Posts Tagged ‘creativity’

Quick Tip: A Unique Solution to the Author Bio Dilemma

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

When you pub­lish a story, they usu­ally ask you for an author’s bio–just a short some­thing about your­self.   Did you know that a lot of the time, they’ll let you write absolutely ANYTHING in those suck­ers?   Online, espe­cially, they don’t seem to really care that much what’s in it.

This is a loop­hole a pro­lific writer can exploit.  Take a really nice 500 word flash fic­tion story, a fic­tional his­tory of a fic­tional you, per­haps, and chop it up into 50 word incre­ments.  Label each piece (Part 1 of 10) and so on at the start or end of the text.  Let cool for 20 min­utes.  Now you have 10 ready-​​made bios to go out with your next ten short story sales.    At the very least, you’ve saved your­self the time spent ago­niz­ing over whether to write about your­self in first per­son or third per­son, and whether you should men­tion your cats or not.  And you’re being cre­ative, instead of cut­ting and past­ing the last one you used, updat­ing it to remove divorced spouses, dead pets, or jobs you no longer have.

The best part, how­ever, is that you’ve also cre­ated a trea­sure hunt/​puzzle quest in your read­ers.  “Huh,” they will say.  That bio was weird.  Part 3 of 10, you say?  I really need to col­lect the other 9 parts.”  It’s viral mar­ket­ing! Wow, I just threw up a lit­tle in my mouth as I typed the v-​​word.

There is a risk is that your writ­ing career will crap out and you’ll only get 3 or 4 of the 10 pub­lished, but that’s a risk we all run in cre­ative endeav­ors. Keep at it, and I think you’ll get them all out there.

I almost want to get writ­ing a bunch of short fic­tion again just so I can try this idea.  If you do it, let me know how it goes for you. I fig­ure only a cou­ple of us will get to pull this off before they start clos­ing the loophole.

Admittedly, this is a silly idea, so if you think it’s ridicu­lous, know that it was pre­sented thor­oughly tongue-​​in-​​cheek.

The Writer’s Trait of Reacting Uniquely

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

This quote really struck home for me recently, via some­one on Twitter who I can’t find any­more because I fol­low too many people.

‘To be a writer, a cre­ative per­son, you must retain your abil­ity to react uniquely. — Dwight V. Swain

Reacting uniquely to things got me in a lot of trou­ble in col­lege, where I had a rep­u­ta­tion of being pretty obnox­ious with my line of ques­tion­ing in class.  I was required by my adviser to take a phi­los­o­phy class. Fine, I thought. I could han­dle that.  Philosophy seemed inter­est­ing.  But in class dis­cus­sions, I couldn’t help but find that most of the ques­tions they were ask­ing had been answered defin­i­tively by bio­log­i­cal sci­ence, or could be any­way.  This did not endear me to the future phi­los­o­phy majors who appar­ently don’t like being reminded reg­u­larly that we’re bags of water and meat.

It’s not that I was react­ing uniquely in gen­eral, but I was react­ing to the mate­r­ial in a way that was both unique and some­what (hell, totally) inap­pro­pri­ate for the con­text of the class.  Some might say I was pio­neer­ing cross-​​disciplinary think­ing, that I was a vision­ary ahead of my time.  Mostly, I was that  annoy­ing nerd who wouldn’t shut the hell up about evo­lu­tion and genet­ics when oth­ers wanted to talk Kant.

Yesterday, I talked about how I felt as if my thoughts were grow­ing more shal­low with time. Part of this fear has been also that my reac­tions to the world have grown less unique.  Have they really? Or have I just real­ized how many more peo­ple there are that react like I do? Then there’s the fear­ful thought that per­haps I never had unique reac­tions at all.

