The Dip: Why it's good to quit

This is how I became a writer:

Originally I wasn't even in JP's band. He was being lead singer of The Wake (the band he'd set up during our first year at university), and I was struggling through my uni studies, trying to figure out how to write short stories and doodling around on my guitar.

The two of us started hanging out at my flat, showing each other the songs we'd been writing, and trying to figure out how to make them better. Eventually we had enough material to make a set list, and we realised that this was more than just jamming: we actually wanted to start a side-project from JP's band.

And thus Trash Dallas was born. JP and I decided to audition for a drummer and a bass-player, to take our show on the road. The auditions for our side-project were ridiculously hard, and eventually JP invited me to just start jamming with The Wake.(*) After a while, I became part of the band, and a whole bunch of plot twists ensued ...

(*) And thus Trash Dallas was dissolved, after about three months of auditions and no gigs.

About two years later, JP left - frustrated (I think) for various reasons. In the meantime I'd become increasingly integral to the band.(*) Another friend - Margo - joined as lead singer, and we recorded an album and did a few more gigs. Then Margo left, and we started working on a second album, scrabbling for gigs, and trying to audition a lead singer.

(*) Writing it down like that, I hope the two things weren't related!

All through this soap opera with the band, I was studying for my Honours degree, holding down a part-time job, being in a deteriorating relationship, and still working on my writing (I had a bunch of short stories at this point and a decidedly crappy novel). The pressure on me - the pressure of living my life in four different directions - felt enormous. And there was a single moment when it all reached a crisis point.

Greg the drummer came up to me in the quad at university, asked me if I had enough time to come to a rehearsal in a couple of days.

I remember looking up, staring at the roof of the quad, thinking about my Honours exams, about all the extra-curriculars I'd tried to cram into this year. But most importantly I thought about writing - about how I didn't seem to have any time for it, about how writing was something I could control, how it was something I enjoyed and wanted to get better at.

In that moment, it was clear to me that I had to choose; effectively, I had to choose between two possible lives: music or writing.

I looked up at the roof of the quad, and when I looked down I quit the band.

I chose writing. I'd written lots of stuff before this, but it was that moment that focused me. And a lot of great and painful things have come out of that.

I thought of this moment while reading The Dip. Seth Godin believes it's a good idea to quit stuff that you find unrewarding. When you quit unrewarding stuff, what you gain is time. You can use that extra time (and mental capacity) to focus on getting through the Dip on stuff that matters, the stuff that you can be great at.

Let's break that down a bit more:

• Quitting stuff that ISN'T worth it = good for you
• Quitting stuff that IS worth it = self-destructive for you.

If you keep quitting things that are worth it, then you'll never achieve anything. Instead, you'll just waste weeks (or years) of your time and never do anything worthwhile. So, that's bad quitting.

What's so special about this book is that it's remorseless. Quit any project that doesn't have a Dip, it says. Don't stick something out if you're not going to get the benefits of being the best in the world. Quit stuff that you don't want to be exceptional at; quit stuff that you're not really enjoying. If you don't, you'll end up below-average or miserable.

Thinking about it, this answers one of the questions my Inner Critic has been yelling at me while writing these articles. If you quit stuff all the time how can you ever get good at anything? How can you ever do anything worthwhile?

The answer: quit stuff that's not worthwhile. That gives you more time and energy to focus on the things that are.

What Seth Godin is saying here reminds me of something I read about 5 years ago and really took to heart - that quitting can become a habit, a bad habit. The essay I read went on to say that instead of quitting, you should only start things you intend to get all the way through.

Now, this is slightly opposed to what Godin is talking about ('Quit stuff that isn't adding to your life' vs. 'Only start stuff you intend to finish'). And I guess that's been the source of my confusion.

I think the way to reconcile the two is that sometimes you have to start something in order to figure out whether it's worthwhile or not. I'll talk about more about that in a couple of days, but Godin's basic approach is to decide - before you start something - when exactly you will quit it.

What about you: have you ever quit something and been happy you did?

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As always, The Dip is available at Wellington Library.
Seth's blog dedicated to the Dip is here.

The Dip: The difference between good stuff and bad stuff

I've been summarising Seth Godin's book, 'The Dip', which talks about how to deal with the powerful desire to give up on doing worthwhile things when they start getting hard or unrewarding.

Let me call on the power of enormous charts to illustrate what a Dip looks like:


See how this activity was worthwhile and rewarding when you started it. The halfway point on this chart represents feeling bogged down, like you're not making any progress or enjoying yourself. That's the Dip. If you push through, things become even more rewarding, and the curve rises up towards more results, enjoyment, and mastery. However, it's easy to imagine what the chart would look like if you quit in the middle of the Dip; instead of rising back up, the curve would crash down to zero.

In the last post, I talked about the idea of quitting bad stuff so that you can focus your energies on pushing through the Dip, and mastering or finishing your good, worthwhile projects.

Which raises the question: what is 'bad stuff'?

Seth describes these as 'Cul-de-sacs' - these are activities that you're not going to get any better at or that you're not going to enjoy any more than you already are. There are also cul-de-sacs where you not feeling that rewarded right from the start and it doesn't seem to be improving the longer you stick with it.

Cul-de-sacs suck away your time, when you could be doing better stuff.

Ultimately, these activities lead to either failure or giving up on them after sinking way too much time into them. They can also lead to perfectly enjoyable hobbies that you do for fun, without the intention of getting any better at. However, cul-de-sacs can also be stuff you don't really enjoy but you still keep doing it because you just don't think about it that much - you're on autopilot but ignoring the changing weather conditions.

The common element with cul-de-sacs is that you won't get any more enjoyment from it no matter how much you keep practicing or doing it. They look like this:


Or maybe like this:
Seth believes you can tell when you're in a Dip or a cul-de-sac. He says we have an innate sense about it (once the concepts have been pointed out to us). But while he's a big believer in relying on your intuition, later in the book he asks you to predefine the circumstances under which you'll quit. I'll talk about that in a couple of posts.

Next up, why it's good to quit. In the meantime, do you recognise any cul-de-sacs in your own life?

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The Dip is available at Wellington Library.
Seth's blog dedicated to the Dip is here.

The Dip: An overview of how to succeed

Last time, I was describing Jenni's battle with her Inner Critic over whether her latest book was worth writing or not. I described that as a 'Dip': the increasingly powerful desire to give up on something because it's getting too hard.

Seth Godin talks about this in detail in 'The Dip: a little book that teaches you when to quit (and when to stick). What follows is my summary of some of his main concepts ...

Imagine you're learning something or creating something. It seemed like a great idea when you first started it, but at some point you start getting discouraged by the lack of results, or it starts hurting too much to go on (if, say, you're trying to do a measley 10 bicycle crunches a day in order to make a token effort to try getting a flatter stomach and yes that is personal experience talking). Perhaps it's simply a case that you don't know what to do next, or it's not fun, or you've found it impossible to make progress on.

Can you think of a situation you've been in like that?

When most people are faced with these sorts of obstacles, they quit. That's human nature. When faced with the unknown, when faced with embarrassment, or the prospect of failing, we quit.

Seth Godin recommends that we proactively quit. Essentially the advice in his book boils down to this:

To get through a Dip, quit the stuff that's bad for you, and stick with the stuff that's good for you.

Focus all your efforts on pushing through the dips of things that you really enjoy and that you could be great at. To gain that focus, you need to quit stuff that's distracting you, to quit the activities that are unrewarding (or only moderately rewarding) dead ends. "Quitting the stuff you don't care about or the stuff you're mediocre at or (better yet) quitting the [dead ends] frees up your resources to obsess about the Dips that matter," Seth says.

He's talking about being pro-active. You shouldn't just suffer through a Dip, waiting for it to end. Instead, actively work at getting through a dip quicker.

By quitting bad stuff and focusing your efforts on the Dip.

Quitting bad stuff gives you more time to focus on good stuff. And the thing is: anything worth doing probably involves you going through a Dip. So you need stick with the good stuff long enough to make it through discouragement and failure, so that you can start getting the benefits from it.

All of which raises the question of how can you tell good stuff from bad stuff? I'll summarise that tomorrow, and in the post after that I'll talk more about why quitting things is good.

Meanwhile, how does all this sound? Does this ring true to you?

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The Dip is available at Wellington Library.
Seth's blog dedicated to the Dip is here.

Open Thread

Talk, talk, talk. But also: share with me your top 3 interesting websites to visit. I would diversify my experience of the internet.

