Jan 01 0 comments
Projects, The Craft

Introducing Master the Craft

Readers of this blog know that productivity and creativity are two of my favorite topics, especially when it comes to writing.

  • How do you develop your craft and ship art out the door when you have a full-time job, a spouse or kids – or all three?
  • How do you get better at writing if you don’t have a mentor or the time and money to go back to school?
  • How do you consistently produce a high-quality and high-quantity of work on demand?

The challenges are the same whether you’re writing ads, screenplays, novels or nonfiction. Learning how to be a writer is just as difficult and just as important as learning how to write. And it’s often overlooked because the process isn’t easy or quick.

So how do you do it?

A BETTER WAY TO MASTER THE CRAFT

There are no shortcuts to mastering the craft.

However, there are many strategies (and a few simple tools) you can use to accelerate your progress. You can study how previous masters built their skills and follow their best practices. You can hack the learning process to optimize your progress. You can build systems and habits that support your training.

These are just a few of the ideas behind my new venture: Master the Craft.

I’m applying my education design and personal development experience to mastering the craft of writing. I’ll be focusing on screenwriting, but many of the lessons will apply to any type of writing. (And when they do, I’ll be sure to share them here, too, with a wider range of examples.)

After many months in development, it’s thrilling to kick off the New Year with the launch of Master the Craft!

Want to learn more? Check it out…

The blog: Master the Craft

You can also follow along on Twitter, Facebook or RSS.

Dec 27 0 comments
Food for Thought

On failure

My banker has this Michael Jordan quote on his bulletin board.

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

I love that. Reminds me of Ernest Hemingway:

The first draft of anything is shit.

Success isn’t getting it right the first time. It’s trying again. And again. And again.

Dec 21 0 comments
Food for Thought, The Craft

Editing as Poetry

Another thing we learned was that…

Another thing we learned was…

We also learned that…

We also learned…

We learned…

From Jason Fried.

Dec 08 0 comments
Work

New work: Red Bull ad

I don’t generally go for ad contests, but the current Red Bull ad contest seemed like too much fun to pass by. The challenge: write a new Red Bull TV ad. You know those animated spots…”Red Bull gives you wings!” Lots of fun.

Here’s my idea:

Open on a big boat. Titanic-big. Everyone’s on deck dancing and singing and having a good time when…SMASH…where did that iceberg come from? The hull is damaged, water is gushing in, the boat is going to sink. Everyone screams and runs to the rear of the boat where the captain tells everyone not to worry. He opens a big chest that reads “EMERGENCY ESCAPE KIT”. Inside the chest: tons and tons of Red Bull. He starts passing them around. Everyone opens and chugs and grows wings. As the boat is about to go under, the captain drinks the last one and flies off, joining the passengers as they fly (while continuing to dance and sing) to safety.

What do you think?

Dec 03 0 comments
Food for Thought

Death of a Specialist

It used to be that if you wanted to be known as The Food Photography Guy, you could make sure that all of the publicly available info about you dealt with your passion and success as a food photographer. And nobody would know about your love for rebuilding hotrods, your work as your church’s youth minister or the moonlighting you occasionally do as a wedding photographer to make ends meet.

Not so anymore.

Side effects include…

One intriguing side effect of cataloguing our interests and activities on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, et al. is that it’s getting harder to create a focused personal brand. This isn’t just an issue for people involved in unbecoming activities. This is an issue for anyone who claims to specialize in a given area…meaning nearly every business professional out there. Especially as business continues to fracture into smaller and smaller niches.

For The Food Photography Guy, rebuilding hotrods probably won’t affect sales unless you start to gain some notoriety from it. (Success can be a double-edged sword.) Your work as a minister is honest and worthwhile but may cause some to question where your focus really lies. And your wedding photography, oddly enough, may hurt your brand the most. After all, when you need great food photography, you don’t hire a wedding photographer. And if you’re such a great food photographer, why are you taking pictures of bridal veils and wedding cakes?

So what do you do?

Be yourself

You can’t stop being you. And you shouldn’t. As business professionals, we may be specialists, but as human beings, we’re always generalists. Or better, we’re always “multi-specialists”. I think the Internet is just allowing us to finally show this.

You can’t put the cat back in the bag. And hiding from the Internet isn’t the answer. No, I think we’re moving to a new era of personal branding. One that’s less about narrow specialization and more about big ideas.

Like any large corporation, we’ll have a master brand built on our core ideals and interests. Then we’ll have sub-brands and brand extensions built around different interests. And like any business, our brand extensions will come and go – everything has a lifecycle – but our master brand will prevail and grow throughout our lives. And like any large corporation, being well-rounded will be a good thing once again.

Nov 29 0 comments
Food for Thought, Projects

The Power of Half Steps

Matt Mullenweg wrote a great post on shipping. He writes:

Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world….

By shipping early and often you have the unique competitive advantage of hearing from real people what they think of your work, which in best case helps you anticipate market direction, and in worst case gives you a few people rooting for you that you can email when your team pivots to a new idea. Nothing can recreate the crucible of real usage.

I learned this last year on a creative writing project. Tired of pushing the same story ideas around my desk, I decided the best way to make some real progress was to go big and go public. I pledged to brainstorm one movie idea per weekday for an entire year. To help keep me motivated and judge the quality of my work, I built a blog to showcase my ideas and invited a group of friends and associates to follow along, vote on their favorites and spitball the ideas. It was a great success. By the end of the year, I brainstormed over 240 movie ideas, regularly got a 30% response rate on my mailing list and received over 600 comments on my website.