Reacting uniquely, think­ing uniquely, is some­thing our soci­ety actively selects against early on.  There are rules, unspo­ken ones, about how we are expected to for­mu­late ideas and opin­ions, and if we step out­side of those, it’s pos­si­ble to be socially stig­ma­tized.  But hav­ing a unique per­spec­tive is a big part of what makes a suc­cess­ful cre­ative, as Swain said.  Personally, I’m deter­mined to make a bet­ter effort at cul­ti­vat­ing this aspect of myself.

It takes effort to get past sur­face reac­tions, to lis­ten deeper to what our sub­con­scious has to say about things.  When I do this, I’m some­times fas­ci­nated but what a part of me believes.  Sometimes, I’m appalled at what I find out, things that make me seem not nearly so cul­tured and evolved as I think I am ratio­nally.  But the deeper truth, even if it’s an ugly one, has more impact than the sur­face obser­va­tion.  The trick is to put the reac­tion into writ­ing in an hon­est way, no mat­ter what.  Recording your reac­tions hon­estly is just as impor­tant as the abil­ity to react uniquely, I would argue, even if it makes you look like an asshole.

The only way I can think of to work on this is to slow my thoughts down and prac­tice more self-​​examination, so that is what I am doing.  Listen to myself, and lis­ten to oth­ers.  Take more time to for­mu­late ideas and opin­ions.  Question my reac­tions for deeper motivations.

How about you?  Are there any tricks you would like to share with the class?

On Types of Writers Block

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

When I first began writ­ing in earnest, I didn’t believe in writer’s block.  You know how it is.  When you’re com­pletely lack­ing in self-​​consciousness about your works, it’s much eas­ier to get things done.  Doubt hasn’t entered the pic­ture then, nor a dozen other ever-​​present con­cerns, experience-​​driven instincts, and mild pho­bias that you develop with time.  These things are internal-​​process bar­na­cles that form as an outer crust on the hull of your cre­ativ­ity.  They weigh you down a bit, but when the wind is right, you sail straight enough despite them.   The sail­ing is smooth and easy at first with­out them, but you prob­a­bly have no real des­ti­na­tion in mind, and the sail­ing is so smooth that it’s down­right bor­ing to any pas­sen­gers along for the ride.

Since my days of proto-​​writerhood, about 8 years ago, I’ve dis­cov­ered that writer’s block is real enough, and not only that, it comes from a vari­ety of causes. Because writ­ing is a damned bor­ing thing to talk about lit­er­ally, I’m going to flog this naval metaphor as I explore the forms of block I have encoun­tered in my years at sea.  (The irony of me rely­ing on this—me, the kid who didn’t see the ocean for the first time until he was 19—is not lost.)

No wind

The most com­mon block to my writ­ing is a lack of wind in my sails.  The dri­ving force behind my work goes away, and leaves me in the Sargasso Sea of the blank page.  Why does the wind aban­don me?  Why does the wind do any­thing?  The fac­tors are too com­plex to pick apart.   The wind of my inspi­ra­tion can come from a lot of dif­fer­ent places, mostly deep inter­nal aspects of my self that I don’t really feel com­fort­able exam­in­ing too closely.  It feels like frag­ile machin­ery that would be too easy to dis­turb when it’s work­ing right, and when it’s not, I never want to risk tin­ker­ing for fear of break­ing some­thing completely.

When faced with a lack of inspi­ra­tion, I shut down almost entirely as a writer.  I sit in mySar­gasso Sea and pass the time as best I can.  Read, watch TV. Sometimes, I draw.

When I’m clever, I remem­ber the god­damned boat has oars, and I heave to as best I can.

Right now, I can’t even find where I put the oars, but that’s another story entirely.

Wrecked on the rocks

Oops, steered this one wrong.  Now I’m stuck in the muck, marooned on the rocks.  I write myself into a cor­ner often, espe­cially when I don’t have a clear idea of where I’m headed—when I’m writ­ing for the fun of the jour­ney and not the destination.