The Dip: Jenni's Story

Recently Jenni was talking about whether to keep writing a novel she'd just started:

I don’t know if it’s because I’m starting a new project, but I am overwhelmed with doubt about my new novel.

I keep coming up with different arguments in my head for why I shouldn’t even bother trying. I formulated a sentence or two while in my bath, but when I sat down to actually write the thing, my Inner Critic said “What are you thinking, writing this?”

I’m like “Well, I thought it would be an interesting idea.”

Inner Critic said, “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re writing about a woman going to the hairdresser. It’s really boring and mundane.”

Me: “Oh, but…I kind of thought it was an interesting relationship, because there’s this level of intimacy-”

IC: “No, trust me: boring. Like reading about someone going to the dairy for milk.”

Jenni talks about how this inner dialogue continued its combination of critique and sabotage, and how this conversation is not a new thing for her. She struggled with it while writing her first book, too.

While she wondered if it was self sabotage or a lack of confidence or writer’s block, in the end Jenni decided to ignore her inner critic altogether, and just write her hairdresser story down. But:

"It’s not easy when the inner critic is so loud and convincing. She really plays off my insecurities."

Later, Jenni decided to quit that novel and take up a new one she was more excited by:

... I know this sounds bad. Like, oh this one’s too hard so I’ll start an exciting new project.

I’m frightened of this mind frame because it can lead to me just continuing to abandon things when they get boring and never getting anything finished. So why am I letting myself do it this time? I’m not excited about book A. I don’t want to sit down and write it, and when I do make myself sit down I get distracted, my inner critic won’t shut up and I’m consumed with doubt.

... By comparison, book B (kid’s book) is exciting. I want to sit down and write it, and when I do the words flow out of me like iodised table salt (see how it runs!) My inner critic is silent, I am connecting with all this stuff from my childhood and it’s a dynamic feeling. This to me makes it a simple choice. Keep writing book B.

Jenni has since finished the first draft of Book B.

I take a couple of things from Jenni's story. First: the way she describes her Inner Critic resonates with me. It's something I've been through too, and I imagine it seems familiar to you as well. Its attacks are vivid and precise, and calculated to undermine the whole idea of working on that story. The Inner Critic was trying to make Jenni quit; the question Jenni was struggling with was whether the Inner Critic was right.

And that brings me to Seth Godin. He's one of my top reads on the internet (here's his blog). His book, 'The Dip: a little book that teaches you when to quit (and when to stick)', has been intriguing me for a couple of years.

Jenni's story is a perfect example of what Seth's book is about: a Dip.

For me, the key sentences in Jenni's story are:

"... I know this sounds bad. Like, oh this one’s too hard so I’ll start an
exciting new project. I’m frightened of this mind frame because it can lead to me just continuing to abandon things when they get boring and never getting anything finished."

The Dip is the moment when you feel like giving up on something, even if it's something that seemed like a great idea when you started it. This is how Seth describes the lead-up to that moment:

At the beginning, when you first start something, it's fun. You could be taking up golf or acupuncture or piloting a plane or doing chemistry - it doesn't matter; it's interesting and you get plenty of good feedback from the people around you.

Over the next few days and weeks the rapid learning you experience keeps you going. Whatever your new thing is, it's easy to stay engaged in it.

And then the Dip happens.

The stuff that seemed worthwhile and rewarding when you began starts becoming harder. You're feeling bogged down, like you're not making any progress or enjoying what you're doing. That's the Dip.

The Dip is what makes people quit. They get discouraged, give up, abandon projects or dreams. It happens to everybody with everything, and it means that only a few people make it through to the level of mastering a skill like architecture, graphic design, writing, or the ability to effectively use social networks without them sucking up most of your life.

From the book:

The Dip is the long slog between starting and mastery.

It's the combination of bureaucracy and busy work you must deal with in order to get certified in scuba diving.

The Dip is the difference between the easy "beginner" technique and the more useful "expert" approach in skiing or fashion design.

It's the moment when you realise exactly how much effort it's going to take to be great at something. The question is: Will you stick with it until you've gone from good to great? Or will you quit?

I'm going to be taking about The Dip over the next four posts. I recommend the book; it's in Wellington Library (if you're local), and at 80 pages it's a quick read. You can get a taste of it here.

In the meantime, what about you? Can you relate to Jenni's story? What dips have you experienced?

Crafty Screenwriting on the elements of a story

This is the last post about Crafty Screenwriting, and in it I want to look at what it says about the elements that make up a compelling story. These elements are very similar to the ones in 'Elements of Persuasion', so I think it's worth checking out whether they agree, amplify, or contradict each other.

This is how Alex Epstein summarises the way his elements work:

A main character
... who has a goal that we (the audience) care about.
... The main character is risking a lot
... and they have at least one but ideally three basic obstacles in their way.

Main characters can be unlikeable, but we do have to care about what happens to them. What is it that makes us care? Alex proposes two ways:

• their situation is familiar to us (eg. Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz)
• we enjoy projecting ourselves into their shoes (eg. James Bond if you want to be a hero; D-FENS from Falling Down if you want to work through your rage)

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The character's goal needs to be something we care about. Maybe it's internal (psychological, emotional); maybe it's external (save the world, fall in love). As Alex points out, "We don't have to necessarily be on the hero's side. We just have to be involved emotionally in what he's trying to do."

So, goals help us care about people. A person may be a jerk, but if their goal is one we can admire or get behind (put on the best show possible; kick the Nazis out of Europse), then we can root for them as a protagonist.

For me, one of the biggest tests of this (in recent years) is Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. As a manipulative, obsessive 19th century oil-man, he’s not a character I feel familiar with or whose shoes I want to walk in. And his goal: ‘to con a small community out of its oil at any cost’ isn’t one I can admire or get behind. So why do I root for him? I guess partially it’s because he’s an object of fascination – Daniel Plainview is such an unusual psychological presence; the way he thinks and sees the world just rivets me (plus he’s too dangerous to take your eyes off). And partially it’s because he cares about the boy he’s raising; Plainview’s goal of raising his son well is only a small part of the film, but it’s one I can get behind.

Man, time to watch There Will Be Blood again!

This idea of goals (and methods, I guess) being things we care about also reminds me Humanity checks in the game Sorceror. A protagonist can be a real scum-bag, but they remain worthy of our attention as long as we don’t think “That’s it. I’m done with you; I don’t care what you do any more – you’ve crossed a line and you’re irredeemable as far as I’m concerned.”

Alex also observes that characters without goals lead to stories without drama.

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The third element is risk, jeopardy, the idea that the character has something to lose. And that what they could lose is worth caring about.

Actually, some of this feels a little tautological. We'll care about a character if the thing they could lose is something we'll care about? It's the idea of 'caring' that needs to be grappled with here.

And I think Alex makes a good crack at answering that at the end of this section:

Jeopardy puts the hero in play.

I like that phrasing. The hero (who's someone we care about because we identify with them or want to be with them) is now at risk of being transformed, harmed, or losing something vital to their life. They are in play; the thing that they are risking is (essentially) themselves.

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Finally, the main character has "at least one but ideally three basic obstacles in their way." These obstacles are:

1. An External Antagonist or Obstacle: this could be so many things ... environmental (an erupting volcano), social (a corrupt justice system), personal (a masked killer stalking you), widespread (a continent-spanning war), or nearly microscopic (a swiftly growing brain tumour).

Again, we have to care about the antagonists - perhaps because they're sympathetic; perhaps because they're scary as all hell. In fact, check out this quote from James Berardinelli's recent review of Robocop:

One of the standout elements of Robocop is the despicability of the villains. These aren't mealy mouthed bad guys - they are vile, mustache-twirling cretins who deserve horrible, painful deaths. It takes a talented director to fashion characters that become targets of such extreme vitriol. This is what Verhoeven wants; the more deeply viewers hate the bad guys, the more they will be involved in the outcome. It's nice for an audience to like the hero, but more important that they loathe the villain.

And this quote from Crafty Screenwriting addresses the other side:

If your hero has an obstacle instead of an antagonist, we still have to care about it. If your hero is crossing the Antarctic, you have to find a way to make us feel what is grand and compelling about a lot of ice. In a movie about climbing Everest, you are going to have to make us care about a really big rock.

2. An Intimate Opponent: Someone on the main character's side who is working at cross-purposes to them.

3. A Tragic or Comic Flaw (A Psychological Opponent): Indecision, guilt, self-doubt, a death wish, self-loathing, pride. This is all stuff I'm very familiar with from playing lots of Primetime Adventures - most situations can be made much worse if you just give a character enough rope to let their own Issues mess them up.

