Smart People Saying Smart Things

Watch This: Wrestling Isn’t Wrestling

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , ,

I watch a fair bit of pro-wrestling. Partially because I’m a fan and partially because it’s an extraordinarily complex sequential narrative with decades of continuity, and I like figuring out what I can learn from it as a writer.

If you’ve got twenty minutes to spare, Max Landis does a phenomenal job of explaining the appeal of wrestling – and why it’s narratives are so complex – by parodying two decades of the career of pro-wrestler HHH. I’m not the greatest fan of Landis – Chronicle bored the pants of me – but he gets this one thousand percent right. Wrestling fans should watch it for the parody elements. Non-wrestling fans should watch it ’cause it says something powerful about character, evolution, and story.

You Do Not Need To Consumed By art

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

We like the idea of an artist destroyed by their talent. It’s part of the cultural myth we build up around art and writing, designed to move the conversation away from it being work one expects to be compensated for, much like conversations about muses and inspiration and creativity as a powerful force.

It leads too all sorts of bad habits. The biggest of which is the decision that a artists needs to be a artists twenty-four-seven. To stop producing, for whatever reason, is a sign that you’re not truly talented and instead just engaging in hack work. This is why the YOU MUST WRITE EVERY DAY crowd are so loud and so prevalent among writing advice.

I’m thinking about this today, after reading Laura Vanderkam’s post about the writing life and playing the long game (two topics pretty near and dear to my heart):

As for making money while writing books, I have never believed that book writing needs to be all-consuming. It wasn’t for Toni Morrison, writing The Bluest Eye at night after her kids went to bed, and let’s face it, we’re not likely to produce anything like The Bluest Eye no matter how much time we spend writing. Books are projects like any other. You can carve out time to seek out high-paying but not-terribly-demanding work to pay the bills while you work on the book. Many writers do things like writing website copy for businesses, press releases, etc.. Incidentally, you can make time for the rest of your life too. I’m always amused by the lines in book acknowledgements in which authors (generally, male authors) thank their families for putting up with all their missed dinners. Not only am I not missing dinner, I’m generally cooking it. –

See more at: http://lauravanderkam.com/2015/03/writing-life-playing-long-game/#sthash.aGdcWjgh.dpuf

Personally, I’m starting to embrace the idea of the weekend. I “take Sundays off” by aiming to produce 100 words, maximum, before I step away from the computer. It gives me time to do other things.

Charlotte Nash on Project Based Writing

PETERMBALL Smart Advice from Smart People , , ,

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 defined outcome, project-based is how I approach stories, too. It wouldn’t be particularly helpful if a construction site’s management policy was We’ll build stuff every day (jokes aside, many an engineered project is effectively managed to deliver on time or early).

It’s an apt metaphor, I think, and the full blog post is pretty damn awesome. It’s a great resource if you’re unable to write every day, or trying to get a project done in a limited time frame (I kinda wish I’d read this before I attempted the novella diary). Worth checking out, especially when you consider that Charlotte’s approach got her first novel drafted in three weeks, then revised and ready for submission less than two months later.