The best way for me to avoid this is to know where I’m going ahead of time.  For a while there, after con­ceiv­ing of a story, the very next thing I attempted to do was envi­sion the point or the finale.  What would it build to?  With that in mind, I could set sail.  And if I saw a bet­ter des­ti­na­tion along the way, there was no rea­son I couldn’t change course!  My plans or out­lines are never set in stone.  They’re there just to keep me from the rocks.

There’s a leak

Sometimes you set sail with a story made of lit­tle more than a vague idea and a half-​​sketched out char­ac­ter con­cept.  And it isn’t until you’re in deep waters that you dis­cover your ini­tial con­cept is full of holes (made by the worm­rot of the implau­si­bil­i­tus, incon­sis­ten­tia, or been-​​there-​​done-​​that-​​allia species).  Now you find your­self sink­ing, maybe bail­ing for your life with a lit­tle hand wav­ing, but the boat’s tak­ing on the waters of dis­be­lief and some of your pas­sen­gers aren’t going to see the jour­ney to the end.  “No thanks,” they say as they dive off and swim back to shore. “We’ll take the next one.”

I scut­tle a lot of story boats this way delib­er­ately.  The ini­tial rush of an idea, those hard fast winds that come early; too often, I would set sail imme­di­ately with­out any plan­ning at all, buoyed by the excite­ment of the fresh­ness of it in my mind.   More often than not, when I dis­cover the flaws in my half-​​assed idea, I would sink the whole thing and move on.  I’ve prob­a­bly aban­doned five times as many story ideas as I’ve ever fin­ished.  I was a strong swim­mer in those days, but now I would just as soon arrive in a leaky boat and start work on patching.

I try to never patch-​​edit while I’m work­ing on the first draft. That’s a sure fire way to end up com­pletely bogged down.

Listening to the Crew

When things aren’t going well, the crew, made up of internal-​​editors, voices of self-​​doubt, and so on, they tend to get rowdy.  Sometimes, even when things are going well, they’re a noisy bunch, and it’s tempt­ing to give in and lis­ten to the nasty bunch of swine.

If I had my way, I’d make them all walk to plank at the start of a voy­age, but they’re not com­pletely worth­less.  Best to gag them, tie them up, and throw them into the hull until you’re done with your maiden voy­age, I say.

NOT Listening to the 1st Mate

My friend Jay Lake calls his sub­con­scious Bob, but I tend to call my sub­con­cious “Potatohead,” because he’s really not too bright.  Sure, he’s cre­ative and all, but he doesn’t have any con­cept of the real­i­ties of being a human being.  Impractical, is what I’m saying.

But when it comes to sail­ing, Commander Potatohead was born into a life at sea.  He may not know how to bal­ance a check­book or even earn a decent liv­ing, but the bas­tard knows how to sail bet­ter than I ever will.

I don’t always give him his due.  Me, Captain Ego, I want to be right all the time, want to be in charge.  I don’t like lis­ten­ing to the sea­soned advice of Mr. Potatohead who really knows these waters bet­ter than any­one.  When you fail to lis­ten,  you often end up  with a mutiny on your hands, marooned, or stuck in a Sargasso Sea.  Again.

That’s not even tak­ing into con­sid­er­a­tion the dif­fi­culty of com­mu­ni­ca­tion! While I speak the Queen’s English, Commander Potatohead speaks some patois that I’ve never even heard of before.  I’m pretty sure he orig­i­nates from some­where in Polynesia—some obscure island nobody has ever heard of.  So we can’t really talk.  We resort to draw­ing vague pic­tures, ges­tur­ing wildly in some ridicu­lous game of conscious/​subconscious Charades.  And worse, we don’t keep the same sleep sched­ules, so we have to leave mes­sages for one another on scraps of paper, rope, what­ever we can find.

Frankly, it’s amaz­ing we have ever com­pleted a voy­age together at all.

* * *

But we have. And I’ll be damned if I am going to let any of these things get in my way to com­plet­ing my jour­neys in the future.  I don’t care if I make it to the other side leak­ing like a sieve, tied up and held hostage by the crew,  being slowly inched over the edge by a Commander Potatohead wear­ing an eye-patch—I’m going to make it.

