Time to Write

Surviving as a writer (Doug Rushkoff advises...)

Galleycat features an audio interview with author Douglas Rushkoff, who is branching out from magazine articles, books and comic books into a games-related graphic novel (“X”). His advice for writers now:

"My real strategy now is to survive by any means necessary. There's less money out there [for writers]. In the old days, between books, you'd call Playboy or GQ and pick up a $3-a-word article for something ... Now you're lucky to get a buck or buck-fifty from a major magazine. All you can really do is diversify and focus at the same time…”

 He means that you should focus on your expertise and branch into any medium into which you can take it. That could include gaming—which, Rushkoff points out—has all the money and is where some of the most innovations in narrative are taking place.

His site is rushkoff.com and his most recent book (other than the graphic novels) is Life Inc (How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back).

 (For help with creating your writing career, get my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, WHSmith and many other online and offline retailers.)

Your writing future is digital - WGA panel excerpts

The Writers Guild of America sponsored a couple of panels at the 2009 Digital Hollywood Fall Conference in Santa Monica. Here's part of a report on those, from the WGA's newsletter:

Transmedia Storytelling: Writing and producing for the multi-platform universe, explored the question: With a whole universe of entertainment – TV, broadband, DVD, Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, Manga, books, Alternate Reality, games – tomorrow’s writers will need more than a three-act structure to engage an audience – what does the future have in store?...

“Heroes is basically an MMOG (massive multiplayer online game),” [said] Flint Dille. “We’re in a time now where the fans have to own part of the story. There is an expectation that we will see the story on all mediums: games, mobile, etc.”

Aside from high quality standards, sophisticated web-savvy audiences who interact and years of project development, there is one other challenge facing writers when it comes to writing for new media. “A show can’t just be ‘a show’ on the Internet. It has to be everything,” said [John] Fasano, which precisely sums up the key message from this fall’s Digital Hollywood conference. The future is moving to an integrated digital media world, and adaptation is fast becoming part of survival. "

I think the same is going to be true for writers starting out in all media. 

(For more information on New Media and the WGAW, click here. For more information on Digital Hollywood, click here.)

(For help with all kinds of writing, buy my book, “Your Writing Coach,” which guides you from idea through to publication. More information at www.yourwritingcoach.com.)

A writer's revenge

This is one of those heart-warming stories where a writer (in this case, songwriter and musician Dave Carroll) is able to use his skill to get revenge on an uncaring company.

After months of frustration trying to get United Airlines to compensate him for damage done to his expensive guitar, Carroll gave up and took his case to the airwaves—or at least YouTube. He wrote and filmed a song (quite catchy, actually) called “United Breaks Guitars” and put it up on the internet.

His goal was to get a million views.

 

So far he has almost five million.

 

I’m guessing United is wishing they’d paid him his $1200 in damages.

 

Writing warriors, let Dave be our inspiration!

(for tips and techniques for being more creative and productive subscribe now to my free monthly Brainstorm e-bulletin. Just send an email request to BstormUK@aol.com)

Do you (also) suffer from Technobivalence?

I don’t know if “technobivalence” is a word (well, it is now) but that’s what I’d call my attitude toward all the (maybe) great devices sprouting up and I was delighted to find, via Robert Crampton’s “Beta Male” column in the Times magazine, that I am not alone. Are you one of us, too?

 Crampton told of a party at which a friend showed off an expensive new digital camera but admitted, “I haven’t used it yet. I’m frightened of it.”

 Crampton then confessed that when his kids aren’t around he’s often unable to turn the TV on because he can’t work the four remote controls that go with it.

 He’s mastered his computer, mobile phone and tape recorder, he says, “but I still hate and fear them.”

 The fact that kids don’t bother with instruction manuals when they get a new device but just start pushing buttons is obvious, but I hadn’t thought about why it’s so much harder for us to do that. Crampton’s explanation is right on target: “I belong to a generation that remembers when…if you hit the wrong button the thing would break. Or at the very least cock up your life.”

 Yes, for instance by making a day’s worth of writing vanish.