... oh, and a main character's tragic flaw can reflect the external antagonist or obstacle in some way.

That's it for Crafty Screenwriting. In about a week, I'll be moving on to the last of these books on story construction: "Made to Stick", which talks about why some ideas and stories survive and get passed on from person to person, while others wither and die. You can read excerpts from the intro here, if you're curious.

Open Thread

What's on your mind today?

Crafty Screenwriting on pitching

Alex Epstein's book 'Crafty Screenwriting' also has a lot to say about pitching that I think it relevant to the process of creating a story. As I mentioned earlier, he fiercely advocates NOT writing down your story for as long as possible, and instead actually telling it to people.

Why wouldn't you write down your story? Alex suggests that writing it down 'freezes' your story, making you reluctant to make big / necessary changes to it. He uses the example of 'While You Were Sleeping', whose writers pitched the film for 5 years before realising how much it would be improved by having the GUY be the one in the coma. It was easy to change the story because nothing was written down.

Alex also says that writing down your story can make it easy to overlook its flaws. I can related to this - my eyes have certainly skimmed over sections of my outlines before, as I 'know' what it's trying to convey and don't need to pay attention to it. As a result, whole sections have wound up needing to be deleted or re-arranged in finished scripts.

The best way to find out if your hook or story works is to tell it to people. Tell it out loud, over and over again, to whoever will listen.(*) Telling it allows you to see what people respond to. And because you're not writing it down, it allows you to figure out what bits of it are memorable or not.

(*) Candidates for telling your story to include co-workers, friends, your mum, kids, strangers on the bus, muggers, priests in confessional boothes.

Basically, the process of telling your story will give you an opportunity to naturally flesh it out, elaborate on it, and deepen it.

Alex also suggests three questions to think about while you're telling your story:

1. Is your listener interested in your hook at all? If not, then (a) rephrase it and try again, or (b) come up with a better idea.
2. What does it remind them of? Check these other, similar stories out.
3. What do they tell you? They may have ideas and criticisms. Listen to them. Even if they're off-base, you'll find out what sort of things they expected to hear or see when you told them your pitch.

Telling allows you to reinvent your story easily and on the fly.

Telling lets you immediately see the reaction to your story.

Telling mean you can hear when YOU get bored or confused.

Telling forces you to create a story that's so simple, clear and logical that you can remember it. It forces you to remember what comes next.

But what if the idea of telling someone your story completely freaks you out? Well, there are some alternatives:

• Tell it to yourself
• Write down the basic beats of the story on cards, mix the cards up, and try to put them back together in the right order
• (... and my favourite) Write your story down. Hide those pages. Rewrite it again from memory. Hide those pages. Repeat.

Crafty Screenwriting on hooks

I mentioned way back in my synopsising of Presentation Zen that I was going to have to do a bit more reading about the 'how to' part of how to construct a story. That reminded me that of a script-writing manual that I felt might have some relevance - Crafty Screenwriting by Alex Epstein.

Alex advocates coming up with a hook - a description that encapsulates your story in a nutshell and intrigues the audience into wanting to know more. He also fiercely advocates NOT writing down your story for as long as possible, and instead actually telling it to people.

The idea of the hook resonates with the advice I keep reading about reducing your story or presentation down to its core idea, to a single catchy phrase. Why would you do this? Well, I think Alex provides some really good insight here: we all have multiple demands placed on our attention every day - so how do you cut through the noise and make someone pay attention to you?

You have to make them want to know what happens next.

So, a hook is a fresh idea that instantly makes showbiz people want to read your script, and audiences want to see your movie. It makes people want to see how it turns out. Alex provides some examples, such as:

• A puppeteer finds a secret tunnel into John Malkovich's brain
• There's a bomb on a crowded city bus. If the bus slows down below 50 miles per hour, the bomb goes off
• Three film-makers goes missing in the woods while taping a documentary about a legendary witch. A year later their footage is found.

Hooks are fresh. Intriguing. Simple.

Buffy: The Big Finish

Earshot
I remember this being a lesser episode, but the word online is that it's good. Let's check it out ...

... (after watching it) Yeah, that was good. Much more than I remembered. Earshot is an episode that takes its time and lets us hang out with the characters, rather than rushing along with the plot. I also felt a sense of fear for Buffy - that this telepathy could be really bad for her - and I felt that despite (a) having seen the episode already, and (b) still feeling my prior comments about how threatening the lead character's life doesn't work for me.

So, the thing that was different for me here was the idea that being driven mad by telepathy could actually change Buffy. And it occured to me that in long-running TV shows with established lead characters, change can equal jeopardy. Hypothetical example: you can't kill off Jack Bauer in 24, but you can change him so that he's no longer operating from motives that we'd sympathise with.(*)

(*) I know. They'd just change Jack's character back within 2 or 3 episodes, or reveal that it's an elaborate bluff ... but man, a series of 24 where Jack is the bad guy? And we're following him? That'd be spectacular. And probably the end of the show.

The episode also really illustrates that Buffy is a hero, by showing her as crippled by the telepathy but still compelled to help, and it has a great reveal at the end about the killer. Top marks: not essential to the main plot of Season 3, but excellent television.

Choices
I remember 'Choices' as being a really strong episode, with a locked room setting that's one of my main memories from this season. Let's see how it stacks up to the idealised episode in my mind ...

... ah, it's a bit different. The locked room setting takes up maybe 5 minutes, a far shorter portion of the ep than I remembered.

'Choices' features some great little moments: Faith's look of hatred towards Willow; the Mayor as a well-intentioned, yet evil truth-teller; and a great payoff for Willow's floating pencil trick. And at the very end I thought they were going to have an upbeat finish ... but no. The script had to decompress itself through 2 scenes, but it managed to get to a downbeat place eventually. Yay! Or yay-ish. The sense of dread and the maudlin tone of Season 6 is not entirely unknown to this show.

A good ep, and very clearly belongs in the main plot of Season 3.

The Prom
I remember this being pretty good, but it turns out that The Prom is a fracking great episode that delivers a huge emotional payoff for setting the show at high school for three seasons. What this episode has in common with 'Earshot' is that it's not afraid to humanise the characters, to take time to reflect on their relationships.

It's also a big Buffy-Angel (BAng) episode (and it makes me realise that Season 3 is partially about resolving the BAng relationship so that both characters can move on.(*)

(*) Two asides: The first is that having watched the spinoff show Angel, I can see how 'cooped up' Angel feels hanging out in Sunnydale. Moving to Los Angeles gives him a more epic quality that I really like.

... Secondly, Angel has just spent several hundred years being tortured in a hell dimension. It always occurs to me that the time he's spending in Sunnydale during Season 3 must feel like a dream, like a fantasy that the hell demons are using to torture him and that'll be yanked away at any moment.

Graduation Day
It's a well paced war movie of a finale, and I don't have too much to say about the plot - other than it's good, and it weirdly makes me regret not going to my own graduation.

There are many fantastic moments in it, but most notable for me is that I totally buy the Mayor's paternal attitude towards Faith now. What started as a comedic characteristic that came completely out of the blue is completely sold by the way they talk to each other and the Mayor's genuine rage when he finds out what Buffy and Faith have been up to. There are also beats that are mirrored and developed in later seasons (Buffy quitting, Buffy going to war).

Basically it's an excellent two-parter that first sets up a smackdown with Faith, and then a war with the Mayor, and neatly wraps up three seasons of story-telling.

Long Range: Ariely on cheating

I'll summarise the main points of Dan Ariely's talk on cheating here. If anyone want to dig into this a little bit deeper, let's hit the comments.




Ariely's saying that people like to think of themselves as a 'good' person ("They like to be able to look themselves in the mirror"). But effectively what that means is that people can cheat a little bit as long as it doesn't change their image of themselves.

That means that the amount a person cheats is NOT affected by:

• how much they can potentially earn through cheating
• discovering there's a reduced probability that they'll get caught

Neither of these has an effect on a person's mental image of themselves.

But you can increase the likelihood that they'll cheat through two simple methods:

• make what they're cheating or stealing more abstract or symbolic; the less it initially feels like tangible money or valuable goods, the easier it is to cheat or steal it
• be part of a group where it's socially acceptable to cheat

The conclusion Ariely draws here is that the stock-market (*) is a prime target for this sort of cheating as it's filled with items of value that don't feel like money, and is run by a group that has suffered from people committing spectacular fraud. There's a short article expanding on this talk, here, where Ariely discusses the Bernie Madoff financial scam. He speculates that some members of the financial industry, "now that they have been exposed to this extreme level of dishonesty, might adopt slightly lower moral scruples."