When I look at cre­ative block in the abstract, it’s much more intim­i­dat­ing.  Abstract con­cepts aren’t eas­ily defeated, but when I con­cretize the idea into a giant tuber wear­ing an eye-​​patch, it sud­denly seems so much eas­ier to overcome.

Maybe that will work for you too.  Yarr.

Writing is a Sail Boat, And I’m Stuck on the Reefs

Labeling Oneself as an Artist and Why I Have Avoided It

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I’ve strongly resisted the label of artist for a long time, because I don’t feel wor­thy of it, on the one hand, and on the other hand, to avoid the neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tions that are entwined with the label in my back­wards, red­neck brain.

Who is an artist? (the ingrained notions)

Here’s what I grew up think­ing of artists–not actively think­ing or delib­er­ately decid­ing to believe, but just absorb­ing in Kansas/​Midwestern culture.

Artists are peo­ple who do not have real jobs.  They are as likely to spend their time drink­ing absinthe, doing drugs, and sleep­ing around as they are to do any­thing hon­est and deserv­ing of com­pen­sa­tion.  Artists do not con­tribute to the growth and wel­fare of soci­ety in mean­ing­ful ways.  They are prob­a­bly not very smart, because if they were smart, they would have gone into a pro­fes­sion like engi­neer­ing or med­i­cine where they could actu­ally do some good and make real money to sup­port their fam­i­lies.  Artists, above all else, are irre­spon­si­ble, child­ish, and poor.  POOR!

Conversely, artists are tal­ented (even if that tal­ent isn’t val­ued very highly).  They can draw any­thing they can imag­ine effort­lessly.  Their imag­i­na­tions are supe­rior to almost any­one elses’s.  They speak a secret lan­guage of color and form, and really, if you want to rearrange your liv­ing room and get some new cur­tains, an artist would not be a bad per­son to ask.  They’ll prob­a­bly help for beer money.

Why I am not an Artist (the rationalizations)

I’m cre­ative, sure.  I do a bit of writ­ing, but writ­ing isn’t art, because art is visual, and writ­ing is lan­guage.   And yes, I know how to oper­ate a cam­era, but art­work should con­vey emo­tions, tell a story, and my pho­tog­ra­phy doesn’t con­vey any such thing.  Anyone can pick up a cam­era and point it at some­thing.  Anyone can take enough shots, throw­ing out the bad, to make them­selves look like a mod­er­ately decent photographer.

I’m a web designer, but design is not art.  Design is com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and it has strict rules (rules that I strug­gle every day to learn and under­stand bet­ter).   And any­way, I pri­mar­ily excel at writ­ing code and solv­ing tech­ni­cal prob­lems, less so than mak­ing things beau­ti­ful and artistic.

Despite my ingrained beliefs about artists as pro­fes­sion­als, I grew up secretly wish­ing I could be some kind of sci­ence artist, but I  wouldn’t ever really because I wanted to con­tribute and make money. And finally, for some rea­son, I can­not ever be an artist because I can­not draw any­thing that I pic­ture in my head.

Why I am an Artist (the realization)

First of all, most of the bull­shit I grew up believ­ing about artists is just that–bullshit.  Artists are as intel­li­gent as any­one else, if not more so,as respon­si­ble, and they are no more likely to drink heav­ily and do drugs than any­one else.  They con­tribute to soci­ety in less quan­tifi­able ways than say, an engi­neer, but they act in a way as society’s con­science, as it’s out­let.  As a means of self-​​reflection.  Artists play a role, and while I don’t quite under­stand that role, I know they have one and it’s deeply impor­tant.  Being an artist is a real job, and has all the bag­gage that jobs have.  It’s also really, really hard to make a liv­ing at.