 I don’t know exactly when it happens, but I think there’s some kind of turning point as you get older when you go from craving complexity (“Wow, look at all the stuff this thing can do!”) to craving simplicity (“How do you turn this thing on?”).

 I call this technobivalence instead of technophobia because although we fear these devices, we still crave them—or at least what we are told they can do. Count yourself lucky if your household includes a ten-year-old who can sooth your fears and show you how it’s done. Not that you’ll remember it the next time.

(for tips on how to be more creative and productive, sign up for my free monthly Brainstorm e-bulletin--just send an email request now to BstormUK@aol.com)

 

Oh oh is the free office coming to an end?

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, coffee shops in New York are starting to discourage or even forbid the use of laptops during peak hours and reducing the number of electrical outlets available to customers. They found that too many people were nursing a cup of coffee for hours while writing the great American novel or screenplay.

 If this phenomenon spreads to Los Angeles, the number of unproduced screenplays will diminish overnight. In the West Hollywood Starbucks there always are at least four, and often six or eight, frowning aspiring screenwriters toiling over their screens—some bring in extension cords to plug in.

Other places that I often recommend if you need a working space away from home include your local library, the lobbies of big businesses, large hotel lobbies, unpopular pubs, and airport chapels or meditation rooms (obviously behaving in a way that does not disrespect anybody else who is there--better for brainstorming than bashing away on a laptop).

For tips and techniques for being more creative and productive, subscribe now to my free monthly Brainstorm e-bulletin. Just send an email request to BstormUK@aol.com.

Change your life with a Cylie Rule (don't miss this one!)

In an article a while back, How design magazine featured a great story which they used to help encourage people to stretch their creativity—but I think it goes far beyond that.

 The story concerned a schoolgirl named Cylie Pastian who developed bone cancer. One thing she was sad about was that her bones were too fragile to allow her to continue playing basketball. In response, the players and coaches at her school in South Dakota invented the Cylie Rule: whenever there’s a foul, anyone recovering from bone cancer has the right to check into the game and shoot her team’s free throws.

 The article suggest you consider what rule in your life or organization inhibits creativity, and then come up with a Cylie Rule to replace it.

 Great idea, and I’d suggest extending it to ask what rule or standard procedure in any part of your life is holding you back and coming up with a Cylie Rule to overcome it. Here’s one example:

• When the dishes and other housework pile up, anyone writing a novel has the right to ask the rest of the family to help out. (If your kids are smart, suddenly they’ll be writing novels, too…)

 Equally important, you can also make up a Cylie Rule that gives you the right to behave in ways that may be more productive or enjoyable:

• When attending a boring event of any kind, a creative person has the right to use his or her creativity to figure out how to get away and do something more enjoyable (or to make the event more entertaining for themselves and maybe for others).

• When stuck in a pattern of interaction with someone else that’s not working, the creative person has the right to interrupt that pattern with something unexpected that will change the nature of the interaction.

If you’d like to share your own Cylie Rules, please leave them in the comments section or send them to me directly at j4london@aol.com.

(for regular tips on how to be more creative and productive, subscribe to my free monthly Brainstorm e-bulletin. Just send an email request to BstormUK@aol.com)

The most important question about your writing

The other day I presented a workshop for a chapter of the Academy for Chief Executives on going “Beyond Brainstorming.” This covers advanced creativity techniques and it’s always interesting to see how quickly these methods yield new, practical ideas.

But what struck me this time was an exercise in which the executive said his goal was to come up with a better web site. He revealed that he’d paid a lot of money to a company that promised to get his company to the top of the Google search engine results. They did it—but very few of the many people visiting the site actually contacted the company to find out more or to buy their service. The moral of the story is:

Be very clear on what it is you really want.

In this case, they didn’t really want lots of random visitors to their site—they wanted visitors who would buy. (And we quickly generated several ways for them to attract those kinds of visitors without being number one on Google.)