This year, I learned that before you ship, sometimes progress is simply a matter of starting even when you can’t see the finish line.

Coming off last year’s success, I wanted to keep the momentum going this year. I narrowed my list down to twelve ideas and invited the group back to follow along while I outlined one a month for the entire year. Unfortunately, between a heavier freelance workload and a new baby in the house, my creative writing time has been minimized. Determine to do justice to the ideas, four weeks per outline became five (costing me two outlines) and delays and a short break cost me another two.

Still, I’ve accomplished a lot with minimal resources. Eight outlines is a lot more than I had written in previous years. In hindsight, I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. Step-by-step, though, I often felt the opposite. Sometimes when I sat down to right it was all I could do to come up with the next question, forget the answer. But half steps add up. It’s important to ship, but along the way it’s better to take a half step than no step at all.

Matt Mullenweg’s 1.0 Is the Loneliest Number

Nov 16 0 comments
The Masters, Writing Life

Put it all in

The best way to read an author is start to finish. Grab a good biography (or two), dig up his letters if you can, collect all of his works and even toss in a few critical essays. Then start at the beginning of his life and read through to the end.

Reading this way is a much different experience. It adds depth and value to works you may otherwise skip or not enjoy. In many ways, reading this way is less about the prose than the writer. Sure, this biographical and historical approach may skew your interpretations of the work — and the author may wish you hadn’t — but there’s much to be gained.

Last night, I finally finished Raymond Carver’s collected poems, All of Us. With 300+ poems over the final decade of his life, the book feels like this start-to-finish approach in microcosm. The period encompasses his recovery after near death from alcoholism to his actual death from lung cancer at 50 years old. During that time, he sobered up, fell in love with (and married) the poet Tess Gallagher and found peace with his past and himself via his writing.

The story is so sad. Still, Carver resists the urge to complain or blame. He is clearly scared and grieving, but he finds comfort in his work, in his writing. Many of his poems are about writing. Writing as a form of meditation, a method for experiencing and interpreting one’s life. And in that a way to fully engage with one’s life even when the picture isn’t pretty.

For example:

Sunday Night

Make use of the things around you.
This light rain
Outside the window, for one.
This cigarette between my fingers,
These feet on the couch.
The faint sound of rock-and-roll,
The red Ferrari in my head.
The woman bumping
Drunkenly around the kitchen…
Put it all in,
Make use

Finished with All of Us, I felt the urge to return to Coleman Barks’ translations of Jelaluddin Rumi’s poems. Rumi has always helped me deepen my own experience and interpretation of life. I opened The Essential Rumi at random and found this poem:

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Put it all in. Make use.

Thank you, Ray.

Oct 16 3 comments
Food for Thought

The next (next) big thing

Right now, the big thing is convenience. We want everything now. And we want it everywhere. Complete portability and instant access. There’s a lot of money to be made by being the most convenient.

And when convenience becomes ubiquitous, the next big thing will be personalization. Everywhere you want to be, instantly and exactly how you want it. Forward-thinking companies are already pushing this. And if convenience was big, personalization will be huge.

And when personalization becomes the norm…then what? What’s the next (next) big thing?

Sep 30 0 comments
Food for Thought

Scott Adams on winners and losers

Scott Adams on winners and losers:

I’ve noticed that losers compare themselves to the average of other people, whereas winners compare themselves to their own natural potential. The loser can find comfort in knowing there are plenty of other slackers, and he is average (good enough) among them. The winner compares his progress to his personal potential and doesn’t stop until he achieves it.

From The Scott Adams Blog

Sep 24 0 comments
Writing Life

Belsky’s “Making Ideas Happen” in 17 bullets

If you’re a creative who always seems to have too many ideas and too little time, read Scott Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen. (Actually, first read Seth Godin’s The Dip — don’t worry, it’s very short — then read Scott Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen.) I used to really struggle turning my inspiration into finished works, but I’m getting better at it. For me, making my projects public and structured provides both motivation and direction. I now look for ways to build these characteristics into all my creative endeavors.

I would have loved to have this book 10 years ago, but as it is, there’s still plenty of value here for me, a reformed procrastinator. After all, even us productive types are always looking for ways to get even more done.

To give you a taste, here’s the 17 ideas from the book that hit me the hardest:

  1. Someone with average creativity and great organization will have a greater impact than a creative genius with no organization skills.
  2. No action steps = no action = no results.
  3. Throw out your reference material, if possible; translate as much as you can into Action Steps.
  4. Energy is your most valuable commodity.
  5. Compromise is a necessity; choose the five most important projects to you and focus on those.
  6. Select several Action Steps to tackle each day; don’t go to bed until they’re done.
  7. Through windows of non-stimulation, you will reclaim the power to focus on what projects are most important.
  8. It is only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.
  9. Constraints (deadlines, budgets, briefs) help us manage our energy and execute ideas.
  10. Surrounding yourself with visual proof of progress (e.g. “Done walls”) can help you focus.
  11. Perspiration is the best form of differentiation.
  12. Other people always play a role in pushing your ideas forward.
  13. Sharing ideas increases the odds of gaining momentum and making ideas happen.
  14. When you make a mistake, continue down that path a little way. The alternative perspective can be hard to get.
  15. Leaders of any creative endeavor should focus first on only the things that they can do — things that simply can’t be delegated to others.
  16. Use happiness, games/fun and success to motivate creative teams.
  17. A.A. Milne: “Good judgment comes from experience, and experience — well, that comes from bad judgment.”

How do you make your ideas happen?

Scott Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen
Seth Godin’s The Dip