Being any good does not deter­mine whether one is an artist or not.  And art encom­passes many more skills than just draw­ing.   My pho­tog­ra­phy may be some­thing any­one can do, but every once and a while I make some­thing nobody else  but me could make.  I’m actively try­ing to sell prints of my work actively, so I guess that right there makes me an artist in the same way that actively pur­su­ing pub­li­ca­tion made me a writer.

Design may or may not be art, but I’m a work­ing cre­ative indi­vid­ual.  Sometimes, what I cre­ate is art.  Sometimes, it’s crap.  Well, more often than not.  But I share more in com­mon with work­ing illus­tra­tors and painters now than I do with my friends who spend their days slic­ing DNA in laboratories.

So, yeah.  I am an artist.  Whatever that means–I’m still learn­ing. It’s not all that I am, but I’m done not call­ing myself that just because I can’t draw and I grew up believ­ing some kind of dumb things about who writ­ers are.  My life is cen­tered around cre­ative acts of one form or another, so.  There it is.

Have any of you ever resisted label­ing your­self like that, for sim­i­lar mix­tures of rea­sons?  I’m curi­ous to know if this is dif­fi­cult just for me, or if it is for others.

PS:  I keep try­ing to fix that draw­ing thing.  I’ve been stuck in the first cou­ple of chap­ters of “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” for a cou­ple of years.  Maybe this year will be the one that I finally get past the weird trac­ing stuff and start learn­ing how to stop myself from draw­ing on the left side of the brain.

Exit Funk, Stage Left

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

You might have noticed that I was in a bit of a funk last week.  Thank you to every­one who made lovely com­ments on my last post.  I was feel­ing a lit­tle ashamed about my whin­ing there, so I haven’t thanked or replied to any­one indi­vid­u­ally.  I appre­ci­ate you all being there for me when I get like this. Thank you for putting up with it.

I’m see­ing things  more clearly this week, and I feel some energy return­ing. Part of the prob­lem I sus­pect was that I had a really nasty cold, com­bined with com­ing down from all the excite­ment of being back home to see folks.

I’m focus­ing all my energy right now on becom­ing the best web designer I can.  I think the time for explor­ing other poten­tial careers is not when you’re scrap­ing by as a free­lancer.  I’ve been slow to com­mit to life as a free­lancer, wor­ried about any num­ber of things asso­ci­ated with it, but I’m slowly con­quer­ing those fears and start­ing to treat my busi­ness like, well, a busi­ness, instead of just a guy work­ing out of his office all day.

I have plans to rebuild this site from the ground up, as well as build a photo store to sell prints of my land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy.  Stay tuned for more about all that in the future.

Thanks for hang­ing in there with me.  I will hope­fully start to have cool things to show and share again soon.

Writing: Your Subconscious and You

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I have a very rocky rela­tion­ship with my subconscious.

On the one hand, my sub­con­scious is the font of my best ideas.  Even when I writ­ing some­thing that has come mostly from ego-​​brain think­ing, it inserts cool things, catches ideas that I missed the first time around.  It’s some­times like hav­ing a bet­ter writer sit­ting on your shoul­der catch­ing your missed opportunities.

On the other hand,  my subconscious’s inter­ests are not always mar­ketable inter­ests.  My sub­con­scious feeds me sto­ries about Kansas about once a week.  The state needs to start writ­ing me checks for the PR.  Lord knows they need a pos­i­tive face what with all the wackos that pop­u­late my home state.  So I write a lot of sto­ries about Kansas or set in Kansas. I’ve yet to find a mar­ket for that stuff, and I doubt any­one wants to read about it.  And yet my sub­con­scious per­sists.  I’m wrestling with Potatohead (that’s what I call my sub­con­scious) right now about a story that involves mole men and Kansas.    Excited to read that one? Yeah, didn’t think so. I keep telling him, we need postsin­gu­lar­ity sto­ries that use the entire galaxy as their set­ting.  We need fan­tasy sto­ries that take place in the New York sub­way sys­tem.  What does he feed me?   A story about a woman whose abu­sive dead hus­band comes back made out of pota­toes after being buried int he garden.

