For me, it is about identifying the things that you find interesting that no one else finds interesting. That’s one way to view your job as a writer: It’s to tell stories that no one else is going to tell unless you do. I feel like there are a lot of stories that we read that anyone could have told. There are books that you read, or movies or TV you watch, and you feel almost anyone could have written them.
There’s also a good Annie Dillard quote that’s mentioned in the interview:
You (writers) have been sent here to give voice to your own astonishment.
I hadn’t thought of it this way before, but it seems to be a decent goal, I think. Write what only you can write. And I would broaden that to: Make what only you can make. I’m trying to figure out what that means for me, both for writing and for everything else.
I recently came across Maggie Appleton’s article on digital gardens. Oh my goodness, this is delightful. I’m sure some small part of it is just nostalgia for the old days of the web, but the idea seems good and solid nonetheless. I love digital gardens. (See Mike Caulfield’s The Garden and the Stream and Swyx’s Digital Garden Terms of Service for more in this vein.)
Exploring some of these gardens led me to the idea of learning in public (also see Gift Egwuenu’s Learning in Public talk). Very closely related to digital gardens, of course, but a different angle to look at it from. It also nicely parallels the working in public idea I posted about recently.
I’m looking forward to adopting more of these practices myself. Not sure yet exactly what form that will take, but at the moment I’m thinking it’ll probably be the notes system I mentioned. While that would be doable with the website engine I have now, it wouldn’t be very ergonomic, so I’m probably going to retool. (And by probably I mean almost certainly, because I am an inveterate toolmaker at heart. I’ve written out plans for a new version of Slash, my blog engine, that will easily support notes as well as blog posts and web pages. More on that soon.)
I have now passed 50,000 words on the novel, making this the longest piece I’ve ever written, period. It’s a good feeling. A few unsorted related thoughts:
One of the things I’ve reminded myself of over and over again is that no book is perfect. All novels have imperfections. This realization has been tremendously liberating.
Somewhere along the way I realized that (in my view) I’ll probably learn more from writing multiple novels than I would from toiling a lot longer on a single novel. My goal is to write something that is good enough, then move on to the next book so I can improve more rapidly. (Polishing one book for a long time can obviously create spectacular results. I guess what I’m saying is I’m impatient.)
At this point I’m figuring out how to pull threads together for the ending. The ending! I’ve never gotten this far before. It feels easier — so much downhill momentum, with the bulk of the book at my back — but also harder, since I’ve only ended short things before, and there are many more threads to work with. I’ve reread the first part of the book to remember what I wrote long ago, though, and that’s helping with getting the story to pay off its earlier promises.
There’s a China Miéville quote I came across a few months back (I need to find it again), basically saying that he only worldbuilds what’s in the story itself. I’m beginning to suspect that may be the kind of writer I am. Or at least the kind I am right now. I like the act of worldbuilding — and it’s a great source of ideas for the story — but I don’t think I’m patient enough to do it in any great detail before I start writing. (Sensing a theme here.)
Also: this novel-writing thing is insanely hard, but man is it fun.
I added an about the blog page (still somewhat of a rough draft) which also explains how to use the new tag inclusion/exclusion controls in the feeds. (If you want the RSS feed but don’t want to see any of my posts about art, for example, you can do that now.)
Last night Richard L. Bushman gave a Center for Latter-day Saint Arts Zoom keynote:
In commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the Restoration of the Gospel, foremost scholar and historian of the Prophet Joseph Smith, Richard Bushman shares the art of the First Vision. He addresses this seminal event in the Latter-day Saint faith tradition as it has been visually represented from artists all over the globe. Bushman also answers questions about why the arts are significant to revelatory development.
With my permission (though with the artwork’s Creative Commons license it wasn’t actually necessary), he included my Let Him Ask of God piece at the end of his talk. That part starts around 29:54. (I haven’t watched the whole thing yet — it just got uploaded an hour or so ago — but I’m very much looking forward to it.)
Yesterday I found out that one of my coworkers (not on my direct team, but in my division) passed away from Covid on Friday. She’s the first person I actually know who has died from it. Unsettling and surreal and very sad.
One of my favorite ways that creative people communicate is by “working with their garage door up,” to steal Robin Sloan’s phrase. This is the opposite of the Twitter account which mostly posts announcements of finished work: it’s Screenshot Saturday; it’s giving a lecture about the problems you’re pondering in the shower; it’s thinking out loud about the ways in which your project doesn’t work at all. It’s so much of Twitch. I want to see the process. I want to see you trim the artichoke. I want to see you choose the color palette.
I love this kind of communication personally, but I suspect it also creates more invested, interesting followings over the long term.
Yes! I too love it, and I’ll be doing more of it here from now on. (I think long ago I used to do it to some degree, but somewhere along the way a fit of self-consciousness took it out of me.) No luck yet finding the original Robin Sloan source, but if any of you come across it, let me know.
I’ve also enjoyed reading through the rest of Andy’s notes, by the way. Itching to do something similar here. More to come. (I’ve already been planning to rewrite the backend engine for this site — it’s old and decrepit — so this is a fortuitous time to come across this idea.)