(*) Well, the stock-market or a corporation's profits.

I also found this interesting: You can decrease our inclination to cheat / improve our morality simply by making us think about moral things (the 10 Commandments, the Honour code). You don't have to believe in this things for it to have an effect - one of Ariely's experiments showed a statistically significant decrease in cheating (like, no cheating) when atheists swore on the Bible.

One other item of note for this series on long range thinking. Ariely claims that people (tend to) feel that their intuition about things is right. That would mean that it's difficult to motivate yourself to test whether your intuitions or theories about how the world works are actually correct.

Long Range: Getting ready to look at Predictably Irrational

I mentioned that there's a few books I want to read about the irrationality of human decision-making. I thought I'd lay the groundwork for that with a few videos.

Here's a talk by Dan Ariely, behavioral economist and the author of Predictably Irrational. His talk discusses cheating. Ariely looks at "the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it's OK to cheat or steal (sometimes)."

I've kicked off with this presentation because Ariely starts with an extremely personal story about being seriously burned, and arguing with his nurses about whether it's best to take his bandages off in one fast rip, or in a slow drawn-out pull. Not only is this story hilarious (it leads to the invention of a 'pain suit'), it also makes me empathise with him - I can imagine the pain he went through, and understand his motivations for testing our intuitions.

(I'll have a separate post later today to discuss this presentation.)




Next (but in real-time I think a year or two earlier), Ariely 'uses classic visual illusions and his own counterintuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we're not as rational as we think when we make decisions.'

Where the Wild Things are

I think we need to talk about how this might turn out to be the greatest movie ever made - especially if it does what I think it's going to do with Max's relationship with his parents.

Trailers here.

Buffy: The Turning Point

Bad Girls
A great episode that contains two strong choices that I think are wrong.

First up: Buffy and Faith are fantastic together when they're having fun - they kick arse and then celebrate in a way that feels liberating, sexy and a bit dangerous. It's fantastic to watch them enjoying themselves to what they do best ... and naturally it can't last. In fact, it doesn't last more than about 15 minutes of screen-time. Now I get that happy characters are dull characters; I get that you have to bring the conflict. But it strikes me that you could've stretched this change in Buffy towards being a bad girl for at least one more episode, and used Willow's feelings about being displaced as a friend (and the Scoobies' concerns about Buffy's transformation) as a source of conflict. So, yeah, I wanted to see the two female leads actually have fun for a while.

Second: I do not buy Faith's line at the end ("I don't care.") Sure, it's harsh and sets up some good conflicts down the line. But it feels forced and inconsistent with the character we've been watching. I seem to remember this gets deconstructed in later eps (especially in Season 4), so I'll withhold some of my judgment for a while.

This is also the episode that confirms the Mayor is the Big Bad, introduces Wesley Wyndham-Price and begins his epic character arc, and really strongly showcases the Buffy-Faith relationship. Pretty essential stuff.

Consequences
So, I as I was saying, I really wanted to see more of Faith and Buffy working together as Slayers who are good at their jobs and enjoy life ... and this ep sort of didn't give me that but after a while I didn't mind.

What starts as a placeholder episode (we know Buffy is going to tell Giles about the murder eventually) ends as an intensely action-packed mini-feature film filled with lots of story and character development.

It kicks off the Angel-Faith plot that crosses from here over to Angel and then back to Buffy again.
It has an AMAZING moment between Xander and Faith.
It finishes with a bold twist. If I didn't know better, I'd say Faith was going undercover.

Playing Faith as being in denial is a good choice, and alleviates quite a few of my worries from Bad Girls. I still don't fully buy Faith's reaction to the murder, or her psychology, but Consequences gives me enough to get by.

There's also a really nice shifting focus between who the villain is: The Mayor or Faith.

An excellent episode, vital to the main line of Season 3 (and featuring a great moment where Giles holds the idiotball that made me yell at the screen).

Doppelgangland
Basically, this is 'just' an excellent mistaken-identity farce. A spotlight episode for Willow that features two well-motivated versions of her character initiating their own plots and bouncing off each others. The multiple sources of pressure on Willow to conform and obey lead to her desire to be rebellious, which (at a writers' level) motivate the arrival of her doppelganger from Dark Sunnydale. It's a big episode for Willow that shows her as the go-to wicca for serious magic, and illustrates again that she's good at whatever she does, whether that be computer hacking or being a vampire.

A great episode, but only essential-ish. There's some Faith-Mayor developments that feel a little too rapid to me, especially when the Mayor raises the subject of what to do about Willow. There's only 6 episodes till the end of the season and it feels like things haven't really gotten moving yet.

Enemies
I don't have much to say about this episode. The opening scene provides a good illustration of why the Buffy-Angel relationship won't work, and the rest of the story follows that through in a covert yet interesting way.

The episode is based on a tension of 'When will Buffy find out that Faith is evil?', but because the whole story is based on a deception which I remembered from my previous viewing, I felt little sense of jeopardy.

Coupled with that is realisation that while the Mayor's paternalism towards Faith is a great character trait, it's feels cosmetic - there haven't been enough on-screen events between the two of them for that relationship to have been earned. I'm also finding Faith's characterisation to be all over the place, and I'm looking forward to watching the essential episodes of Season 3 to find out how it all tracks when you string the key episodes together.

In all, this episode is essential for a few plot reasons, but I found it kind of irritating.

2012: It's a Disaster!

An awesome trailer for my most anticipated film of the year: 2012 by Roland Emmerich.



Don't worry: the Institute for Human Continuity has got our backs.

(And yeah, I'm a carrier of viral marketing. I don't care: I'm also an apocalypse nerd.)

Speaking of which: choose your own apocalypse. Turns out I'm a blood-thirsty misanthrope.

Long Range: Does choice work?

OK, time to start dipping back into this series. For new readers, Long Range is my attempt to examine why some people are able to successfully think further into the future than others.

My first set of posts on this topic got slightly sidetracked when Billy and Mike both raised the reasonable point that people don't make the best decisions possible - that our judgments have biases and irrationalities built into them. So, as well as looking at some of my social psychology texts, there's also going to be some study of the following books in the near future:

Nudge
Stumbling on Happiness
Predictably Irrational

Nudge is an interesting book, because (as I understand it from listening to one podcast) it postulates that you can give people choices, but you get 'better' results when you constrain people to a 'choice architecture' that's been designed to guide people towards an optimal result.

Here's a local situation to illustrate the difference. The previous Labour-led government wanted to introduce legislation that eliminated conventional lightbulbs from the marketplace, replacing them with more efficient compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs.

Recently, the Electricity Commission announced the launch of rightlight.govt.nz, a website to provide tools and information to help families and businesses reduce their power bills and choose the right efficient light for the particular application.

State-imposed constraints versus freedom of choice. I am fascinated to see if the rightlight initiative has an noticeable impact, as (I believe) people will buy the cheapest thing. The lower prices of conventional bulbs will be more appealing to consumers than any projected long range benefits of buying CFLs.

So the question I think I'll be looking at (occasionally) over the next few months is 'Does choice work?'

Movies: Some capsule reviews

My consumption of feature-length media continues.

Beetlejuice is a movie I haven't seen since it came out in 1988. It's far more incoherent than I remembered, but I totally forgave it because of its great over the top performances and production design. Weird that Beetlejuice doesn't actually show up as much as I remembered, though.

Knowing is the movie that taught me it now costs $16 to go to the movies. Way freaking darker than I expected, but lacking in psychological plausibility and possessing a cringe-inducing epilogue.

Paprika is an anime about dreams, movies, and weird surreal parades filled with fridges and frogs. For me, this was an almost great movie, despite its repetitive scenes and frequent incoherence. Here are the opening credits (which I fell in love with):



Shortbus is a movie about people trying to overcome sexual problems in their lives. It may have kicked off the Bex/Steve breakup via a pretty intense discussion about pornography and morality, but I thought this movie was fantastic.

Snakes on a Plane has an unexpectedly lame opening credit sequence, but is pretty much utterly ludicrous fun for the rest of its running time.

Doctor Who: The Next Doctor was quite fun, with the best giant robot threatening London since Steamboy, and I found the ending moving and affectionate.

Doctor Who: Planet of the Dead was great; the storyline had a clarity to it that I appreciated. Nice dread at the end, too. Michelle Ryan would've been an excellent on-going companion but I can see that she might have overshadowed the new Doctor as he finds his feet in the role.