Sometimes it’s useful to ask that question about our writing, too. What do you want? It could be:

• the creative satisfaction of expressing yourself through your writing;
• the money that comes with having a best-seller;
• to leave a legacy (of wisdom or experience) for your children and grand-children;
• to have a book that will serve as a calling card for other things you do, like consulting or teaching.

Each of these would lead in a different direction, but I see lots of writers who are not matching their writing practice to their real goal. For example, if you want to leave your story behind for your children and grand-children, self-publishing is a terrific solution; if you want to have a best-seller, it’s (usually) not.

What do you want to get from your writing? Are you following the best path toward that destination?

Where do you write? This time it's the bunker...

In the previous post, I described where Guillermo del Toro writes: his man cave. Today we discover that Gay Talese has a "bunker." It's described in New York magazine as "a plush cave [that word again] under the streets of Manhattan...

"There is no phone, no e-mail, no view, no sound. Along the walls there are shelves filled with brown box files that Talese has covered in collage."

The boxes contain his notes, photos, and other reference material for each of his projects incuding his best-known book, "They Neighor's Wife." They are all color-coded and carefully labeled.

Another interesting note about how he works: "He spends years reducing his research until at long last it all fits on a single piece of shirt board. And then he draws it. And then he starts writing."

(There's a chapter in my book, Your Writing Coach, about setting up a writing space that works best for you. You can get the book from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online and offline retailers.)

Where do you write? Meet 'the man cave'

In an article in the Independent, Guy Adams describes the creative space owned by writer/director Guillermo del Toro, the “Man Cave”:

The Man Cave has blood-red wallpaper. Its hallways are filled with monster statuettes, mock-baroque paintings, and Gothic objets d'art. The bookshelves are stacked with leather-bound notebooks, on which he sketched out plot-lines and characters for his best-known films: Blade II, Hellboy, and the critically acclaimed Pan's Labyrinth. It is, in other words, his creative hub.

"I bought it because my crap used to take up three-quarters of the house, and my wife couldn't stand it," he explains. "One day we were fighting because I wanted wall-space near the kitchen for a statue of a rutting woman zombie. And she said, 'you should live in a cave'. So I did what I was told. Now the family home is pristine, and all my crap is in this crazy place where I write."

Is that cool, or what! (OK, I know mostly only my male readers will agree…)

He has a huge number of projects underway. How does he do it?:

"I compartmentalise my life very easily," he says. "When I'm doing one thing, I'm really doing one thing. I have a sign on my office at the studio. It says 'fuck off, I'm writing'. When that sign is on the door, nobody knocks. I just put music on and I occupy myself very hard. And that is how I get things done. And I never stop. I hate free time. I hate down time. This is what I do."

(If you’re interested in cultivating focus, have a look at my book, “Focus: the power of targeted thinking,” published by Pearson and available on Amazon and other online and offline retailers in the UK—the US edition has been postponed to March 2010.)

What the creative person needs to be today

On Creativity-online.com, Joyce King Thomas, Chief Creative Officer of the ad agency, McCann Erickson, New York, said some interesting things about being creative in the ad agency world. It struck me that you could say almost exactly the same thing about books, screenplays, and other writing projects these days:

“To be a great creative person today, you have to be open to anything. You have to come to every project with zero preconceptions of how you're going to solve the problem. Advertising is in total, absolute flux right now. The mediums we use, the way we make money, the way agencies are organized. Nothing is stet.

What we do today is some kind of hybrid of advertising, communication, ideation and conversation creation. Ultimately, it has the same goal of persuading consumers to behave differently. I'm not about the past. Advertising, or whatever you call what we do today, is way more interesting now. What has always been most interesting to me about this business is that, at its core, it's about changing someone's mind. The biggest challenge agencies have today is juggling the need to be financially prudent and the imperative to move forward.”

The only difference is that as writers our goal is to get the readers/viewers to FEEL something, rather than to change their behaviour (although with self-help or political or ecology books we may be doing that as well). And, as is true of ad people, we ignore at our peril the changes in the business and marketing aspects of what we do.

(For tips on how to be more creative, sign up for my free monthly Brainstorm e-bulletin. Just send an email request to BstormUK@aol.com)