Yeah, I actu­ally wrote that one.  The rejec­tion Nick gave it at Clarkesworld was enough to put me off writ­ing for a year.  Not one you’ll prob­a­bly ever read. There are a lot of these.

On rare occa­sions, one of us presents an  idea that the other finds just as fas­ci­nat­ing.  My story “The Yeti Behind Me”  is a good exam­ple.  The idea of ghosts of extinct ani­mals popped up in con­ver­sa­tion.  I felt the indi­ca­tion of Potatohead’s inter­est in the form of an explo­sion just behind my right eye.  Potatohead is not sub­tle.   But if we agree on some­thing straight away, I know it’s got legs.

Problem has been, lately, I have stopped trust­ing Potatohead.  He’s fix­ated on the same things much of the time.  He’s not giv­ing me ideas that I can get excited about.  And vice versa.  I spend all day think­ing of story ideas and ask­ing “Hey, Potatohead, what do you think of this one?”  His response is gen­er­ally a resound­ing “meh.”

I feel like the two parts of my brain are at war lately  Each one knows some­thing use­ful about writ­ing, but they are not agree­ing on things nearly often enough for me to feel like I’m mov­ing for­ward with my “career.”  I can write sto­ries based pri­mar­ily on the input of one half, but those sto­ries are flat, and aren’t going to take me anywhere.

There’s one other, unre­lated thing about Potatohead that ticks me off.  When I’m asleep, peo­ple can talk directly to Potatohead.  I have had long and var­ied con­ver­sa­tions in my sleep that I con­ciously have no rec­ol­lec­tion of.  The thing that gets me into trou­ble is, Potatohead doesn’t know that I/​we are married.

Sarah has come to bed late on sev­eral occa­sions, only to see me shoot upright in bed and demand “Who is that?”

“It’s me,” she says.

“Me WHO?” Potatohead asks.

“Sarah,” she says, begin­ning to be a bit more exasperated.

“Sarah WHO?”

And that’s the last straw.  “Your WIFE,” she snaps.  “Go back to sleep.”

“Oh.  Okay,” says Potatohead and down he goes back to where he came.  And the only indi­ca­tor I have that this con­ver­sa­tion ever hap­pened is that my wife is pissed at me all morn­ing for no appar­ent reason.

How does one force his or her two minds to sit down and come to some kind of ami­ca­ble agree­ment?  We have crap that needs to get worked out if we are going to con­tinue to make a career of work­ing together.  This part­ner­ship is turn­ing sour, and I need to straighten things out quickly.  I also need to get it through Potatohead’s half-​​brain that ask­ing “Sarah WHO?” is not a good thing for either of us.  If any­one has any sug­ges­tions, I’d love to hear them.

The Evolutionary Basis for Creative Depression

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Last week, The Economist ran a really fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle on recent research into the evo­lu­tion­ary ben­e­fits of depres­sion.  Why do we get depressed?  Why did such a trait come to be, and if it’s so detri­men­tal to our health, why hasn’t it been selected against in the population?

Dr Nesse’s hypoth­e­sis is that, as pain stops you doing dam­ag­ing phys­i­cal things, so low mood stops you doing dam­ag­ing men­tal ones—in par­tic­u­lar, pur­su­ing unreach­able goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and resources. Therefore, he argues, there is likely to be an evolved mech­a­nism that iden­ti­fies cer­tain goals as unat­tain­able and inhibits their pursuit—and he believes that low mood is at least part of that mechanism.

Unobtainable or unre­al­is­tic goals?   Like, say, beat­ing the odds and sell­ing a story to the New Yorker?  Or sell­ing a screen­play to Hollywood for 6 fig­ures?  Or how about win­ning a Hugo award before you turn 30?  Could this explain why an unusu­ally high num­ber of artists and cre­ative types suf­fer from depression?