The Frighteners is a nice companion piece to Beetlejuice. I'd forgotten how it descends from frivolity into darkness. The Director's Cut makes a whole bunch of stuff play better too: Jeffrey Combs delivering the classic line "My body is a roadmap of pain", and the murder-spree flashbacks in the hospital. Overall: PG for Pretty Good.

Snatch lacks a compelling central story or characters to focus on, but it's got a nice, ironic big-picture view of seedy London. I particularly liked this guy:




Layer Cake, on the other hand, has a clear focus and a taut, political view of epic-level criminal London while still remaining filled with the potential for brutal violence. This and Shortbus are the best movies I've seen recently.

Open Thread

This weekend's question is brought to you by Helen's prompting. What are you proud of? What are you pleased with?

Buffy: Heading towards the middle of Season 3

More mini-reviews, this time with the occasional listing of specific act breaks

Lover's Walk
The episode that convinced Joss Whedon that he could mine more dramatic potential from Spike - by protraying him as a drunk, hilariously love-lorn emotional sap/psychopath. It's great comparing the scene of Spike trying to convince Willow to cast a love spell with the scene in Season 4 where he's failing to bite her - Willow as the terrified confident of a confessional Spike is a fun dynamic, and I can see why they revisted that well.

This episode starts building up the question of what going to happen after high school finishes, as Buffy begins to realise the future is wide open to her. A tremendously entertaining episode that finishes on a low point for everyone. It's not key to the overall story of Season 3 though.

Act Break (AB): Spike decides to use Willow.
AB 2: Spike captures Willow and Xander. Wants Willow to cast a spell on Dru.
AB 3: Spike shows up at Buffy's house. He has a heart to heart with Buffy's mum.
AB 4: Spike is under threat, and Buffy and Angel have to protect him. Although I'd argue that the real act-out comes when Cordy gets impaled by a pole.

I enjoyed how the reactions to these act breaks (when we cut back from commercials) are unexpected and reveal character.

The Wish
An episode that ties off quite a few of the romantic subplots from the first third of the season and sets up a new status quo. Cordy's wish doesn't create a subtle alternate reality, but it's a nicely handled one - it feels logical, and it's portrayed in broad strokes that feel appropriate and convey a lot of information.

Amends
Boy, I remember this as a weak episode. And in a way it is - it creates this false jeopardy that Angel was brought back to kill Buffy (*), before swerving into the more believable territory of Angel wanting to destroy himself. The result is pretty damn sappy, but not as bad as I remembered it.

(*) Cos they're totally going to kill off Sarah Michelle Gellar's character halfway through the season, right?

Amends also demonstrates that this show does NOT ignore the emotional reality between the characters. Take a look at the scene where Giles meets Angel for the first time since he's back - Angel killed Giles' girlfriend, and the show tackles that head-on. This emotional continuity is a vital part of the 'watching a novel' effect I'm talking about.

Gingerbread
I remember this as an effective little story, although (like Amends) it's not essential to Season 3. It's a nicely-developed mob-mentality horror story. It also features the transformation of Amy into a rat that becomes so important in Seasons 6 and 8.

I'm beginning to really lock in to the idea that the reason Buffy is so satisfying to rewatch is that the real plots happen in the sub-text of the episode.

Helpless
This felt like a significantly deeper episode to me; a great combination of schlock (suddenly defenceless slayer hunted by vampires) with introspection (what is Buffy without her powers? What is the exact nature of her relationship with Giles?).

I'm impressed by David Fury (the writer of this ep; he later moved to 24). The episode is filled with nice transitions between scenes, and scene endings that are odd, skewed, and quiet. There's also a extended pre-teaser intro that really drew me in to the episode.

This is a Buffy/Giles episode - the presence of other supporting cast has been significantly reduced. Buffy has to deal with Giles' betrayal; the father-daughter vibe between them is more deeply explored (and the conflict between Giles' role as a Watcher and his relationship towards Buffy as a human being is fully brought out into the light). It also ends with a big plot development for Giles - something I'd completely forgotten about.

A good, more serious episode that I think will be pretty important to the rewatching of Season 3.

The Zeppo
I can remember reading that a lot of fans were angry about this episode - presumably because it undermines the reality of the show but undercutting the epic Buffy/Angel love story and the seriousness of preventing the apocalypse. Me, I think that's hilarious.(*)

(*) In particular, check out the music cue when Xander leaves Buffy and Angel alone about 32 minutes into the ep.

This episode is supposedly about Xander's inadequacy, his search for coolness, and generally trying to find his identity in the group. I'd say at a meta-level, it's really about giving us, the audience, a reason to care about Xander by throwing him into an episode that gives him a mega-dose of 'worthiness as a protagonist', making him someone we want to watch.

It doesn't hurt that it uses a whole 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead'/what's-happening-backstage structure to tell a series of funny jokes. It also doesn't hurt that Xander and Faith have a couple of scenes together (and check out that impressive 5 seconds of silence as he leaves her motel ... that is some rare stuff in TV, to just watch a character process what's happened to them).

Finally, I'd say check out Xander's costuming. Compare his super-geeky sweater and shirt in the first scene after the title sequence to how he's dressed in the final scene. As with The Wish, it's overt but clearly makes the point about Xander's transformation.

... Now, on to the heart of the season. Episode 14 (Bad Girls), here we come.

Adjusting the blogging schedule again

For the last two months I've been running an experiment on this blog. Posting every couple of days has been fun, but I'm still feeling a bit of pressure. So, I've decided to change my schedule to one post every four days.

That gives me more space, and I expect I'll pop in the occasional blog post between those scheduled posts.(*) I'm also regularly updating the Links of Interest on the top right of the blog, usually every day, with stuff I think is worthy of your attention.

(*) I'm still writing these posts in advance, and auto-scheduling them to publish (this one was written on the 21st of June).

I'm still figuring out what to do with multi-dimensional; I reckon this schedule change will create the environment for me to be able to play around a bit and sort that out.

Synopsis: Elements of Persuasion (The Last 3 Elements)

In The Elements of Persuasion (TEOP), the Antagonist is defined as the thing that is keeping your Hero from achieving their goal(s). This 'thing' could be a person, or a disease (if you're a doctor), or a sinking ship (if you're stuck on the Titanic).

An Antagonist isn't used to create conflict; they're used to "clarify what the conflict is about".

So, here's why TEOP thinks you should use an Antagonist. The authors say that if you're going to persuade people, then they must remember what you've said. Citing studies that indicate that experiencing strong emotions increases the chances of remembering something, the authors then point out that using an Antagonist has two advantages:

• you can easily generate strong negative emotions because of them, and
• audiences will associate those the negative emotions with the Antagonist - keeping your Hero sympathetic.

Antagonists also get the audience on the Hero's side, says TEOP.

You've got to choose the 'right' antagonist, though. One that can be overcome. One that's not a straw villain (either imaginary, or whose threat is overinflated). And one that you don't demonise - because that allows your hero and your audience to learn from them. Choose the right antagonist and you're halfway to succeed (in either the goal you've set for your hero or in persuading your audience).

Awareness and Transformation

TEOP kind of peters out in its final two chapters. Rather than providing 'how to' guides on building moments of awareness and transformation into your stories, it shares a bunch of pretty interesting stories about viral marketing and retail architecture. It's become very obvious by this point that TEOP is a business book, but in these last two chapters it becomes extremely (to be generous) 'indirect' in the way it imparts its lessons; very 'show, don't tell'.

So, drawing on material from the book's introduction, 'Awareness' is the moment that allows us to learn from the story and therefore succeed. When I write it like that, it seems that Awareness applies both to the Hero and to the audience.

You want to create a moment of Awareness in the audience where they see the problem for what it is and the actions they need to take to fix it. Hopefully by this point you'll have also created the Passion to change things and given them a model of how to change (the Hero).

As for Transformation ... well, TEOP says that in commercial storytelling this usually involves you getting paid. But more generally, Transformation involves taking action that changes you and the world around you.

That's all I was able to extract in terms of how to apply the Elements of Persuasion from the last 2 chapters.

Criticisms

I should point out that TEOP contains a bunch of interesting stuff that's not totally on-message. Creating teams, tips for presenting stories effectively, advice about finding meaning in your life. Stuff I found useful, but not for this synopsis.

And it turns out that my criticisms boils down to two points: This is a 225 page book that feels like it should be about 100 pages long, something that's tighter, more on-message. And I'm absolutely not the target audience ... well, sort of absolutely not. I can see how to apply some of this to my day-job. But the book is pitched at business leaders and corporate storytellers/marketeers.

