

STEAL THIS IDEA: Zombie Mode Task List!

PETERMBALL Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking, Writing Advice - Craft & Process

I’m a big fan of running playbooks to take decision making off the table, especially on low energy days when I don’t have the spoons for self-management. There’s a larger piece in the works on this—part of a series that’s been going through my newsletter of late—but it remains a work-in-progress because there’s a bunch of moving pieces I’m trying to lay out and it’s hard to fit it into self-contained, 1,000 word chunks.

Imagine my jealousy when a Software Engineer named Lisa wrote about their “Zombie Mode” list over on the Bullet Journal blog.

“Zombie Mode” is what I call the state of being when I do not want to think and just want to be told what to do next. I have two collections to use when I am in this state — one for workdays and one for non-workdays. They both contain lists of tasks to be completed for the day, in order, until I snap out of Zombie Mode or the day ends.

Before, when I was in Zombie Mode, I would just waste all that time playing on my phone or trying to motivate myself to choose something to work on. Once I gave myself a list of things I could focus my attention on without having to make any decisions, my time in Zombie Mode went from completely wasted to productive. Even though I am only getting routine and brainless tasks done during that time, it is a vast improvement over getting nothing done at all.

My interest in playbooks started with something similar to this. I have a serious sleep disorder, so there’s a lot of days when I start off brain-fried and over-tired. Writing is damn near impossible on those mornings, and deep concentration is a mountain I often can’t climb, so I laid out a series of step-by-step activities I could follow that would steer me away from common, not-terribly-useful coping mechanism (computer games, binge-watching TV) and towards tasks I could actually do (layout and design; updating websites).

Over time, they’ve developed a little—my core playbooks are less “zombie mode” and more a trilogy that covers being overtired, over-anxious, or working-around-short-term-stressors—but I’m gradually building more and refining those that exist.

For example, over the weekend I added “straighten desk” to my three core lists, bedding in a habit of making the primary work space more pleasant to be around rather than defaulting to the couch. Another recent addition: play something from the “banger start to the morning” playlist, after a recent run of starting my mornings with the Kaiser Chiefs’ I Predict A Riot sent me into the workday with more enthusiasm than normal.

Do You Know The Origins of Frequently Quoted Advice?

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Trace the origins of the “ten thousand steps a day” health advice, and you’ll find a marketing campaign. A Japanese company built a step counter and invented a reason to use it, with the brand name—Manpo-Kei—translating into 10,000 steps.

Trace the origins of the oft-repeated writing advice to show, rather than tell, and you’ll find the silent film industry, and writers making decisions between conveying information via dialogue card, or putting it into action. Also popular in turn-of-the-century theatre scene of the early 1900s, where “showing” gave actors to display the emotional responses to scenes in ways the writer could not convey.

Neither origin makes for terrible advice—ten thousand steps a day is good for your health, and show, don’t tell can be solid advice for a prose writer—but it also gives you wiggle room to escape the tyranny of the ideals presented.

Any activity is better than none, and the health benefits kick in long before you hit a ten thousand step a day goal.

Showing is a worthy goal for a scene, but there’s a time in place to just tell the reader something. Not everything needs to be dramatised, and access to the narrator’s interiority is a trick that prose can deliver that theatre can’t. The advice wrote for a reason: sometimes a title card is the right choice for conveying information.

Context matters. Goals matter. And oft-quoted advice isn’t always the best solution, merely the version we’ve inherited as a culture because it’s pays off more often than not.

Narrative Assumptions in the Binge-Watch Era

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process
Avengers: Endgame is a thoroughly unsatisfying movie as a stand-alone piece of cinema, but full of heart-in-your-throat payoffs if you’ve invested in the 22 Marvel movies released over the eleven years prior to its release.
 
The Witcher on Netflix never really grabbed me on an episode-by-episode level, but it became remarkable when I we finished the season and pulled all the disparate narrative strands and timelines together.
 
Trying to engage with either of these works as a stand-alone is to read against the grain. The creators are playing by a fresh set of narrative expectations, once that started with home-video and repeated viewings. They’re film and TV of the binge-watch era, with narrative payoffs no longer confined to a singular arc or instalment. Their ambition is far-reaching and long-term.
 
And now, with Spiderman: No Way Home in 2021, the ambitions are more audacious. Marvel lays claim to two prior iterations of the character, bringing in actors and characters from movies stretching back to the Sam Raimi trilogy that saw its first instalment released in 2001. Laying claim to earlier, stand-alone works and making them part of the continuity.
 
You have seen these films, they whisper. You remember this version from 20 years ago. Get excited that they’re coming back.
 
Better yet, go back and watch it again. Binge watch every Spiderman movie ever made, because they’re connected now. They’re relevant.
 
But when you re-watch, consider this: the 2001 Spiderman deployed the same narrative that lay at the heart of every Superhero film of the era. Give your protagonist powers, introduce a life-changing conflict, and trace their transformative arc all the way through the conclusion. A story designed to be one-and-done, no prior knowledge necessary.
 
A legacy of a bygone age, made by people who never really understand what made comic books great.
It’s no surprise that Marvel embraces the possibilities of the binge-watch era, because print comics have spent decades exploring the pleasures of ongoing continuity and call-backs. The version of Spiderman you read about in comics today is the same character who debuted in 1962, with sixty years of legacy characters and stories to play off, each new tale iterating a core concept out rather than changing his life forever.
 
A thing fiction writers and publishers haven’t seemed to realise yet: we can pull these tricks off too. Not just the best-sellers of yesteryear, but everyone with the ambition and patience to build a readership.
 
It’s not easy. Like TV, like film, there’s a convention of the stand-alone story that’s ingrained in the way we approach storytelling, but it’s just that—a convention. A legacy of an era where we all fought for shelf space, and there were costs associated with keeping backlist titles available that prohibited relying upon them as a source of potential revenue.
 
But those days are gone. Ebooks and print-on-demand technology make back lists readily available, and the binge-read is a tool that changes narrative assumptions just as surely as the binge-watch, if you care to use it.
 
Like TV and film, the people who have realised the power of that are typically coming from outside the industry. Storytellers familiar with other forms, applying the lessons to prose and breaking all the rules along the way. People who don’t have to unlearn narrative conventions in order to take advantage of the new forms.