Creativity is often all about unre­al­is­tic goals.  The prob­lem is, with­out them, we would not strive to achieve the things we do finally achieve.  Aim for the stars, shoot for the moon, as they say.  So, depres­sion is tied directly to our ambi­tion and stick-​​to-​​it-​​iveness?  From the article:

Dr Nesse believes that per­sis­tence is a rea­son for the excep­tional level of clin­i­cal depres­sion in America—the coun­try that has the high­est depres­sion rate in the world. “Persistence is part of the American way of life,” he says. “People here are often dri­ven to pur­sue overly ambi­tious goals, which then can lead to depres­sion.” He admits that this is still an unproven hypoth­e­sis, but it is one worth con­sid­er­ing. Depression may turn out to be an inevitable price of liv­ing in a dynamic society.

Depression, an inevitabil­ity of a dynamic soci­ety and a cre­ative lifestyle?  What do you think?  Is it pos­si­ble that those of us who suf­fer so much “cre­ative” anguish would be much hap­pier with our lives if we aimed lower?  But would that just be giv­ing up, and just as bad as being depressed?  Which is worse, a lack of ambi­tion or being depressed?

The Dancing Guy Stands For All That We Do

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

There’s a video mak­ing the rounds.  It’s not shot very well, and it might even make you a lit­tle motion sick, but if you can make it through it, I think it’s really worth it.   Try to get at least halfway through.  Here’s the video.  More after you watch it.

Here’s my expe­ri­ence of watch­ing this in a nut shell:

For me at least, the guy looked like a fool!  What a crazy way of danc­ing, and danc­ing all by your­self like that?  How embarass­ing!  I could never do tha–oh wow, some­one joined in. Hey,  here comes another.  Holy Shit.

I felt a shiver run down my spine when I real­ized what I was watch­ing.  Then I started to grin.  And I’m still grin­ning about it.  This is one of the more uplift­ing things I have seen in a long time.  I’ve been pon­der­ing why that is.

It feels like a metaphor for every cre­ative endeav­our.   Writing espe­cially, or blog­ging.  You’re on your own at first.  Dancing all by your­self in front of an indif­fer­ent crowd.   It’s harder than hell to get over the feel­ing that what you’re doing could be just a lit­tle ridicu­lous.  You keep doing it though, because it feels good.

Then some­one starts pay­ing atten­tion.  Your friends, maybe.  Then their friends.  You accrete fans, or fol­low­ers, or read­ers, what­ever.  The next thing you know, you’ve started that.  It’s a brave damned thing to do, and it’s never struck me until watch­ing this just now.

I hope this moti­vates you like it has me.  Keep danc­ing.  Just keep danc­ing,  no mat­ter what.

Expedition Update

Wow, I have some amaz­ing friends.  We’ve raised $160 towards my pho­to­graphic expe­di­tion to Yellowstone.  Proving that I am the AntiChrist or some­thing, I now only need to raise $666.   Please con­sider throw­ing a few bucks in the pot. The pic­tures are SO going to be worth it.

On Recreating the Shower Creativity Surge (minus water)

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I know I am not the only writer who finds that inpira­tion oftens strikes in the bath. I’ve had a num­ber of con­ver­sa­tions with fel­low writ­ers about how strange it seems that some of our best ideas come to us at that moment. I can think of a cou­ple of the­o­ries as to why this happens:

  • The time of the day that you shower is par­tic­u­larly con­du­sive to cre­ative think­ing. I shower first thing in the morn­ing, and I know my cre­ative brain is a lit­tle bit stronger when the ana­lyt­i­cal brain is still swip­ing away the pre­vi­ous night’s cob­webs and puz­zling over what the hell those rab­bits on stilts were doing in that last dream.
  • The white noise sound gen­er­ated by the shower puts us into a par­tic­u­lar brain wave state or something.
  • The absence of dis­trac­tion from elec­tron­ics and media and every­thing allows us to actu­ally think freely. Personally, it is the only time in the day that I am not inter­act­ing with some kind of elec­tronic device. If I’m not on the com­puter, I’m watch­ing TV, or read­ing a book, and my iPhone is never more than a reach away. Basically, dis­trac­tions abound.