Worthy of having a quick flick-through browse, filled with tangents, and it'll make you work to extract its lessons. That's my take on the Elements of Persuasion; now I'm going to try applying its principles, which I have found useful.

Open Thread

In honour of this weird-ass week: What's the craziest thing that's happened to you recently?

Buffy: The first third of Season 3

Being home with the proto-flu has given me a chance to watch about a third of Buffy Season 3.

Buffy is the show that really started my second phase of thinking about how to write for television. Working on my own show was really like boot camp for TV script-writing. Watching Team Whedon, on the other hand, gave me an opportunity to reflect on a completely different approach. Most notably:

• a strong focus on using the act breaks to twist or invert the situation
• using the main story to develop and comment on a character's emotions
• telling a coherent season-long story almost totally inside the subtext of the episodes; it's a story that's invisible to a person who watches just one episode, but cumulatively it's quite epic in scale and makes a season of Buffy feel like a novel.

What's been most impressive about these early episodes is how they take their time to really explore difficult emotional terrain for the characters - in particular, the cost of keeping secrets from people.

These first seven episodes have played like an overture to the season, gradually moving sub-plots into place - and when I say "gradually", I mean they're not afraid to let crucial characters drop out of entire episodes while they establish other stuff that's going on. That other stuff includes:

• Willow and Xander develop feelings for each other
• Angel returns from several hundred years being tortured in a hell dimension;he's in a bestial state
• Faith, another slayer, arrives in Sunnydale and develops a complicated relationship with Buffy
• The Mayor is slowly (very slowly) introduced as a character (*).

(*) The Mayor's been hinted at as far back as ... episode 3 of Season 2 (the one where Spike takes over the school).

It's amazing that by the end of episode 7, the heart of Season 3 has yet to be even hinted at. Sure, Buffy and Faith have had a bit of a well-motivated smackdown in Revelations, but Faith's descent into the dark side? The Mayor's paternal relationship with her?

The characterisations have established that these could be plausible, but even so, they're not even a possibility yet.

Anne
The first episode of Season 3 focuses on Buffy's new life after running away from Sunnydale. The central question is 'What will it take to make Buffy go back home?'. Watching Whedon escalate the pressure on Buffy (to the point of trapping her in a hell dimension, just as Angel was) is fun. And the episode totally delivers on its two obligatory emotional beats: (i) Buffy embracing the fact that she can't run away from being a slayer, and (ii) her reunion with her Mum.

Dead Man's Party
An unusual episode, explicitly dealing with the gang having to reknit itself, and learn to trust each other again, after Buffy's long absence.

This one felt far less solid to me - in fact, I stopped watching it at one point (when Buffy's friends start planning something for her during an emotionally difficult time, without asking her if it's something she'd like). Sure, I could interpret that moment as the friends trying to ignore the fact that the situation is emotionally difficult. Unfortunately, it really felt like "Full House Syndrome" - the inability of characters to learn and grow during the course of a TV series.

Faith, Hope and Trick
A really complicated episode developing several subplots, including Buffy moving on from her relationship with Angel, and ending with the kick of a major character returning to Sunnydale.

Beauty and the Beasts
Man, this episode totally features my favourite shot ever of Oz in werewolf form - I love the way he bounds through the halls of the school; it feels genuinely inhuman.

By this point, the show is firmly re-establishing its style of using the A-plots of each episode to advance the bigger picture plot. This is what I mean when I talk about Joss Whedon's voice - not the phrasings he uses for writing dialogue, but the idea that episodes aren't about beating the monster, or even about facing what the monster represents. Episodes are incidents in the broader 'novel' of the season, and the plot of that novel is moving relentlessly forward, sometimes extremely subtly with each episode.

Homecoming
Weird to describe an episode that features a competition called "Slayerfest 98" and a rocket launcher as more of a character piece, but there you go. Great to see Cordelia get a hero moment.

Band Candy
Way more fun that I remembered - I was actually a bit nervous about rewatching this one (much like the upcoming 'Amends'). Sets up a great little run of character moments in future episodes between Joyce and Giles, and outs the Mayor as a bad guy with supernatural connections - but that's really a minor part of this episode, and I'd say it's not totally clear what his status as a recurring villain is at this point

Revelations
A great episode that deals with bringing the news that Angel is 'alive' to the group: news which puts Faith and Buffy into real conflict for the first time. I like episodes like this - where characters who like each other are strongly opposed, and that opposition comes from well-motivated reasons that have been developing for a while.

Yes, I like drama.

Synopsis: Elements of Persuasion (The Hero)

Heroes show us how to change things. That's what I've taken to be the essence of The Elements of Persuasion's (TEOP) discussion about the Hero. They live the story, personify it, and show us how to change our own lives.

Once you've connected with an audience through a shared passion, a hero allows the audience to 'access' the story. (*) Having a hero allows the storyteller to unify the audience, so that they all see the events and meaning of the story through the same point-of-view.

(*) I'm using 'access' to synthesise a whole bunch of concepts in TEOP: the idea of 'connecting the story to the audience's world at a broader level', 'equality', and 'looking at the world through the hero's eyes'.

'What is a hero?' is the obvious question. TEOP describes a few qualities that heroes possess; they are :

• the highest common denominator; they bring out the best in themselves, the listener and the story
• complexity; heroes surprise us
• authenticity; heroes are real and charismatic

It's vital to find the right hero for your story, and it's best (says TEOP) if they are real rather than fictional. This is because stories are more than words; they are things that can be lived. Heroes demonstrate how to live the story.

The book provides some pretty reasonable examples of corporate and team stories, such as the behind-the-counter routines at Starbucks (story: "This is how you make a really good cup of coffee"), Harley Davidson (story: freedom and fun through getting on a bike ... I guess), and the US Marine Corp (story: Always faithful). (**)

(**) In fact, the book's description of USMC basic training is definitely worth a read, especially its description of the Crucible on pp 99-101 which synopses a 54-hour test of group performance under combat conditions coupled with myth-building. It is both stranger and more interesting than I'd ever imagined basic to be.

TEOP's advice is to reduce your story down to its central concept. Transform that concept into actions. Then choose a hero who demonstrates how to take those actions.

Criticisms

As with the section on passion, I've found that once I've boiled down TEOP's take on the hero, there's a lot of insightful material that I'd never thought of.

However, some negatives are also becoming obvious. The book is primarily directed toward a corporate audience (referring to them as 'corporate storytellers' as some points); in other words, an audience that is not me. That explains a lot about why some of the examples leave me cold.

The idea of associating each element of persuasion with one of the five classical elements seems a bit spurious. Why is the Hero associated with Earth, for instance? You could make an equally good case for Air, Fire, Water, or ... I think 'Spirit' is the fifth element the authors use.

It's a little unclear how to operationalise some of the stuff TEOP talks about. "Heroes stand their ground," says the book. "They control some territory (whether it be physical, emotional, intellectual, or spiritual) of value." Interesting stuff, but more something you the author recognise than something you implement.

There are sections (like the one on active listening) that feel like tangents or padding. I can sort of see how they connect with the aim of the book, but I'm not quite sure when to utilise them in the process of creating and telling your story.

Next up, 'The Antagonist', via a chapter of sticky stories (a chapter that I'm not quite fits in to TEOP's five elements schema).

Synopsis: Elements of Persuasion (Passion)

The first 'element' of persuasion is the PASSION with which a story is told. 'Passion' is defined as the energy that makes you need to tell a story. The two big advantages of passion are that:

(i) passion can cut through all the competing demands for an audience's attention and make them listen to you

(ii) if your story connects with people emotionally, they will spread it for you because it's fun to tell (*).

(*) I'm not entirely sure the authors justify how that second point follows from a story being told with passion, though. Unless 'passion' is simultaneously "the energy that makes you need to tell a story", and "the emotion you want the story to create."

According to the authors, speaking with passion has another couple of benefits. It warms the audience up (getting them ready to want to listen to you). Passion then makes the story come alive for them; the story seems more vivid and more real.

Apparently, the more passionate and personal your story is, the easier it is to overcome the natural stage fright of telling your story to people. In particular, stories that are personal are easier to remember, and able to be told in a way that makes you appear natural and relaxed. They also increase your likeability and show that you're authentic (talking about something that means something to you).

Which brings me back to the first point: passion is your need to tell a story. The Elements of Persuasion (TEOP)describes itself as being about how to get other people to care about what you care about. The key to this, according to TEOP is that you need to be personally committed and passionately involved (in order to be able to make anyone else care). Before you tell your story, you need to ask:

• Do I really care about what I'm about to say?
• It is true?

If the answers are 'No', you should pick another idea to talk about. And if people aren't connecting with your story at an emotional level, then you're telling the wrong story.

Criticisms

As I mentioned earlier, I'm also trying to figure out why I've found this book so difficult to read. At this point, I don't really have firm conclusions, but some of the stuff I've noticed while working through these two chapters on Passion are:

• the book occasionally makes some spurious connections between different facts
• some of the books used as examples have quite tenuous connections to the points being made (going from the idea of 'victory through a single strike' as portrayed in the Book of Five Rings to William Safire's (and Presentation Zen's) idea of summing up a story with a single memorable phrase ... well, that's quite a stretch for an analogy
• it's not focusing on the 'How' of how to tell or construct stories; so far, it's more about providing examples of stories. I assume it's hoping we'll learn through reflecting on those stories.

That's it for Passion; despite my criticisms I found the ideas in these section were solid and seemed true to me. The next element of persuasive story-telling is the Hero.

The Strain: ... and now I have a sore throat

Weird how reading a book where the primary symptom of vampirism is 'having a sore throat' can make me more aware of my own developing ill health.

The mid-section of The Strain starts developing some of the infected characters and their family members (aka future victims). This part of the novel felt very early James Herbert - it was good at rapidly building up mildly sympathetic characters and then killing them just as I was getting interested in them.

It also hinted at a bigger political situation involving ancient vampires that feels just slightly a little bit totally like antediluvians in Vampire the Masquerade.

cf. Penny Arcade.

The Strain finishes off with a lot of pulpy action that will undoubtably make a reasonable movie finale; it also draws on some stuff about rats that reminds me a lot of Scott Westerfeld's Peeps and The Last Days (*). The Strain is the first part in a trilogy, which means it feels like it stops at a reasonable point, rather than feeling like it's finished telling a story. That's irritating - it makes me want to read the next book, but by the time Book 2 comes out, it will totally have to rebuild my slowly emerging sympathy and enthusiasm for the characters - which, for me, may make the whole enterprise worth skipping until they've finished writing all three and I can read them from start to finish.

(*) Hmm, I've been reading a lot of vampire stuff recently ... not sure why ... and I'm seriously considering rewatching Season 3 of Buffy.

Conclusion: Moody, trashy, quite fun ... and probably worth waiting until they've finished the series - by which point I'm sure the first movie will have come out.

Open Thread

What's the most fun you've had recently?

The Strain

I've just started reading 'The Strain', a vampire novel co-written by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hagen.

In some ways, it's reminding me of the Garden of Last Days in the way it's spending so much time focusing on the arrival of a plane filled with dead passengers (*), and the ensuing examination by the CDC. Like Garden, The Strain is also creating a sense of approaching doom.

(*) A nice riff on Dracula's arrival in England on the Demeter.

In other ways, it's reminding me of novels like the Keep and Nightworld by F. Paul Wilson with a little bit of Tom Clancy thrown in - pulpy, Euro-mystical (although not as bug-nuts insane as Wilson's 'Nightworld'), with a bit of 'super-competent protagonist' syndrome we usually find in modern blockbuster fiction. Oh, and a tendency to show off the authors' ability to google every single detail in the book to add an air of authority to what they're saying. (**)

(**) Something I'm guilty of, too!

I'm enjoying it so far (A biological horror novel? That sounds tailor-made for me), and I'm wondering how nasty and apocalyptic it's going to get. From the foreshadowing that's been going on, I can certainly see an I Am Legend level of civilisation destruction approaching -- and it'll be interesting to see how that plays out compared to the book's current sedate, precise tone.

... oh, and it has gotten under my skin. Last night, just after I started reading it, I had three separate vampirey/cannibally dreams ... which is a slightly higher rate than usual.

A couple of other things of note:

• I'm not really interested in any of the characters yet - they seem more like chess pieces with arbitrary flaws and likeable traits - but because they're in an interesting situation, I'm willing to follow them
• However, one character (Gus) has just been involved in a vividly written, short action sequence that's gotten him into a lot of trouble. He may be a Hispanic gang-member but what's happened to him is unfair, and I'm interested in finding out what happens to him next
• ... and if people are interested, I can talk a little about the thing the novel is doing that I once considered doing myself and decided that it would be in bad taste (there would be spoilers, though)
  

Synopsis: The Elements of Persuasion (Introduction)

As a follow-on from Presentation Zen, I'm going to synopsise my notes from re-reading (*) 'The Elements of Persuasion'. This is a book that aims to teach you how to tell more effective stories, or (as the sub-title says) how to 'use stories to pitch better, sell faster, and win more business'.

(*) Actually, I've tried reading it twice before, quitting both times. Hopefully this time through, I'll be able to figure out why.

The Elements of Persuasion (TEOP, from here on in) defines a story as a 'fact, wrapped in an emotion, that compels us to take an action that transforms our world'. The authors, a scriptwriter and a former monk/communications coach, describe stories as having five elements:

1. The PASSION with which the story is told
2. A HERO who leads us through the story and allows us to see it through their eyes
3. An ANTAGONIST (or obstacle) that the hero must overcome
4. A moment of AWARENESS that allows the Hero to prevail
5. The TRANSFORMATION in the hero and the world that results from successfully acting on that Awareness.

I'll go into more detail about each of these as I go through the rest of the chapters. TEOP also describes how stories don't have to be lengthy, and they don't have to be verbal. As an example, it offers this image:


Back in a few days for details on the first ... I guess ... element of persuasion: Passion.

EDITED TO ADD:

Here are the links to all my Elements of Persuasion posts.

The First Element: Passion.
The Second Element: The Hero.
The final three Elements.
Summary.

Second Sight

I am back into the world of long-form video games. Second Sight uses the classic technique of giving the protagonist amnesia - it totally saves on frontloading exposition when the player discovers the world at the same as the character.

While the premise is a little ridiculous - you're an amnesiac ... with psychic powers ... who's a reknowned paranormal debunker ... who (as I play him at least) is the greatest natural sniper in history - yeah, like I said: while the premise is a little ridiculous, the structure of the game is compelling.

It's told in two timeframes: what happens once you wake up in hospital without any memories, and flashbacks to the events that put you in hospital. The two timelines change in subtle, slightly disturbing ways every once in a while, as characters you thought were dead turn out to be alive. I'm looking forward to the game's explanation for that.

About halfway through the game, I discovered a fascinating third strand to the game happens when you fail a level (either by dying or by letting a team-member die). You'll enter the interrogation room where the central villain of the piece messes with your head for a minute before letting you restart the game

Second Sight also plays in extremely digestable chapters. I can play a chapter without triggering my OOS, which makes it a pretty perfect diversion ... as long as I don't get addicted and play three chapters in a row like I did last night.

I'm also playing using a walkthrough - yes, it's cheating (in the sense that I'm not figuring out each level or activating the puzzle-solving part of my brain), but it's also saving me heaps of time, protecting my health, and delivering a more cinematic experience.

***

Just finished it: It's a good game, does interesting things with time, and while it's pretty damn linear there are some great gimmicks that give you a variety of options to complete each level. The power to astrally project and then possess someone else may well be the scariest thing ever.

Open Thread

What are you into at the moment?

This is not a title

Language is a virus.

Words are the capsid that protects the virus and allows it to be delivered.

Speech and writing are the vectors of transmission. Books are hot zones.

Our minds are the hosts.

The symptom is a fundamental alteration of how we perceive and interact with the universe - expanding our abilities, constraining them ... or both.

Most people are carriers, sneezing emails or phatic communion.

Writers and orators spread the infection best. By making us think (or inspiring us) they cause the virus to replicate. Essays, short stories, novels and scripts may result as the infection changes us and uses us to spread itself.

It might even turn us into writers, shedding filthy infectious language.

Aphasiacs are immune.

I have no idea what a vaccination consists of. Meditation? Judging a poetry competition for teenagers?

Presentation: Wake up, Freak out, and then get a grip

Wake Up, Freak Out - then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.

A great example of a compelling metaphor - this one explains the 'tipping point' - and a pretty good visual representation of feedback cycles.

RPG: Danger Patrol

Played Danger Patrol last night - a new game of pulpy cliffhangers in an alternate 1950s universe filled with rocketships and rayguns. Think Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers.


It didn't go very well, but I think it has lots of potential for delivering a style of gaming I really enjoy.