It is hard to say which of these three aspects are most directly respon­si­ble for that cre­ative burst, so I am going to try and recre­ate the expe­ri­ence with a few mod­i­fi­ca­tions to make it eas­ier to actu­ally cap­ture the ideas that come from it. One of the biggest prob­lems i have with hav­ing inspiri­a­tion then is that I can’t remem­ber it long enough to get it down on the com­puter or paper. Someone sug­gested putting in some kind of mark­ers or bath­room crayons in the tub so that you can write it out on the wall, but as I rent, I don’t want to deal with any poten­tial dis­as­ters there. So:

  1. Roll out of bed first thing and into the office. Turn on a white noise gen­er­at­ing pro­gram, or a long record­ing of rain.
  2. Turn off the inter­net con­nec­tion. Load up a full screen wordprocessor
  3. See what happens.

I will be attempt­ing this exper­i­ment in the next cou­ple of weeks, and will report back when I’ve gath­ered enough data to deter­mine whether it’s help­ful. If you want to join in, please do so. More peo­ple attempt­ing to do this could result in a bet­ter per­spec­tive on the phenomenon.

Photo by Flickr user Turyddu

On Getting Your Content in Front of People

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Smashing Magazine, a great web­site deal­ing with all things web design, had a really great arti­cle the other day titled “10 Ways to Put Your Content in Front of More People.”

Not all of these ideas are applic­a­ble to everyone–some are quite specif­i­cally techy.  Most cre­atives don’t really need an Adobe Air app on someone’s desk­top, and they don’t need to cre­ate an API or wid­get (although wid­gets are often pro­duced for authors by larger pub­lish­ers.  I don’t know that they get used by fans much, but they do get made).

However, the basics, like Facebook, Twitter, guest posts, and more are all very applic­a­ble meth­ods.  Using mul­ti­me­dia is still some­what rare in the author cir­cles I fre­quent, so it’s open for some real inno­va­tion.  Book trail­ers are just a start.  I’m work­ing with one client on some­thing that takes advan­tage of all these options.  More on that when it’s done.

My approach for my author clients is that any read­ers of their online media pres­ence are poten­tial read­ers of their books.  But I don’t have them treat their online pres­ence as a giant adver­tis­ing plat­form for those books.  No, the key to get­ting more peo­ple to look at your con­tent, above all else, is to write com­pelling con­tent.

There are tricks to mak­ing your web con­tent more com­pelling when it’s in a blog style for­mat.  The specifics of those tech­niques I save for my con­sult­ing clients.  In gen­eral, pay atten­tion to the kinds of posts that go viral, get retweeted and linked all over.  And match those post styles, but within your own niche.

Of sec­ondary impor­tance, after the con­tent, is estab­lish­ing a good niche and thus an iden­tity.   If you main­tain a niche, cre­ate a solid iden­tity (and thus some author­ity), and write in a link­able and web-​​friendly for­mat about com­pelling sub­jects, you’ll grow read­ers like crazy.

As many blogs out there as there are, peo­ple are always look­ing for some­thing new that grabs them by the throat.  Something that edu­cates them, or titil­i­ates. There are a lot of ways you can be com­pelling.  Hell, we all strug­gle with that in the non-​​online types of writ­ing we have to do.  But it’s not enough to just blog about your day and your word count, or your lat­est pho­tos.   It’s fine if you don’t mind what your audi­ence size is online, but if you’re inter­ested in build­ing a fol­low­ing, you have to take it further.

That’s what I’ve been try­ing to do with these posts, appear­ances on pod­casts, and so on.   And to be nice about all of it.  I gen­uinely enjoy help­ing peo­ple with this stuff, and shar­ing what I’ve learned.  So the extra read­ers are really just a bonus on top of  the main motivation.