I'll be running it again, probably at Confusion in August.

My comments on the game are here.

Graphic Design Practice #8

I'm pleased I managed to figure out how to create an opaque background for text, right-clicking and using Fill with some opacity.

Bad Family: 100 words a day

The re-writing of Bad Family (*) has been warming up over the last week or so (although it'll have been just over a month, by the time this entry is auto-published).

(*) My game about dysfunctional relationships, family sit-coms, and the struggle to get what you want by the end of the episode before your big sister screws you over.

Really, it feels like the writing is happening at the intersection of seven personal productivity hacks that I've been using for a while:

1. I've set up the home page of my browser so that the Google Docs page where I'm writing Bad Family is right in my face whenever I go online. Using Google Docs also has the advantage of making it easy to work on it anywhere.
   
2. I have started a Seinfeld chain - basically, the idea that if you can see you're making progress every day, you don't want to take a day off (and break the chain). You can see my chain for Bad Family here.
   
3. I'm using an idea from Mark Forster called the Current Initiative, which is that you choose one project that you want to make progress on, and make it the very first thing you do each day. So, when I wake up I write on Bad Family for 10 minutes. I also make it the first thing I do when I get home.
   
4. After reading 'In Praise of Slow', I'm putting less pressure on myself to complete this game RIGHTNOWASSOONASPOSSIBLE. By taking the pressure off, I'm trying to make it more fun.
   
5. I'm writing it with a specific audience in mind. This is a hack suggested by Jonathon Walton - writing it to a particular person gives it a more personal voice. Hopefully it also makes it a more enjoyable read.
   
6. I'm making this my main writing project for the next two months (till the end of July). I'm now alternating a period of serious, focused writing with two weeks of playing around with various projects, finding out what's fun.
   
7. I'm writing 100 words a day. Again it's a suggestion by Jonathon Walton, in this thread on Story Games.

Basically, I'm looking forward to 'finishing' this thing. Not only will it tie off the last Old Thing I've been working on, but it'll also allow me to release Matt, Karen, and Gino's artwork into the internet.

EDITED TO ADD: I've also been 'gameifying' my writing - finding easy levels (sections) to complete and working on them; gradually I'm working my way up to the harder levels.

Open thread

What are you up to this weekend?

Synopsis: Presentation Zen (Be with your audience)

Presentation Zen (PZ) finishes up with some simple advice for actually delivering your presentation.

First: practice. The aim is to know your material so well that you can present it without referring to any notes. As PZ mentions earlier, the act of developing your story is going to help you develop this mastery of the material.

Second: be fully present when you give your presentation. Focus just on this moment; don't allow yourself to be distracted by thoughts of what happened before you arrived, or what you need to do afterwards.

This advice goes even further - it suggests focusing entirely on the act of presenting, and not on how your presentation is being perceived.

Garr Reynolds, the author of PZ, suggests a few things here:

• "Don't ask 'Will I be appreciated?' or 'Will I win them over?' Ask 'How can I contribute?'
• Think of mistakes as fascinating. Think of mistakes as opportunities to learn (to grow). Let the mistakes go and move on; dwelling on the mistakes will disconnect you from your audience.

Reynolds says, "Once you begin to judge yourself, or wonder how you're being judged, you stop being mindful."

This quality of 'mindfulness' is, I think, a way of delivering the best possible presentation. You're focusing on conveying the material, which (hopefully) leads to a stronger connection with the audience as they see that it's not about you, it's about what they're learning.

Third: Aim to be as interested in your material as you hope your audience will be. Again, mindfulness helps you share your passion for the material in your presentation with your audience.


How to connect with an audience

Reynolds points out that people's concentration tends to flag after about 15 to 20 minutes. Keeping your presentation as short as it can be is an excellent goal, as is trying to finish before your time runs out.

He also suggests reducing the number of barriers between you and the audience:

• Don't use a lectern
• Don't sit at the back of the room by the projector
• Don't sit behind a desk
• Keep lights on, so people can see you.

Gerald's Game

by Stephen King

I like to re-read books. After my difficulties reading Garden of Last Days, I went back and re-read one of the lesser-known Stephen Kings. It's also one of the books I've been consistently tempted to adapt, probably due to its simple premise: Gerald's Game is about a woman handcuffed to a bed in the middle of nowhere. No-one is coming to rescue her, and if she's going to survive she's going to have to think her way out.

The handcuffs are the most obvious of the two antagonists in this book. The second antagonist is the lead character's own mind; Jessie Burlingame experienced something genuinely horrible 25 years ago, and has spent most of the intervening time repressing it. That's led to her mind not only creating a bunch of different voices to represent different aspects of her personality, but also a deeply self-destructive desire to undercut her own achievements, make her screw up, and ultimately kill her (because she 'deserves it').

These voices rise to the fore once Jessie is handcuffed: without any way of escaping, she finally has quiet time to listen to her thoughts without distraction. The truth of this really hit me; it's a phenomena that's been experienced by me and a few people I know recently as we've been dealing with some unpleasant mental crap.

For me, this idea of the antagonist being your own thoughts is the strongest idea of the book and oddly under-developed.(*)

(*) I've now realised it also has a lot in common with one of the new things I'm playing around with.

Instead, the psychological complexity that I admire in Gerald's Game threatens to go completely out the window once King introduces a psycho-killer with pallid skin, sharpened canines, and a suitcase filled with human bones. It becomes a little difficult to focus on the idea of an enemy inside your own mind when you're afraid that Leatherface is going to come back and kill you the next night.

At least, that's been my memory of this book over the last 15 years. However, I realised during this time through that, to his credit, King does play with the idea that the killer is imaginary. In fact, he does more than play with it -- by the end, the killer is not only real, but it's also how the self-destructive elements of Jessie's own mind have chosen to manifest themselves.

Still, my scriptwriter voice kept yelling out while reading it that the idea of the killer was a bit lame. That he's there to motivate Jessie to escape, putting a time-limit on her actions. To 'Scriptwriter Me' there's already a character in this book that serves this purpose: a scared and hungry stray dog. In my hypothetical adaptation, I'd up the threat from this corner, and bring out Jessie's 'Inner Antagonist' voice more strongly.

I'm not even sure it needs the killer in the book. The reliving of Jessie's repressed memory is horrible enough - visceral, repulsive, banally evil - and King takes his time detailing the aftermath of it, as much as he would with any other thriller setpiece. Reading these sections reminded of conversations with some of my exes, in which we've watched a movie (like, True Romance, for instance) and they've been baffled at what I could have seen in it. Questions have been asked like "Why would you want to watch something like that?" "How does it make the world a better place?"

After reading the icky repressed memory sequence, I'm beginning to see their point.

Re-reading it, I was suprised to find that the repressed memory at the heart of the book is pretty much openly acknowledged about 1/4 of the way through, and vividly [shudder] dramatised at about the halfway point. And just when I figured that it was all done with, King does something really exciting: he ties Jessie's chances of escape to her ability to remember by hinting that there's something else that she's repressing, something that we haven't been made aware of. This inverts the value of her memory - making it something she has to use rather than push away from her.

Later, King pushes the timeframe of the story forward, much further than I expected him to. It had the effect of pulling me out of the book, but after taking a break and pushing on, it actually seemed quite natural. King used the flash-forward to demonstrate massive character change in Jessie, dump a whole bunch of exposition on us, and dramatise her final triumph over her mind (through the act of finishing a letter).

After finishing it, I realised that Gerald's Game might be another one of those books that I've long wanted to adapt but subsequently realise that I don't (Phantoms by Dean Koontz also falls into that category). If I were to push myself to articulate why this is, it'd be something like: there are things about this book that I find compelling, things I find easy to visualise cinematically, and especially there are things that I would like to do differently. The question is: would I like to spend two years doing them?

And maybe the answer is that, for me, Jessie's transformation is satisfying but not quite meaningful enough. She goes through hell, she triumphs over some really nasty adversity, but the emotional bang isn't quite there for me. And I'm not sure why, and I'm not sure how to make it happen - and THAT is what any adaptation of this story really needs.

Random thoughts:

• Gerald's Game is a companion piece to Dolores Claiborne. I seem to remember it was written at a time when he had come under a small amount of criticism for not being able to write women as psychologically deeply as he did men.
  
  
• Actually, re-reading it made me realise how influential this novel was on me: the precision with which King deals with describing how Jessie tries to get out of her predicament. It's something I drew on when writing The Limit (in fact, that script contains a woman in a very similar situation).